#climate book
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
One of the points of Greta Thunberg's book about the Climate, was about female land ownership, and how we need an increase of it. That actually surprised me, not that I didn't think of it before, but because it was presented as one of the solutions.
Greta actually looked at what happens to the land when women reign over it, or when women even just have access to it and are allowed to work on it, and noticed that women almost always, naturally, regenerated the land. Women will go and plant trees on their land immediately, and feed their families with the produce it makes. Women will not even stop at planting trees on their land, they'll go and re-forest the surrounding areas too, sharing secrets of the trees with others who can benefit from the extra free food. Women will plant native species, bushes, flowers, gardens, revitalize the soil, add life to the dirt and the sand, and this is something that is recorded consistently and long term with the female land ownership, land is not only regenerated, but used for immediate benefit of all life on it. That includes humans, animals, bugs, bacteria, plants and the local environment in general.
Greta also points out that most of the land that women are working on, is currently not their own. They're most often lending their hands to the land owned by their husbands, brothers, uncles, relatives or landlords, and these m*n will sometimes decide to undo all that work, and build something environmentally destructive on it in order to make a personal profit.
This is why Greta implores that is important that women own more land, personally and with full power over what happens to it. Women having full control over land is nature's way of regeneration and prevention of climate change. Give land to the women to fight climate change.
3K notes
·
View notes
Text
This Is The Best Book I’ve Ever Read to Empower Anyone with Real Climate Hope
READ MY REVIEW👉 Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Hope
"To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable." —Rebecca Solnit
What gives me hope is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and have succeeded. Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is the series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.” —Rebecca Solnit
Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Hope
#climate hope#climate#climate change#climate art#climate optimism#climate action#climate justice#climate book#book review#book recommendations#environment#earth month#book#books#rebecca solnit#renewable energy#renewable power#courage#climate solutions#favorite quotes#quotes#inspiration#inspiring quotes#envrionment#environmental communication#climate communication#favorite books#despair#possibility#climate story
44 notes
·
View notes
Text
#Trump#biden#democrats#republicans#politics#climate change#woc#poc#fda#scotus#education#books#medicare#us military#constraception#lbqt#kanala harris#Epa#antarctica#feminism#Obama#youtube
1K notes
·
View notes
Text
I’ve teased it. You’ve waited. I’ve procrastinated. You’ve probably forgotten all about it.
But now, finally, I’m here with my solarpunk resources masterpost!
YouTube Channels:
Andrewism
The Solarpunk Scene
Solarpunk Life
Solarpunk Station
Our Changing Climate
Podcasts:
The Joy Report
How To Save A Planet
Demand Utopia
Solarpunk Presents
Outrage and Optimisim
From What If To What Next
Solarpunk Now
Idealistically
The Extinction Rebellion Podcast
The Landworkers' Radio
Wilder
What Could Possibly Go Right?
Frontiers of Commoning
The War on Cars
The Rewild Podcast
Solacene
Imagining Tomorrow
Books (Fiction):
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness The Dispossessed The Word for World is Forest
Becky Chambers: A Psalm for the Wild-Built A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
Phoebe Wagner: When We Hold Each Other Up
Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation
Brenda J. Pierson: Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology
Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World
Justine Norton-Kertson: Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology
Sim Kern: The Free People’s Village
Ruthanna Emrys: A Half-Built Garden
