#cli-fi

[lgbtqreads]

Reader's Guide: Earth Day

In honor of Earth Day, check out these Climate Fiction-related books and this conversation between authors Sim Kern and Cynthia Zhang on LGBTQ rep in books about Climate Change. Young Adult Climate of Chaos by Cassandra Newbould In dystopic Seattle, storms have devastated Earth’s population, a new virus is spreading, and the privileged live inside domes controlled by Aegis Corp. Healthcare is…

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[bronzecats]

Part two of pictures from Rajni Perera’s Futures.

[biblioklept]

Miserable comforters are ye all | On George Saunders' hollow new novel Vigil

George Saunders’ latest novel Vigil is told primarily from the perspective of a ghost, Jill “Doll” Blaine, a spirit who has resisted elevation to up there in order to remain on Earth, where she guides her dying “charges” into the afterlife. Her latest (and perhaps last) charge is one K.J. Boone, an oil tycoon dying in the “slop room” of his least favorite house. Boone spent his career denying…

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[solarpunkmagazine]

Solarpunk Magazine Issue 18 Released!

And it's on sale for $4 through this weekend! Check out our website for all of our issues.

[elliepassmore]

All the Water in the World review

5/5 stars Recommended if you like: cli-fi, disaster fiction, community, survival

Big thanks to St. Martin's Press, Netgalley, and the author for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This book examines survival in a climate ravaged world, and the positive and negative ways people rebuild after the end. It's told through a mix of 'present' day events, when a superstorm destroys their home and they have to find a new one, and past events that detail how there came to be a community on the roof of the American Natural History Museum and the kinds of things they did to survive. Technically the whole book is in past tense, with Nonie narrating, but there is a delineation between Nonie's childhood and the travels from the AMNH to a farm in upper-NY.

I really liked that the original group of survivors we follows is a set of anthropologists, scientists, and museum employees (plus their kids). It's such an interesting setup and it allows for the adults to have skills and knowledge that the average person probably doesn't possess. I also really liked the American Museum of Natural History in NY being the backdrop of the main character's childhood. It's such a unique location and I really liked seeing how they used things from the museum and knowledge from the past to survive in the 'modern' world.

It's hard at times to remember Nonie is only 13 when all this is going down. She has a pretty mature voice and even when she doesn't understand certain things, she still has a strong understanding of the world. Nonie is very empathetic and caring, and it comes through in how she handles her sister and Keller (and others) at various points in the book. Despite how the world is around them, Nonie is also a fairly hopeful character, both about the small things and the big things. She dreams of one day going on one of the research boats to study the changing waters of the world (big hope) and she also wants to believe the best of people, though she's also realistic, especially if something seems off. I definitely read Nonie as being autistic even though no one ever says it outright.

Biz was someone I had a harder time connecting with, though I also understand her. She's 16 during the course of this book and is not only old enough to remember when times were less apocalyptic, but she's also lived through some pretty grim stuff herself. Part of Biz is angry and a little reckless because of it, but part of her is also afraid and full of the knowledge of just what might go wrong. That being said, like Nonie she's very caring and determined to see their small group survive.

I liked seeing the different ways different groups of people survived, and how that compares and contrasts to the AMNH group. Some of the ways are remarkably similar, like the people at the Cloisters, while others only seem that way on the surface and others yet take a more violent dog-eats-dog approach to survival. This book really does a good job looking at how we behave when the end has come and the things we are, and aren't, willing to close our eyes to if it means survival. That being said, this book isn't all dark and I think it really pushes the narrative of community = survival, which I would say is both realistic and hopeful.

One thing that bugged me at the start of the book, as someone who knows a lot about tornadoes, is that they're trying to find shelter and keep running into rooms with windows! It's really a minor thing but it bugged me so badly, lol.

Overall this is a really good book and does a good job of examining survival and hope after the end. I liked the museum aspect of it a lot and also liked the community-oriented take on survival Caffall depicted.

[ufohio]

Happy Earth Day season from Kaleidoscope World. In honor of the thrilling wonder planet on which we live, the brighter future our setting imagines, and our own one-year anniversary as a site, we're celebrating this year with an  Earthstravaganza event. And we'd like to invite you to join us in imagining a more harmonious and colorful world.

We think it's important to acknowledge the vital roles imagination and science fiction play in improving our society here on Earth. During Earthstravaganza, our writers will be creating a better, greener, more accessible vision of the future through the power of storytelling, and we invite you to do the same.

If all things were possible, what kinds of technologies and miraculous feats of science do you think would put mankind in harmony with the Earth?

Share your ideas on Tumblr or post to this thread as a member or guest. You could even take the question back to your own families and communities and bat it around there as well!

Once again, here's wishing you a very happy Earth Day season!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ian McDonald's "Hopeland"

Tonight (May 30) at 6:30PM, I’m at the NOTTINGHAM Waterstones with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Christian Reilly (MMT Podcast).

