Into the Ruins 5 is out
May. 30th, 2017 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophiaJust got my copy of the latest issue of Into the Ruins, the premier -- well, to be honest, also the only -- quarterly magazine of deindustrial SF.
It's a good lively issue, with the usual assortment of highly readable stories, essays, letters to the editor, etc. (Full disclosure: I have a regular column in it talking about older works of deindustrial SF; in this issue, Stephen Vincent Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon," Clark Ashton Smith's "The Dark Age," and Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin's The Masters of Solitude get their place in the postcollapse sun.) Copies, for those who aren't already subscribers, can be gotten here.
One of the stories has me running a hand down my beard and considering a counter-story. Catherine McGuire, whose work I published in several of the After Oil deindustrial-SF anthologies, has a quasi-Utopian piece titled "Root and Branch;" it comes across as her idea of the good society, and strikes me as stunningly dystopian under a layer of warm emotional spraypaint. One way or another, it's thought-provoking...but as with most Utopian pieces, it leaves me thinking hard about what would happen once you add actual human beings to the picture. Hmm...
It's a good lively issue, with the usual assortment of highly readable stories, essays, letters to the editor, etc. (Full disclosure: I have a regular column in it talking about older works of deindustrial SF; in this issue, Stephen Vincent Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon," Clark Ashton Smith's "The Dark Age," and Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin's The Masters of Solitude get their place in the postcollapse sun.) Copies, for those who aren't already subscribers, can be gotten here.
One of the stories has me running a hand down my beard and considering a counter-story. Catherine McGuire, whose work I published in several of the After Oil deindustrial-SF anthologies, has a quasi-Utopian piece titled "Root and Branch;" it comes across as her idea of the good society, and strikes me as stunningly dystopian under a layer of warm emotional spraypaint. One way or another, it's thought-provoking...but as with most Utopian pieces, it leaves me thinking hard about what would happen once you add actual human beings to the picture. Hmm...
(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-12 06:27 pm (UTC)huh, that's an interesting take. I didn't line it up quite like that (navel-gazing blindness? I hope not, but I guess it's a possibility) but instead more as: people who have figured out how to co-exist with their ecosystem (Kesh) vs. the old-American BAU conquer-it-and-gain-our-rightful-place type of culture (the warring Condor people)... Honestly, I would not have pegged either of those as liberal vs. conservative, but more as variations on the approach to dealing with limits and whether or not you pay attention to your environment.