Into the Ruins 5 is out

[ecosophia]

Just 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...

Comments

adding human beings

[ecosophia]

I'm still mulling about how I would handle a counterstory. My sense at this point, though, is that we already know what happens to a society that decides that some basic human drive is evil, and tries to repress it by massive peer pressure backed up by the equivalent of legal penalties. Thus a society like the one in "Root and Branch" would end up being just as hypocritical (and obsessive) about anger and other "unharmonious" emotions as Victorian England was about sexual desire; everyone would maintain a facade of perfect harmonious calm, and all the while some people would act out their cravings in variously twisted and destructive ways, while others would repress it so far that they'd end up as psychological basket cases with the equivalent of hysterical paralysis and the like. A festering pit of seething hatred, but everyone very well trained to keep the calm smile and the gentle tone of voice rigidly glued in place...something very much like that.

Just at the moment, though, I'm finishing up the sixth (out of seven) book in the Weird of Hali sequence, and I'm also mulling over an enticing idea for a series of ecological detective stories set in the deindustrial future, so "The Twisted Branch" (my working title for the idea sketched out above) may have to wait a bit. Oh, and packing to move is also taking some time!