Sarina Ulibarri: Glass & Gardens
Books (Non-fiction):
Murray Bookchin: The Ecology of Freedom
George Monbiot: Feral
Miles Olson: Unlearn, Rewild
Mark Shepard: Restoration Agriculture
Kristin Ohlson: The Soil Will Save Us
Rowan Hooper: How To Spend A Trillion Dollars
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The Mushroom At The End of The World
Kimberly Nicholas: Under The Sky We Make
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass
David Miller: Solved
Ayana Johnson, Katharine Wilkinson: All We Can Save
Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are The Weather
Colin Tudge: Six Steps Back To The Land
Edward Wilson: Half-Earth
Natalie Fee: How To Save The World For Free
Kaden Hogan: Humans of Climate Change
Rebecca Huntley: How To Talk About Climate Change In A Way That Makes A Difference
Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac: The Future We Choose
Jonathon Porritt: Hope In Hell
Paul Hawken: Regeneration
Mark Maslin: How To Save Our Planet
Katherine Hayhoe: Saving Us
Jimmy Dunson: Building Power While The Lights Are Out
Paul Raekstad, Sofa Saio Gradin: Prefigurative Politics
Andreas Malm: How To Blow Up A Pipeline
Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Almanac For The Anthropocene
Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist
William MacAskill: What We Owe To The Future
Mikaela Loach: It's Not That Radical
Miles Richardson: Reconnection
David Harvey: Spaces of Hope Rebel Cities
Eric Holthaus: The Future Earth
Zahra Biabani: Climate Optimism
David Ehrenfeld: Becoming Good Ancestors
Stephen Gliessman: Agroecology
Chris Carlsson: Nowtopia
Jon Alexander: Citizens
Leah Thomas: The Intersectional Environmentalist
Greta Thunberg: The Climate Book
Jen Bendell, Rupert Read: Deep Adaptation
Seth Godin: The Carbon Almanac
Jane Goodall: The Book of Hope
Vandana Shiva: Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture
Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement
Minouche Shafik: What We Owe To Each Other
Dieter Helm: Net Zero
Chris Goodall: What We Need To Do Now
Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stephanie Foote: The Cambridge Companion To The Environmental Humanities
Bella Lack: The Children of The Anthropocene
Hannah Ritchie: Not The End of The World
Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist
Kim Stanley Robinson: Ministry For The Future
Fiona Mathews, Tim Kendall: Black Ops & Beaver Bombing
Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come
Lynne Jones: Sorry For The Inconvenience But This Is An Emergency
Helen Crist: Abundant Earth
Sam Bentley: Good News, Planet Earth!
Timothy Beal: When Time Is Short
Andrew Boyd: I Want A Better Catastrophe
Kristen R. Ghodsee: Everyday Utopia
Elizabeth Cripps: What Climate Justice Means & Why We Should Care
Kylie Flanagan: Climate Resilience
Chris Johnstone, Joanna Macy: Active Hope
Mark Engler: This is an Uprising
Anne Therese Gennari: The Climate Optimist Handbook
Magazines:
Solarpunk Magazine
Positive News
Resurgence & Ecologist
Ethical Consumer
Films (Fiction):
How To Blow Up A Pipeline
The End We Start From
Woman At War
Black Panther
Star Trek
Tomorrowland
Films (Documentary):
2040: How We Can Save The Planet
The People vs Big Oil
Wild Isles
The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind
Generation Green New Deal
Planet Earth III
Video Games:
Terra Nil
Animal Crossing
Gilded Shadows
Anno 2070
Stardew Valley
RPGs:
Solarpunk Futures
Perfect Storm
Advocacy Groups:
A22 Network
Extinction Rebellion
Greenpeace
Friends of The Earth
Green New Deal Rising
Apps:
Ethy
Sojo
BackMarket
Depop
Vinted
Olio
Buy Nothing
Too Good To Go
Websites:
European Co-housing
UK Co-housing
US Co-housing
Brought By Bike (connects you with zero-carbon delivery goods)
ClimateBase (find a sustainable career)
Environmentjob (ditto)
Businesses (🤢):
Ethical Superstore
Hodmedods
Fairtransport/Sail Cargo Alliance
Let me know if you think there’s anything I’ve missed!
#solarpunk#hopepunk#cottagepunk#environmentalism#social justice#community#optimism#bright future#climate justice#tidalpunk#turbinepunk#resources#masterpost#books#films#magazines#podcasts#apps
1K notes
·
View notes
Text
Christopher Brown’s ‘A Natural History of Empty Lots’
On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!
