Wild Authors: Paolo Bacigalupi
Paolo Bacigalupi’s novels tell stories about human impacts on the environment – and, in turn, the results of these impacts
Literature
Wild Authors: Clara Hume
After 15 months of writing this series about other authors tackling climate change in fiction, I’m going off the path
The Literary Method of Urban Design
Smothered in soaking tropical heat, I’ve been chasing my two-year-old as he runs through fields of strange flowers, treads around
Wild Authors: Morgan Nyberg
Morgan Nyberg grew up in farming country in southern British Columbia. After graduating from the University of British Columbia he worked
Writer Elizabeth Rush Distills the Stories of Communities Affected by Sea Level Rise
Author Elizabeth Rush talks about her award-winning book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. Elizabeth spent time in nine
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Wild Authors: Susan M. Gaines
This month’s spotlight is on Susan M. Gaines, who wrote Carbon Dreams, her first published novel – and she has just completed another. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, such as the North American Review and the Missouri Review, and in the anthologies Best of the West V and Sacred Ground: Writings About Home. She studied chemistry and oceanography before a love for literature lured her away from the lab, and her book, Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal about Earth History (Oxford University Press, 2009), employs narrative and literary prose to report on research in organic geochemistry. Currently she holds a post as writer-in-residence and co-director of the Fiction Meets Science program at the University of Bremen in Germany. Despite having spent much of her adult life abroad and found homes in Uruguay and Germany, Gaines regularly returns to her roots in northern California. Carbon Dreams was published in 2001 and is set in the 1980s; it is
Wild Authors: Barbara Kingsolver
From Barbara Kingsolver’s official site: “Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955, and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology
Writing the Future of Water
Science fiction writers create stories that take place in the future and include inventive settings and imaginative elements such as new universes and societies, time travel and extraterrestrial beings. American writer Robert Heinlein (1907 – 1988), often considered the “dean of science fiction writers” and author of classics, Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers, referred to the genre as “realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.” Effective science fiction challenges us to examine the physical, moral and political consequences of new technologies and scientific inventions as well as aspects of governance, society and human behavior. As global warming and climate change have become an increasingly important part of our collective consciousness, a number of science fiction writers have imagined how future worlds will function without adequate sources of water, the fundamental requirement for life. Frank Herbert: Dune Dune by
Lessons on the Anthropocene from Dionysus and Mushrooms
As the International Day of Forests dawns, Persistent Acts reflects on American and human questions in the face of climate
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Wild Authors: Brian Burt
When I first talked with author Brian Burt a couple years ago, we sat in on a SFF World panel about climate change in fiction, and I was surprised at the things we had in common: we both hail from Indiana (go Hoosiers!), still dream of our golden (albeit separate) journeys to Ireland, and love red wine. And we like cycling and hiking. After a few talks about writing, I invited Brian to become a moderator at our Google+ newsgroup, “Ecology in Literature and the Arts.” Despite things in common, I was even more impressed that a debut novelist had had such success at creating a following for his books. Brian’s Burt’s biography: While on a consulting assignment in Dublin, Ireland, Brian became sufficiently inspired by the magical scenery and the rich literary tradition to try writing his own short stories. He had more than twenty science fiction and fantasy tales published in small press anthologies, genre magazines, and online