By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
Doomer porn has limited appeal and shelf life; you can only get so miserable before there’s nowhere to go and no point. One of the most appealing subsets of speculative fiction, then, is what we might call the “good old future,” where our descendants have come through a crisis and created a better world that looks a lot like the past.
By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press
The novel has essentially the same premise as the hit disaster movie from five years earlier, The Day After Tomorrow. The Gulf Stream ocean current, which has long played a crucial role in our planet's climate system, undergoes a sudden collapse driven primarily by human-caused global warming. Ice caps rapidly spread across the northern hemisphere, rendering places like New York City and western and northern Europe uninhabitable to all but the most rugged survivalists.
By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press
If you're in the mood for some good deindustrial fiction, I recommend checking out these books by Ann M. Pino.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
The science fiction noir thriller, "The Expanse," has a lot to say about systemic risks in society and about what not to do about them.
By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
If you think there is hope for a decent future -- and I do -- then make that future come alive for your family and friends. I ask only two things: that it shows a realistic future, and that it be fun.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Syfy channel's political/military thriller "The Expanse," set hundreds of years in the future, seems eerily resonant with our own era. The two major powers of the solar system, Earth and Mars, have been locked in a cold war for decades. Exploited populations working and living in the asteroid belt--an area that supplies crucial raw materials to both empires--become the flashpoint for what could turn out to be a civilization-destroying hot war between the two imperial powers.
By Ugo Bardi, Resource Crisis
You showed us a future where science was respected by everyone, where logic was not in contrast with morality, and where diversity was not only accepted, but praised.
By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
Mutatis mutandis, that’s what happened to most of the other grand visions of transformative technological progress that were proclaimed so enthusiastically over the last century or so.
By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
Most of what’s kept people in today’s industrial world from coming to grips with the shape and scale of our predicament is precisely the inability to imagine a future that’s actually different from the present.
By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press
'After Oil: SF Visions Of A Post-Petroleum World' is a short story collection edited by John Michael Greer.
By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press
When Cary Neeper first published excerpts of her novel The Webs of Varok on Resilience.org, one commenter dismissed the work as being “merely a polemic pretending to be a novel.” Only the first charge is correct. The book clearly is an impassioned polemic against the extravagance and destructiveness of industrial society, but it’s hardly “pretending to be a novel.” Rather, it is an involving, well-plotted story that does justice to both the hard science underpinning its interplanetary settings and the long evolutionary perspectives typical of the old scientific romances (those of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke). Further, Neeper is in good company in her use of polemic, as Resilience editor Bart Anderson pointed out in his reply to the first commenter’s post. Anderson observed that George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley and many other great authors have used polemic to poignant and lasting effect.