Tag: science fiction

For some years now I’ve been sharing brief notes about environmental SF as ‘Comments’ on various articles. This page brings them together. It is organised as a blog-within-a-blog, with the most recent additions at the top, and it is open-ended, i.e., I will keep on adding to it. There’s a similar but not green-themed page on my other blog. All my other (longer) book reviews are listed on this page.

Science fiction is valuable for its freedom to conduct thought-experiments which illuminate our present by showing us possible futures. As I’ve said before, utopias beckon us along a particular path while dystopias hold up warning signs saying, “Wrong way – go back.”

Conflict develops character and drives narrative so there are strong literary reasons for the preponderance of dystopias (nuclear war, pandemic, climate collapse, etc – choose your own disaster!). That can be depressing but at least the best of them do point to ways to avoid whatever crisis they describe. The Ministry for the Future, in fact, aims to do exactly that.

William Gibson has done as much as any other SF writer (any other writer in any genre, in fact) to look into the future we’re creating but he’s not very optimistic. Here is a good introduction to his work for those who don’t know it, and here is my review of his Jackpot Trilogy.

Tchaikovsky: Saturation Point

Continue reading “Environmental science fiction”

William Gibson burst onto the SF scene with Neuromancer in 1984 and never looked back. He now has a dozen novels and a nonfiction collection to his name.

His visions of the future have always tended to be dark and edgy. Here I’m interested in his two latest novels, The Peripheral (2014) and its sequel Agency (2020), primarily for the ‘Jackpot’ which is pivotal to both. His earlier work falls into trilogies (see Wikipedia for details of the Sprawl, Bridge and Blue Ant trilogies) and a sequel to Agency may be on the way. He apparently intended to call it Jackpot so let’s call the two-and-a-promise ‘the Jackpot trilogy.’

The Peripheral is very good indeed although Agency juggles too many characters and timelines to be completely satisfactory. The recent TV series, by the way, is only loosely based on the first novel. Continue reading “William Gibson’s Jackpot”