Tomorrow (May 31) at 6:30PM, I’m at the MANCHESTER Waterstones, hosted by Ian Forrester.

Then it’s London, Edinburgh, and Berlin!

Have you ever read a novel that was so good you almost felt angry at it? I mean, maybe that’s just me, but there is one author who consistently triggers my literary pleasure centers so hard that I get spillover into all my other senses, and that’s Ian McDonald, who has a new novel out: Hopeland:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765375551/hopeland

Seriously what the fuck is this amazing, uncategorizable, unsummarizable, weird, sprawling, hairball of a novel? How the hell do you research — much less write — a novel this ambitious and wide-ranging? Why did I find myself weeping uncontrollably on a train yesterday as I finished it, literally squeezing my chest over my heart as it broke and sang at the same moment?

Hopeland is a climate novel, and it’s not McDonald’s first. Hearts, Hands and Voices (published in the US as The Broken Land) is a climate novel (that also happens to be about the Irish Troubles). So is his stunning debut, Desolation Road, which I picked up at a mall bookstore in 1988 and lost my mind over:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/07/02/ian-mcdonalds-brilliant-mars-book-desolation-road-finally-back-in-print/

But those were climate novels written in the early stages of the discussion of the gravity of the anthropocene, and so climate change was more setting than anything else. In Hopeland, the climate is more of a character — not a protagonist, but also not a minor character.

The true stars of Hopeland are members of two ancient, secret societies. There’s Raisa Hopeland, who belongs to a globe-spanning, mystical “family,” that’s one part mutual aid, one part dance music subculture, and one part sorcerer (some Hopelanders are electromancers, making strange, powerful magic with Tesla coils).

We meet Raisa as she is racing across London in a bid to win a rare, open electromancer title. She is on the brink of losing, but then a passerby pitches in to help: Amon Brightborne, part of another mystical family whose stately, odd manor in the English countryside can only be reached by people who can work the “gateway,” which makes the road disappear and reappear. Amon is a composer and DJ who specializes in making music for very small groups of people — preferably just one person — that is so perfect for them that they are transformed by hearing it.

Amon’s intervention in Raisa’s bid for electromancy unites these two formerly disjoint families, entwining their destinies just as the world is forever changing, thanks to the decidedly un-magical buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. They have a romance, a breakup, a child. They are scattered to opposite ends of the Earth — Iceland and a tiny Polynesian island.

Their lives are electrified. Literally. On her passage to Iceland, Raisa confronts a ship-destroying megastorm, speaks its true name, and sends it away before it can sink the container ship — captained by a Hopelander who gives her free passage — that she is sailing on. In Iceland, she falls in with more Hopelanders, tapping a thermal vent to create a greenhouse cannabis farm, which begets a luxury salad greens business, then an electricity plant that attracts cryptocurrency weirdos like shit draws flies.

Amon, meanwhile, is sinking into drunken ruin on his island paradise, where he becomes a kind of mascot for the locals, who respect his musical prowess. The island is sinking, both figuratively and literally, as its offshore king, hiding in a luxury mansion in Sydney, drains its aquifers for the luxury bottled water market and loots its treasuries to fund his own high lifestyle.

McDonald takes a long time getting to this point. This is a 500 page novel, and the build to this setup takes nearly 300 of them. Every word of that setup is gold. McDonald’s prose often veers into poetry, or at least poesie, and he has this knack for seemingly superfluous vignettes and detours that present as self-indulgences but then snap into place later as critical pieces of a superbly turned narrative. How the fuck does he do it?

How does he do it? How does he deliver a sense of such vastness, a world peopled by vastly different polities and populations, distinctly different without ever being exoticized, each clearly the hero of their own story, whether they live on a tiny island or captain an American battleship?

I mean, cyberpunk — the tradition McDonald most obviously belongs to — was always about a post-American future, but no one ever managed it the way McDonald did. He delivered a superb, complex, Indian future in 2004’s River of Gods:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/06/12/ian-mcdonalds-brilliant-new-novel-river-of-gods-bollywoodpunk/

And then did the same in Brazil with 2007’s Brasyl:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/04/30/ian-mcdonalds-brasyl-mind-altering-cyberpunk-carioca/

And Turkey in 2011’s Dervish House, a novel of mystical nanofuturism set in an Istanbul that is so vividly drawn that you feel like you can reach through the page and touch it:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/07/12/ian-mcdonalds-dervish-house-superb-novel-of-the-mystical-nano-future-of-istanbul/

Those were ambitious books, but Hopeland puts them to shame. It draws on so many threads — music and art, climate justice, mysticism, electrical engineering, economics, gender politics — and has such a huge cast of finely drawn characters. By all rights, it should collapse under its own weight. I mean, seriously — who can write multi-page passages describing imaginary music and make it riveting?