Christopher Brown is an accomplished post-cyberpunk sf writer, a tech lawyer with a sideline in public interest environmental law, the proud owner of one of the most striking homes I have ever seen, and an urban pastoralist who writes about wildlife in ways I've never seen and can't get enough of:
https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/
All of these facets of Brown's identity come together today with the launch of A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and other Wild Places:
https://christopherbrown.com/a-natural-history-of-empty-lots/
This is a frustratingly hard to summarize book, because it requires a lot of backstory and explanation, and one of the things that makes this book so! fucking! great! is how skillfully Brown weaves all that stuff into his telling. Which makes me feel self-conscious as I try to summarize things, because there's no way I'll do this as well as he did, but whatever, here goes.
Brown is a transplant from rural Iowa to Austin, where he set out to start a family, practice tech law during the dotcom boom, and write science fiction, as part of a circle of writers loosely associated with cyberpunk icon @brucesterling. After both the economy and his marriage collapsed, Brown started his restless perambulations around Austin's abandoned places, sacrifice zones, the bones of failed housing starts and abandoned dot-crash office parks.
When he did, something changed in him. Slowly, his eyes learned to see things that they had just skipped over. Plants, animals, and spoor and carapaces and dens of all description, all around him, a secret world. These were not pockets of "wilderness" in the city, but they were pockets of wildness. Birds' nests woven with plastic fibers scavenged from nearby industrial dumpsters; trees taking root in half-submerged tires rolled into a creekbed, foxes and rodents playing out a real-life version of the classic ecosystem simulation exercise on the edge of an elevated highway that fills the same function as the edge of a woodland where predator and prey meet.
As Brown fell in love again – with the artist and architect Agustina Rodriguez – he conceived of a genuinely weird and amazing plan to build a house. A very weird house, in a very weird place. He bought a plot of wasteland that had once housed the head-end of an oil pipeline (connected to a nearby oil-storage facility that poisoned the people who lived near it, in an act of wanton environmental racism) and had been used as a construction-waste dump for years.
After securing an extremely unlikely loan, Brown remediated the plot, excavating the oil pipeline, then building the most striking home you have ever seen in the resulting trench. Brown is a pal of mine, and this is where I stay when I'm in Austin, and I can promise you, the pictures don't do it justice:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/style/christopher-brown-edgeland-house-austin/
Formally, A Natural History of Empty Lots is a memoir that explains all of this. But not really. Like I say, this is just the back story. What Natural History really is, is a series of loosely connected essays that explains how everything fits together: colonial conquest, Brown's failed marriage, his experience as a lawyer learning property law, what he learned by mobilizing that learning to help his neighbors defend the pockets of wildness that refuse to budge.
It's an erudite book, skipping back through millennia of history, sidewise through the ecology of Texas, all while somehow serving as a kind of spotter's guide to the wild things you can see in Austin – and maybe, in your town – if you know how to look. It's a book about how people change the land, and how the land changes people. It is filled with pastoral writing that summons Kim Stanley Robinson by way of Thoreau, and it sometimes frames its philosophical points the way a cyberpunk writer would – like Neal Stephenson writing a cyberpunk trilogy that is also the story of Leibniz and Newton fighting over credit for inventing calculus:
https://memex.craphound.com/2004/11/20/neal-stephensons-system-of-the-world-concludes-the-baroque-trilogy/
Brown is a stupendous post-cyberpunk writer, and also a post-cyberpunk person, which I've known for sure since I happened upon him one morning, thoughtfully mowing his roof with a scythe:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/46433979075/
You can get a sense of what that means in this lockdown-era joint presentation that Chris, Bruce Sterling and I did on "cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk":
https://archive.org/details/asl-cyberpunk
Brown is a spectacular novelist. His ecofascist civil war trilogy that opens with Tropic of Kansas got so much right about the politics of American demagoguery and was perfectly timed with the Trump presidency:
https://memex.craphound.com/2017/07/11/tropic-of-kansas-making-america-great-again-considered-harmful/
The sequel, Rule of Capture, uses the device of courtroom drama in a way that comes uncomfortably close to the Orwell/Kafka mashup that the authorities have created to deal with environmental protesters:
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/08/12/rule-of-capture-inside-the-martial-law-tribunals-that-will-come-when-climate-deniers-become-climate-looters-and-start-rendering-environmentalists-for-offshore-torture/
And the final volume, Failed State, is one of the most complicated complicated utopias you could ask for. This is what people mean by "thrilling conclusion":
https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/12/failed-state/#chris-brown
As brilliant as Brown is in fiction mode, his nonfiction is unclassifiably, unforgettably brilliant. A Natural History of Empty Lots is the kind of book that challenges how you feel about the crossroads we're at, the place you live, and the place you want to be.
