Not full reviews or even necessarily recommendations, just some notes on what I've been reading. I will never read all the dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction out there, but I keep trying. This month I read a very early apocalypse story by Jack London: The Scarlet Plague (free to read online). This short story feels like an ur-story … Continue reading Reading journal: January wrap-up
I discuss a less brutal and, I think, more realistic approach to the post-apocalyptic novel in this essay.
This essay also discusses Into the Forest (Jean Hegland; 1996);A Gift Upon the Shore (M.K. Wren; 1990); and Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin; 1985), among various other stalwarts of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre. There will be spoilers for these books.
Pop quiz, hotshot. It’s the apocalypse: What do you do? What. Do. You. Do?
If hundred (thousands?) of post-apocalyptic books and movies are to believed, you break out your cache of automatic weapons, gun down every guy you see, capture a woman and lock her in a cage for later, then chow down on some roasted baby.
There is a certain amount of wish fulfillment going on there. The apocalypse novel is one part fear, one part fantasy. All the rules are suddenly gone; you can do whatever you want! It’s a dim view of humanity that assumes that all people want to do is murder, rape, and…
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I have just discovered a new genre: cli-fi, or climate change fiction. Set in the present or near future, these novels imagine a changed world once the effects of climate change are really beginning to be felt. It's not such a new genre to me, after all. I read David Brin's Earth and Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs … Continue reading Cli-Fi: Fiction about climate change
On Quora, there are a lot of interesting responses to this question: Pandemics: If society started collapsing due to a global pandemic killing more than half of the world's population within a year or two, what would you do when you realized what was really happening? - Quora. There are a number of detailed, well-thought-out answers … Continue reading The end of the world as we know it…
Recently, I have become fascinated with the notion of cycles. We humans tend to regard everything linearly, with a beginning and an end, because that is our individual experience. But taking a wider view, we can see that events tend to happen in cycles, that an end leads inexorably to another beginning. It's easiest to … Continue reading Hell is repetition: The theme of cycles in science fiction
The kind of fiction I like to read the most, and that I tend to focus on here, falls under the broad umbrella of "speculative fiction." I've never been entirely comfortable with the traditional genre labels of science fiction, fantasy and horror. The definitions that are most often applied to these genres seem so limiting, … Continue reading What is speculative fiction?
