Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Aside from John Michael Greer’s several deindustrial novels (Star’s Reach, Retrotopia, the Weird of Hali series), Catherine McGuire’s Lifeline is, if I am not mistaken, the first full novel to emerge into publication from the deindustrial fiction community that sprang up around Greer’s After Oil anthologies and carried over to Into the Ruins and New Maps.
I could rhapsodize a great deal more about the fine writing, emotional power and originality of Arboreality, but suffice to say that for connoisseurs of deindustrial fiction, it isn’t to be missed.
Always Coming Home must stand as a landmark of deindustrial literature, from years before the genre was ever named.
As its name alludes, this visionary new fiction quarterly seeks to challenge our current mental maps of the future.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this anthology of stories and verse about romance in the deindustrial future is its rich assortment of tones and styles. Some stories are charming, others throb with as much trauma as passion and still others feel as timeless as myths.
How will future generations fare in the world of scarcity and instability to which our present-day actions are consigning them? Catherine McGuire’s short story collection The Dream Hunt and Other Tales suggests a multitude of possible answers to this.
This year saw the publication of not one, but two, more worthy additions to the After Oil science fiction anthology series.
The one readily available way around the harsh economic impacts of fossil fuel depletion is the one that Gunnar Erikson tried, but did not live to complete—the strategy of keeping an older technology in use, or bringing a defunct technology back into service, while there’s still enough wealth sloshing across the decks of the industrial economy to make it relatively easy to do so.