The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/17/cyberpunk-pastoralism/#time-to-mow-the-roof
#pluralistic#books#reviews#gift guide#pastoralism#environmentalism#ecology#cyberpunk#austin#texas#climate#christopher brown#conservation#urbanism#ecosocialism#architecture#environmental racism#writing
349 notes
·
View notes
Text
Everyone at @stopproject2025comic knows how hard it is to get people to read anything heavy, so we made a bunch of comics that you can share to get the word out.
Complete alt-text and image description at the site. More comics too. Spread them far and wide because this stuff is important.
215 notes
·
View notes
Text
i'm kind of late to this but i just finished reading the scholomance trilogy by naomi novik and i feel like it is such an underrated urban fantasy?? taking the chosen one trope and turning it on its head with a fmc who has been prophesied to bring death and destruction, who is imbued with terrible power, but cannot even properly use said power to solve any of her obstacles because it would obliterate them and her soul. it takes a tired trope and the idea of an 'overpowered mary sue' and throws it back in your face by showing how all the power and destiny in the world is useless against a system filled with corruption that has burdened you with an easy way out (evil/destructive magic) that you can't take so now you have to work twice as hard as everyone else just to do simple, constructive spells instead of flicking your wrist and being done with it.
#the scholomance#naomi novik#galadriel higgins#orion lake#bookblr#urban fantasy#a deadly education#the last graduate#ya fantasy#the golden enclave#ya fiction#it has a diverse cast#queerness just effortlessly woven in#and the entire thing is so seamlessly crafted with a narrative on what real change looks like#how to really rid your environment of corruption and change society for the better you have to do the gritty work#you have to be willing to do the unpleasant hard grueling organization and working with people / meeting them where they're at#you might not even get to see or do the pretty parts#but its still worth doing the distatesful shit#doing the compromising and giving space for people to learn and make up for mistakes#so that future generations can do better#and have the childhood u didn't#no spoilers in case by some miracle i convince another soul to read this but like#she legit fucking says it in the book#it's not the work she wants to do in the end. not what she envisioned. but she does what she must to make sure other kids don't suffer#makes me think of climate activism so much#we might not get to have the pretty wonderful utopia but we have to be willing to do the shitty stuff it takes to make that future possible
113 notes
·
View notes
Text
me sending yet another email to a French public service to ask them why they use so many gratuitous English words in a service that's supposed to be non-discriminatory and accessible to everyone in the country
#this time it's about the paris library network which offers new book suggestions every month#and so many of the category titles are in english..... why? all the books are in french#'cosy mystery' 'space opera' 'road trips' 'climate fiction' < all of these were in english#i don't care how widespread some of these phrases are; you are public libraries and the public speaks french#do you really want to discourage people who don't read in english from clicking the links to check out the books?#why are you doing this. i am throwing virtual tomatoes at you#a lot of older people are confused or intimidated by this deluge of english loanwords. fuck them i guess?#and yes i picked napoléon in waterloo because i know this is a losing battle#même à la fnac on voit des intitulés de rayon en anglais alors que le rayon ne contient que des livres français...
554 notes
·
View notes
Text
Sauron: [is a decent guy in Valinor, where it is light]
Sauron: [is evil in Angband, where it is dark]
Sauron: [is evil in Forodwaith, where it is dark]
Sauron: [is a decent guy in Numenor, where it is light]
Sauron: [is a decent guy in the Southlands, where it is light]
Sauron: [is a decent guy in Eregion, where it is light]
Sauron: [is evil in Mordor, where it is dark]
Maybe he's evil. Maybe it's seasonal affective disorder and a vitamin d deficiency
#tolkien#incorrect tolkien#lotr trop#sauron#au where galadriel says yes on the raft but insists he fix mordor's climate problem because shes not living in eternal darkness#and what do you know? he's less crabby and dickish when he's getting enough vitamin d#this is crack ik hes evil in numenor in the books
141 notes
·
View notes
Text
I
know that voting for the status quo sucks.
