How we put out the fire

Like Dante in the inferno, for humanity in the first decades of the 21st century, the only way is through. In The Ministry for the Future, writer Kim Stanley Robinson imagines that path, telling the story of a world that somehow manages to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

Running out of Ice on the Moon. The Path of “Resource Depletion” in the Memesphere

Thomas Huxley said that “it is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.” It is a sentence that describes the cycle of ideas, — call them memes — which tend to have a life-cycle similar to that of living creatures. They are born, grow, and disappear. 

What Could Possibly Go Right?: Episode 32 Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson is widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. From his perspective, he answers the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”

Bicyclopolis

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.

Review: “The Day the Gulf Stream Stopped” by Anthony Owen

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.