Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
At his best, Foster is an astonishing spinner of captivating, immersive, delightfully otherworldly tales—one who can be credited with having given this reviewer some of his fondest memories of reading, both as a child and as an adult.
Like Dante in the inferno, for humanity in the first decades of the 21st century, the only way is through. In The Ministry for the Future, writer Kim Stanley Robinson imagines that path, telling the story of a world that somehow manages to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
Thomas Huxley said that “it is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.” It is a sentence that describes the cycle of ideas, — call them memes — which tend to have a life-cycle similar to that of living creatures. They are born, grow, and disappear.
Kim Stanley Robinson is widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. From his perspective, he answers the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Loosely based on an eponymous 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation centers around a journey to the heart of an anomalous region known as Area X on America’s southern coast.
As its name alludes, this visionary new fiction quarterly seeks to challenge our current mental maps of the future.
10 Billion vividly reimagines Greer’s blog post as a graphic novel. Told and illustrated in an immersive comic book style, it gives potent visual form to the original text.
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.
Doomer porn has limited appeal and shelf life; you can only get so miserable before there’s nowhere to go and no point. One of the most appealing subsets of speculative fiction, then, is what we might call the “good old future,” where our descendants have come through a crisis and created a better world that looks a lot like the past.
The novel has essentially the same premise as the hit disaster movie from five years earlier, The Day After Tomorrow. The Gulf Stream ocean current, which has long played a crucial role in our planet’s climate system, undergoes a sudden collapse driven primarily by human-caused global warming. Ice caps rapidly spread across the northern hemisphere, rendering places like New York City and western and northern Europe uninhabitable to all but the most rugged survivalists.
If you’re in the mood for some good deindustrial fiction, I recommend checking out these books by Ann M. Pino.
The science fiction noir thriller, “The Expanse,” has a lot to say about systemic risks in society and about what not to do about them.