To say it "sucks" massively understates the exact amount of suffering that exists under the status quo, an amount that I acknowledge I am too privileged to ever fully grasp.
I cannot magically provide some viable third-party candidate just barely a month before the election. I cannot solve Israel/Palestine Conflict that has haunted the world for over 70 years. I am a 29-year old transgender woman working her way through her own mental illnesses, trauma, and an undergraduate degree. I was never going to be the one to solve anything here.
All I can tell you is that regardless of whether you vote or not, there will be a presidential election. It's going to be a shitshow, regardless. Whether you vote or not, there will be a different president in January. Voting for the status quo may not be directly in your interests.
We had four years of Trump and we are still trying to unfuck ourselves from that. The beginning of my antagonistic relationship with the government was protesting in the streets of DC under his administration. I've fled from the Metro PD. I've put on a change of clothes and slipped out the back door of a gay sports bar.
Fucking vote.
Fucking vote.
Fucking vote.
Honestly, I
I don't want to see this voter apathy shit anymore.
People are going to keep dying under any president. Any president can, and probably wil, be morally culpable for the deaths of innocent people, both in the country and abroad. Carter might be the last president we had that wasn't overtly a war criminal and we still had foreign civilians killed by U.S. military involvement under the Carter admin.
I'm torn between asking you to block me, or asking you to message me, if you're taking the route of voter apathy. I'll tell you right away, here and now, that I probably don't have a solution to whatever problem is keeping you from voting for Harris. I can't even solve my own problems right, tbh. The government isn't really here for me, either.
But there isn't going to be some sort of miraculous revolution that results in The Ending Where Everyone Lives. If there's a revolution, then supply chains will falter and children and the infirm will die of preventable diseases and infections and complications in hospitals that would have otherwise been able to easily deal with such things. That's what happens in a revolution. I'm after the long-term idea where Humanity as a species lives. I'm after the route where we don't have an ending, we keep going.
Fucking vote, because exactly one of the two leading presidential candidates believes climate change is real, and it is the single greatest threat to all life on earth. We have spent the past 250 years, not just playing God with the environment, but actively creating an ecological niche in which future generations of humanity must continue to play God with the environment, dragging it back to a healthy place drop by drop, inch by inch, a degree at a time.
Or, I mean, don't vote. Either way, we'll all die at some point. Perhaps some of us will be lucky enough to die standing by our principles.
Those lucky few will become soil one day, just like I will.
I am begging you on my hands and knees to fucking vote, though, because our options are The Status Quo vs. Worse. That's
That's it.
There is no door number three right now. Our system, our flawed and broken and imbalanced and unjust system, does not accommodate for a third door. Whether you vote or not, you will be dragged through either Door 1 or Door 2 with all of humanity, as we whirl through the cosmos upon our tiny little speck of dust. The only other legitimate option is to allow oneself to become trampled; to become soil early. I don't say legitimate to give this option legitimacy, but to make clear that again, there is no door three. Door three is a casket. A one-way bed.
I didn't vote in 2016, and I'm hoping that you'll vote for the status quo this time, because that's the route that gives me the best odds of having a long and healthy life to regret my failure through inaction.
Just please
Fucking vote.
Or again, if you're taking the apathy route, probably just save me the time of blocking you, because you're not going to magically pull a viable third-party candidate out of your pocket less than six weeks before the election.
