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

[ecosophia]

That kind of novel-as-collected papers can work very well -- Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness makes a first tentative stab in that direction, as I recall, with good results. The thing I didn't like about it, to the extent that I remember, was the way that the Kesh and the bad-guy culture were such stereotypical stand-ins for left coast liberals and flyover-state conservatives. The Manichean attitude -- "we are the children of light and they are the children of darkness" -- that pervades so much of the leftward end of US political discourse is dreary enough in its native habitat; at least to me, it's even drearier when transposed into fiction.

Anderson has been a fave of mine since I read his very early fantasy novel The Broken Sword. The Winter of the World is well worth a read!

Always Coming Home

[https://openid-provider.appspot.com/bryanlallen]

Count me as another fan of "Always Coming Home." I grew up in the Central Valley, so I particularly identified with the setting. Bought the copy that had an accompanying cassette tape with songs; alas, that tape expired after many plays, long before I could have ripped it to a computer... Hey yah...

[(Anonymous)]

"to the extent that I remember, was the way that the Kesh and the bad-guy culture were such stereotypical stand-ins for left coast liberals and flyover-state conservatives."

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.

Always Coming Homeq

[(Anonymous)]

I think the thing I liked about this novel was the spiritual connection the Kesh had with the world around them. It is something of a theme with three other books she has recently written for young adults, Gifts, Powers and Voices. I have enjoyed them very much.