Tomorrow's Parties

Life in the Anthropocene

Jonathan Strahan

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780262371537
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

We are living in the Anthropocene—an era of dramatic and violent climate change featuring warming oceans, melting icecaps, extreme weather events, habitat loss, species extinction, and more. What will life be like in a climate-changed world? In Tomorrow's Parties, science fiction authors speculate how we might be able to live and even thrive through the advancing Anthropocene. In ten original stories by writers from around the world, an interview with celebrated writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and a series of intricate and elegant artworks by Sean Bodley, Tomorrow's Parties takes rational optimism as a moral imperative, or at least a pragmatic alternative to despair.

In these stories—by writers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, and Australia—a young man steals from delivery drones; a political community lives on an island made of ocean-borne plastic waste; and a climate change denier tries to unmask "crisis actors." Climate-changed life also has its pleasures and epiphanies, as when a father in Africa works to make his son's dreams of "Viking adventure" a reality, and an IT professional dispatched to a distant village encounters a marvelous predigital fungal network. Contributors include Pascall Prize for Criticism winner James Bradley, Hugo Award winners Greg Egan and Sarah Gailey, Philip K Dick Award winner Meg Elison, and New York Times bestselling author Daryl Gregory.

Contributors

Sean Bodley, James Bradley, Greg Egan, Meg Elison, Sarah Gailey, Daryl Gregory, Saad Z. Hossain, Malka Older, Chen Qiufan (translated by Emily Jin), Kim Stanley Robinson, Justina Robson, Tade Thompson

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction: Science Fiction in the Anthropocene
• 1 It’s Science over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope
• 2 Drone Pirates of Silicon Valley
• 3 Down and Out in Exile Park
• 4 Once Upon a Future in the West
• 5 Crisis Actors
• 6 When the Tide Rises
• 7 I Give You the Moon
• 8 Do You Hear the Fungi Sing?
• 9 Legion
• 10 The Ferryman
• 11 After the Storm
• Artwork: Sean Bodley
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors