I’m thrilled to report what I consider to be one of my best successes on the writing contest circuit. My short story, The Pupfish of Miracle Spring, made the short list of ten finalists in The End of Our World contest, managed by Aftermath Magazine, which is based in The Netherlands. The contest drew more … More One of my stories makes a contest’s short list in a field of 1,400
Here’s 10 authors you may not have read, but whom offer amazing and thoughtful stories about a warmed future. … More 10 amazing authors who put climate change into their novels
Here’s the third and the last of my “vaudios,” my author-read stories on the YouTube platform. A War Beyond War, and I Am the Only Soldier was the first (and so far only) fiction story I published in an anthology. It appeared in Satirica: An Anthology of Satirical Speculative Fiction in 2009. It’s not part … More YouTube: A War Beyond War, And I Am The Only Soldier
Here’s the second of my YouTube “vaudios,” as I like to call my videos that are really audio stories. Living in Infamy is set in a future when fossil fuels are banned. The captain of a US Navy destroyer, plagued by guilt over a friendly-fire incident, hunts a dangerous carbon smuggler and gets help from … More YouTube: Living in Infamy: A Carbon Run Story
In a future decade when fixing the environment is the world’s top priority, an elderly homeowner must decide whether to fight a citation that might mean the loss of her home. I’ve been experimenting with alternate ways to present my fiction, and I’ve created what I call a “vaudio.” It’s intended for listening more than … More YouTube: Zillah Harmonia, a Carbon Run story
As I mentioned in a previous post, I wrote two Carbon Run short stories, Zillah Harmonia, and Living in Infamy. I’ve recorded the second story and posted it on SoundCloud. In a future when fossil fuels are banned, the captain of a US Navy destroyer, plagued by guilt over a friendly-fire incident, hunts a dangerous … More Reading: Living In Infamy, a Carbon Run story
This weekend’s opening of Star Trek: Beyond and last week’s nomination of Donald Trump to the presidency puts an interesting spin on the utopia versus dystopia debate in the speculative fiction universe, at least for this writer. Star Trek and Trump appear unrelated, but they represent threads of American thinking about the future. Do we … More Are we creating the dystopia we’ve always feared?
America is going through another paroxysm of racially tinged violence, reminding everyone of our failure to reconcile our history with our ideals. In my own lifetime, the country has experienced urban riots (e.g, Watts in Los Angeles), violence after the Rodney King verdict, and last week, two more in a long string of deaths of … More Review: Augments of Change salient in a time of racial tension
It’s a ripe scene for satire. Twenty-five thousand bureaucrats and another 25,000 hangers-on are gathered in Paris at COP21 to exchange climate change jargon over sustainable wine and cheese. It’s hard, however, to ignore the seriousness of their effort, especially as a pall lingers over the city three weeks after the November 13 terror attacks. … More What is the role of a writer as climate change creeps up on us?
Climate science encourages the public to imagine global warming as a decades-long desiccation, a slow transformation of liquid water to vapor locked in the atmosphere, turning the planet into a wasteland of deserts, as if everything is dropped into a saucepan over high heat and cooked into Nevada. In speculative fiction and fantasy, the image … More Review: Gold Fame Citrus is tangy, acidic, and tasty
Mark Nykanen, author of Primitive, Carry the Flame, and other environmentally themed novels, and Mary Sands Woodbury, editor at Moon Willow Press and the website Clifibooks.com, offered their thoughts on climate fiction and its future in publishing. (Material is edited.) What is “climate fiction,” and is it a new genre of fiction? Nykanen: I like … More Thoughts on climate fiction from a writer and a publisher
Climate change is relatively unexplored territory in fiction, including speculative fiction, and most of the pioneers in this area have investigated the subject via the novel. Relatively few writers have tackled it with the short story and other short forms. One collection, however, corrects this mistake. Hot Mess: Speculative Fiction About Climate Change, edited by … More Review: Hot Mess
J.G. Follansbee 