Category: Reading Journal
-
overgrown, with a rich ecosystem: Sheri S Tepper’s Grass
There are schismatic priesthoods! There is legacy Catholicism! There is a vanished alien race and the empty cities it left behind! There is… horse-riding?
-
at Ogre’s Grave
It was estimated that ogres had numbered in the billions when their civilisation had met its end, and they appeared to have colonised every corner of the world. Giants who had ravaged and despoiled the Mother’s land and seas, leaving traces of huge mines and quarries where they had ripped minerals and metals from Her…
-
transition as seen from the other side: Jon Raymond’s Denial
A brief and unusual work of climate fiction, this. Raymond gets straight into an early-2050s US, and a world in which popular anger saw not only some sort of transition away from fossil fuels (in some nations), but also a run of very public prosecutions of bigwigs from Big Carbon: life sentences, the occasional hanging,…
-
who are you trying to impress? McDonald’s Hopeland and skiffy diasporae
It’s yer man ADH, who else? “Space is dead”, sez he: The moon landing happened because capitalism and American empire actually had a rival. These forces had to prove they could outrace, outplan, and outspend communism and Soviet empire. It was probably the biggest PR campaign of all time, if you don’t count our bloated…