Book Review: Heart Spring Mountain by Robin MacArthur
Spring is Coming
Spring is coming.
Carbondale Spring is a visionary development proposal for the city of Carbondale, Illinois. This proposal serves as both a local response to the global climate crisis and as a solution to many other challenges and needs facing Carbondale on a local and regional level.
In this post, I’ll explore several important questions about Carbondale Spring.
What is Carbondale Spring? Why do I support it? What can we do to make this vision and plan a reality? What can people in other cities learn from Carbondale Spring?
The local election coming up on April 2 will have a major impact on how this plan unfolds. If you are a Carbondale resident who supports this plan, please vote for candidates who support Carbondale Spring and help spread the word through social media and canvassing. Read more ›
Captain Marvel and the Evolution of Justice in the MCU
Brie Larson, Captain Marvel, Marvel Studios
Captain Marvel is taking the world by storm. The first Marvel film with a female lead made an estimated $455 million worldwide during opening weekend, making its release the sixth-highest global film debut ever and the highest of a film with a female lead.
Online trolls orchestrated a concerted campaign to tank Captain Marvel’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes and elsewhere prior to its release in the hopes of discouraging moviegoers from seeing it at all. Clearly, that effort failed. Instead, moviegoers around the world demonstrated their eagerness to watch a film about a female superhero. Read more ›
Posted in Politics, Superheroes
Best Climate Fiction of 2018
Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is a literary genre that includes any work of fiction that addresses human-caused climate change. The stereotypical approach to this genre involves telling heavy-handed disaster stories with climate change as the main culprit. If done well, those types stories can still be interesting and meaningful cautionary tales about climate realities (and social realities) that may very well await us in the near future. However some of the most compelling tales take the theme of climate change in an entirely different direction.
What does climate change look like on the small scale, in the daily life of someone whose experience of it you may not have considered? What’s an unexpected turn that it might take? What do some of the solutions look like? What happens when you throw in elements of sci-fi and fantasy such as aliens, zombies, robots, and time travel?
The answers to these and other questions can make for a delightful, thought-provoking, inspiring, and at times terrifying reading experience. This holds true whether the reader is a cli-fi enthusiast or simply enjoys a good story.
The following is my list of the top eight climate fiction books for 2018. Technically, one was published in 2017, and another in January 2019. But both of those titles had enough to contribute to the genre that I included them in my end-of-year round-up for 2018.
No matter what your preferences are as a reader, there’s a story here for almost everyone. Some are down-to-earth works of present-day literary fiction like Heart Spring Mountain that would fit well on any general interest literature reading list. Others like Blackfish City are futuristic tales with dramatic speculative elements that artfully draw out the theme of climate and the potential impacts of climate catastrophe on human society. Most are somewhere in between. Whatever your taste in tone and genre, there are works of climate fiction out there that can entertain and captivate you while also engaging you with what may well be the the most far-reaching social and environmental issue of our time. I hope you enjoy the works that I’ve selected as the best of the year.
My name is Treesong. I'm a father, author, talk radio host, and Real Life Superhero. I live in Carbondale, Southern Illinois. I write novels, short stories, and poetry, mostly about the climate.
© 2019