McDonald is just so damned good at writing love-letters to places that turn them into characters in their own right. The first third of Hopeland treats London that way, bringing it to gritty life in the manner of Michael de Larrabeiti’s classic Borribles trilogy:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/01/16/the-borribles-are-back/

Or, for that matter, China Miéville’s debut novel King Rat, itself out in a fancy new Tor Essentials edition with an introduction by Tim Maughan, who absolutely bullseyes the appeal of Miéville’s novel of underground music, mystical societies and urbanism:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250862501/kingrat

(It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that Miéville is a giant Borribles fan:)

https://www.tor.com/2014/03/13/the-borribles-excerpt-introduction-china-mieville/

I have loved Ian McDonald’s work since I picked up Desolation Road in that mall bookstore when I was 17. One of the absolute highlights of my writing career was writing an introduction for the 2014 reissue of Out On Blue Six, a book that mashes up David Byrne’s solo projects, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Dick’s Do Androids Dream in a madcap dystopian comedy:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/01/20/out-on-blue-six-ian-mcdonalds-brilliant-novel-is-back/

I’ve read everything I could find about how he manages these giant, weird, intricately constructed novels, like this fascinating 2010 interview about his research process:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100726181934/http://www.cclapcenter.com/2010/07/an_interview_with_ian_mcdonald.html

But despite it all, I find myself continuously baffled by how manages it, but each book just stabs me. For one thing, he’s such a good remix artist. His three-volume, essential retelling of Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress starts with Luna: New Moon (2015):

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/22/ian-mcdonalds-luna-new-moon-the-moon-is-a-much-much-harsher-mistress/

Which substantially out-Heinleins Heinlein, adding thickness and rigor to the tropes Heinlein tossed in as throwaways. Then, he topped himself with the sequel, Luna: Wolf Moon (2017):

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/03/28/ian-mcdonald-returns-to-the-harshest-mistress-in-luna-wolf-moon/

Before bringing it all in for a screaming landing that tied up the hundreds of threads he pulled on in the course of the previous two volumes with the conclusion, Luna: Moon Rising (2019):

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/05/16/luna-moon-rising-in-which-ian-mcdonald-brings-the-trilogy-to-an-astounding-intricate-exciting-and-satisfying-climax/

In each volume, McDonald proved — over and over — that he understood precisely what Heinlein was trying to do, then outdid him, and, in so doing, shredded Heinlein’s solipsitic, simplistic, seductive argument about a libertarian utopia.

Perhaps this is McDonald’s greatest gift: his ability to rework others’ ideas, tropes and tales, without ever trying to hide his influences, and then vastly outdoing them. That’s certainly what was going on with his wild-ass, deiselpunk YA trilogy, which started with 2011’s Planesrunner:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/12/06/planesrunner-ian-mcdonalds-ya-debut-is-full-of-action-packed-multidimensional-cool-airships-electropunk-and-quantum-physics/

One important McDonaldism: being deadly serious about his whimsy. The books are all very whimsical, but never frivolous. To get a sense of what I mean here, consider his 1992 graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, a deadly serious comic book about the Klu Klux Klan, told entirely through adorable teddybears in a noir cityscape, whose dialog is heavily salted with Tom Waits lyrics:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/01/24/ian-mcdonalds-kling-klang-klatch/

No, really. And it’s fantastic.

Back to Hopeland. It’s a climate novel, because what else could you write in this time of polycrisis? The book is vast enough to convey the scale of the crisis. The storms that ravage the world are both personified and realized, a terror to compare to any literary monster or Cthuhoid entity. But it’s called Hopeland for a reason, because it’s a book about hope, not nihilism, a book about confronting the crisis, a book about solidarity and love, about overcoming difference, about challenging the way things “just are.”

That’s why I was crying and holding my heart yesterday on the train. The hope. What a ride.

One of the reasons I was in such a hurry to read this novel now is that I’m appearing on a panel with McDonald this coming Saturday, June 3, at Edinburgh’s Cymera festival, along with Nina Allen, author of the new novel Conquest:

https://www.cymerafestival.co.uk/cymera23-events/2023/4/4/connection-interrupted-with-nina-allan-cory-doctorow-and-ian-mcdonald

I’m so looking forward to it. I’ve written a couple dozen books since I read my first McDonald novel as a teenager, and while I still have no idea how McDonald does it, there’s something of his work in every one of my books.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Nottingham, Manchester, London, and Berlin!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace

[Image ID: The cover for the Tor Books edition of 'Hopeland.']

[hpldreads]

Climate Fiction, or Cli-Fi, is a branch of literature that deals with the effects of climate change on human society. Here are a few of the Climate Fiction books we have in our collection.

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

Dry by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman

Life as We Knew It by Beth Pfeffer