Toward Ecosophy

The summer 2018 issue of Into the Ruins has just been released, and it contains a treat...


Longtime readers of mine may remember the first work of deindustrial fiction I ever wrote, which appeared in the last months of 2006 on The Archdruid Report. "Winter's Tales' was a set of vignettes of everyday life in an American city in 2050, 2100, and 2150, taking three samples along the familiar historical curve of decline and fall. It's been turned into a graphic story by Marcu Knoesen and Walt Barna. Yes, this is the first page. 

I'm delighted, and I think my readers generally will find the graphic story a compelling revisioning of my tale. If you don't have a subscription to Into the Ruins yet, you can pick up a copy of the latest issue here. 

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...