Environmental 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

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William Gibson’s Jackpot

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.

book cover PeripheralHis 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”

Cory Doctorow is angry

Doctorow Radicalized coverRadicalized – four novellas
Cory Doctorow (2020)

Cory Doctorow is angry and it shows.

He has been working for years at the interface of civil rights and computer technology, particularly with open source software, while writing very good (and entertaining) science fiction in his spare time – or perhaps vice versa (visit his own site or wikipedia for more about him).

But the USA  has been going from bad to worse in many respects and in these near-future stories Doctorow lets fly at some of the problems.

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A Half-built Garden

A Half-built Garden by Ruthanna EmrysA Half-built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (Pan, 2022) is eco-SF set in the 2080s. By this time nation states and corporations have withered but not vanished, effectively replaced by the ‘dandelion network’ of fully participatory democracies centred on local communities.

It’s not a utopia by any means. The dandelion networks have created a warm, inclusive, egalitarian community but fixing the degraded environment they inherited is a constant struggle. Weather which used to be extreme is now normal thanks to global warming, and they have to keep on developing new food crops to cope with climate shift. (Ada Palmer’s back-cover comment that, “Emrys masterfully demonstrates how a medium-good future can send more chilling warnings than dystopia,” is spot on.)

And then the aliens land.

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SF bookshelf

Jeff Vandermeer’s latest deserves at least a short review but it has a lot in common with Slow River, a re-issue in the SF Masterworks series, so I thought I should write about that at the same time. Slow River in turn connects to an intriguing anthology of newer short SF, so here we go.

Hummingbird Salamander

Vandermeer book cover Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff Vandermeer (2021, Harper Collins) was described on the back cover as, “An intellectual mindf*ck disguised as a thriller,” and by the time I finished it I was inclined to agree.

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