What’s Happening? Or: How to name a disaster - Elvia Wilk - Bookforum Magazine

It went unnamed by Doris Lessing and Cormac McCarthy. William Gibson called it The Jackpot:

On the one hand, naming the crisis allows one to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of “it” or “change” is not any singular instance but rather their constancy.

Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Peripheral, Parable Of The Sower, New York 2140, The Road, Children Of Men, Station Eleven, Severance, The Rapture, Ridley Walker:

Fiction can portray ecologies, timescales, catastrophes, and forms of violence that may be otherwise invisible, or more to the point, unnameable. We will never grasp the pandemic in its entirety, just like we will never see the microbe responsible for it with the naked eye. But we can try to articulate how it has changed us—is changing us.

What’s Happening? Or: How to name a disaster - Elvia Wilk - Bookforum Magazine

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Muscular imagination

Robin Sloan on The Culture:

The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently artic­u­late and defend their values. (Their enthu­siasm for their own politics is consid­ered annoying by most other civilizations.)

Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.

I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.

Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.

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Tales Of The Algorithm – Terence Eden’s Blog

I’m really enjoying these sci-fi short stories that Terence is publishing on his site—one for every day of the month.

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Stories | daverupert.com

Dave’s short’n’sweet sci-fi stories, collected in one place.

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Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In - The New York Times

A profile of the life and work of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler.

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Envisioning Our Shared Storm with Andrew Dana Hudson - Long Now

This observation feels spot-on to me:

The shift that I noticed, totally anecdotally, is literary writers are starting to write more dystopian climate futures and science fiction writers are starting to write about climate solutions.

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