#us politics#2024 elections#can you tell i just blocked someone over this?#maybe i should've spoken to them first#maybe i'm hormonal and barely able to deal with the swords hanging over my head or the coals beneath my feet#i've explored my options for fleeing the country if trump wins; and i'm not sure if i'd follow through#maybe i'd stay here and die for my principles#but at least i'll vote to TRY and avoid that#they burned magnus hirschfeld's books before any other jewish literature#it's already too late to save the late; all we can do is salvage the present#i have to wake up and study the effects of anthropogenic climate change in less than six hours#my morning will be spent looking for; and documenting; dead birds#i love birds#they're my favorite animal#after that; i have a class on grant writing; in which i am working on a project on non-profit local agriculture#then metaphysics; because philosophy is like the only treat i have left in my education#and finally; climate storytelling; in which i and 18 other undergrads are trying to figure out how to get people to care about the planet#and i gotta tell y'all; that last one is a bleak fucking time#fucking vote#forty fucking minutes of being pissed about this#i still have to write an essay on modal realism#and research this country's failings on water resource management for my class on the same on monday#long posts#probably incoherent posts#rambling notes#political rambling
44 notes
·
View notes
Text
Andy Weir is so so good at making a HUGE impact when a character cries or breaks down. The rest of the novels are usually pretty light hearted and suddenly BAM. TEARS. and it just really gets me. It suddenly reminds me of the massive impact those kinds of situations would actually have because these people are HUMAN. The reality of what they are going through. Amazing 10/10
#they’re crying and then I’m crying and there’s tears on the book-#the scene with the climate science guy in phm? With the nukes? that fucking got me so hard#you just know that if a character cries in an andy weir book it’s gonna be written so well and you’re going to be crying too#project hail mary#andy weir#the martian#phm#ryland grace#artemis book#books#writing#not art
760 notes
·
View notes
Text
#Trans women#politics#books#news#climate change#lbgtq#gun violence#democrats#capitalism#lunch school
5K notes
·
View notes
Text
Solarpunk Sunday Suggestion:
Get a library card
#solarpunk#hopepunk#environmentalism#cottagepunk#social justice#community#optimism#bright future#climate justice#tidalpunk#local amenities#books#library economy#solarpunksundays
1K notes
·
View notes
Text
Ian McDonald's "The Wilding"
I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.
Ian McDonald is one of those absurdly brilliant novelists that just leave me wondering the actual fuck he manages it. How does he cover so much ground, think up so many compelling characters, find so many gracenotes, conjure up so many complicated emotions?
McDonald burst on the scene in the late 1980s, with the 1988 novel Desolation Road and then his 1989 Out On Blue Six, a slick, stylized cyberpunk-meets-Orwell tale that overflowed with beautiful prose, technomysticism, and sly jokes that hid sneaky truths that hid even more sly jokes:
https://memex.craphound.com/2014/01/20/out-on-blue-six-ian-mcdonalds-brilliant-novel-is-back/
By my count, McDonald has now published twenty books – mostly novels, but a couple short story collections (and the most amazingly demented, Tom-Waits-inflected teddybear murder comic imaginable, 1994's Kling Klang Klatch):
https://irishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/Kling_Klang_Klatch
McDonald's work is truly globespanning. While he's made his mark on the Martian soil, and overtaken the moon with the Luna trilogy (his definitive rebuttal to Heinlein's Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) he is widely adored and much-awarded for the glittering, futuristic versions of Brazil (Brasyl), Tanzania (the Chaga series), and India (River of Gods).
Indeed, McDonald's imagination has roamed so far over the Earth and the solar system that it's possible to overlook his fantastic reimaginings of Ireland, the land where he was raised. There's his Philip K Dick Award-winning 1991 novel King of Morning, Queen of Day, a swirling, mythopoeic novel of Celtic mysticism:
https://www.baen.com/king-of-morning-queen-of-day.html
And then there's 1992's Hearts, Hands and Voices, which is lowkey one of the best novels I have ever, ever read – a scorching science fictional allegory for The Troubles, but with the gnarliest biotech weirdness you can possibly imagine:
https://archive.org/details/heartshandsvoice0000ianm/mode/2up
McDonald's books cover so much goddamned ground, but one feature they all share is a prose styling wherein every sentence is at least 20% poetry, a fraction that somehow, impossibly, rises to as much as 150% in certain especially shiny passages.
Like this passage, which opens The Wilding, McDonald's new horror novel that marks his first return to Ireland since 1992:
Autumn lay on the great bog in silvers and tans, late purples and duns.
