Announcing: Margaret Atwood on how to survive the future
“Can we change our energy system? Can we change it fast enough to avoid being destroyed by it? Are we capable of thinking about longer-term issues, or, like the lobster in a pot full of water that’s being brought slowly to the boil, will we fail to realize the danger we’re in until it’s too late? We’re supposed to be smarter than lobsters. We’ve committed some very stupid acts over the course of our history, but our stupidity isn’t inevitable.”
She has explored dystopic futures in seminal novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. But now Margaret Atwood is concerned about the future we’re building right now. In a fresh, expansive essay, she tries to find out how we’re going to get to a world without oil… and explains why stories — and a genre of fiction known as “cli-fi” in particular — may be the answer to our Climate Futures.
Margaret Atwood:
It’s Not Climate Change. It’s Everything Change.
Read it now.
But it doesn’t end there. We’ve brought together some astonishing writers to take up Atwood’s challenge. Names coming soon include Bruce Sterling, Charlie Jane Anders, Brandon Keim and many more.
Right now you can read fiction and essays from these great names:
Paolo Bacigalupi — City of Ash
New fiction from the award-winning author of The Windup Girl.
Choire Sicha — Table of Contents
A short story from the founder of The Awl.
Ed Finn — How Science Fiction Holds up a Mirror to Our Future
An essay from the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination.
Ghislaine Maxwell — When The Oceans Failed
An imaginative op-ed from the founder of the TerraMar Project.
Dan Bloom — Can Cli-Fi Help Keep Our Planet Livable?
The man who coined the genre gives an overview.
And that’s just the beginning.
You can read more by browsing the Climate Futures or CliFi tags on Medium — or join in by tagging your own stories.