The sun rose above the tall ash saplings and feral sycamore. It called the birds into full voice. Stabbing shrills, tumbles of notes, the flutes of dove-call, frantic ticking hisses, song upon song. In hedgerows and copses, among the pale foliage of the birches, in the weave of deep willow and the bramble fastnesses, each bird called and was heard. In this season the peatland held the day's warmth through the night and on the bright, clear mornings rivers of mist formed, filling the subtle hollow places in the exposed cuttings, the bogs and fields. High sun would dispel it but at this hour half of Lough Carrow lay mist-bound. Each blade of grass hung heavy with dew, the clumps of sedges were already browning, the bracken curling and crisping.
A pair of horns lifted above the willow scrub and out-grown ash hedges of the Wilding. Polished tips caught the low sun and kindled as bright and keen as spears.
https://www.gollancz.co.uk/titles/ian-mcdonald/the-wilding/9781399611503/
Oof.
I would drop everything to read Ian McDonald's grocery lists but after that opening, I wasn't going to put this one down, and I didn't, reading the whole thing on yesterday's flight home from my gigs in Atlanta this week.
The Wilding is (I'm pretty sure?) McDonald's first horror novel, and it's fucking terrifying. It's set in a rural Irish peat bog that has been acquired by a conservation authority that is rewilding it after a century of industrial peat mining that stripped it back nearly to the bedrock. This rewilding process has been greatly accelerated by the covid lockdowns, which reduced the human footprint in the conservation area to nearly zero.
The story's protagonist is Lisa, a hard-case Dubliner who came to the bog to do community service after a career as a crime syndicate driver for hire, a woman who never met a car she couldn't boost and pilot in or out of any tight situation. After years in the bog, she's ready to start a new life, studying Yeats at university, indulging a late-discovered love of poetry that has as much to do with her redemption as her years in the wild.
Lisa's last duty before she leaves the bog and goes home to Dublin is leading a school group on a wild campout in one of the bog's deep clearings. It's a routine assignment, and while it's not her favorite duty, it's also not a serious hardship.
But as the group hikes out to the campsite, one of her fellow guides is killed, without warning, by a mysterious beast that moves so quickly they can barely make out its monstrous form. Thus begins a tense, mysterious, spooky as hell story of survival in a haunted woods, written in the kind of poesy that has defined McDonald's career, and which – when deployed in service of terror – has the power to raise literal goosebumps.
There's a lot of fantasy that deals with Celtic mythology, including McDonald's own King of Morning, Queen of Day, but the vibe of that stuff tends to the heroic and romantic – sure, there's the odd banshee, but in the main, it's mischievous wee people, pookas, and leprechauns. More fey than fear.
But Irish mythology in its raw form is terrifying. The monsters of Irish storytelling are grotesque, mean, remorseless, and come in every shape and size. Some authors have done well by going back to the bestiary for the deep cuts. When I was a kid, I must have read John Coyne's Hobgoblin fifty times (mostly because it was about D&D, which I was obsessed with). I haven't read this one since I was about 12, and I have no idea if it'd hold up today, but it left me with a deep appreciation of the spooky multifariousness of monsters who dwell in Ireland's bogs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobgoblin_(novel)
The Wilding is a suspense novel, which means there's no way to really sum up the plot without spoiling a lot of the affect, but suffice to say that McDonald brings large swathes of deep Irish lore to the surface, and it had me reading as fast as I could and wanting to put the book down and hide.
What a writer McDonald is! The fact that this is the same guy who wrote last year's stunning secret-history/solarpunk/uncategorizable wonder that was Hopeland beggars belief:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace
Read you some Ian McDonald novels, is what I'm trying to say. This one is only available in the UK, if that's not where you are, consider mail-ordering it. Looks like they've got stock at Forbidden Planet for £19 plus £18 shipping to the US. Worth every penny:
https://forbiddenplanet.com/424306-the-wilding-hardcover/
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/25/bogman/#erin-go-aaaaaaargh
103 notes
·
View notes
Text
finishing a book series with no real online presence in fandom spaces is gonna kill me
#reading#booklr#books#the scholomance#galadriel higgins#orion lake#who do i talk to about these books and the simple but beautiful analogies it makes#about capitalism/climate disaster/corruption#plS
39 notes
·
View notes