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Speaking of Imagining the Future...
Feb. 7th, 2021 01:13 pm
I'm delighted to announce that the first issue of New Maps, the new quarterly magazine of deindustrial future fiction, is in print and available for purchase. It's got stories by a fine mix of established deindustrial fiction authors and newcomers to the field -- Pierre Magdeleine, Dawn Vogel, Daniel Chawner, Jonathan Reif, Jeff Burt, David England, G. Kay Bishop and Violet Bertelsen -- as well as a book review and a letters column that is already full of conversation. I'm eagerly looking forward to my copy. If you're interested, you can get more information here. Copies of the first issue or subscriptions to the first four issues can be bought here. (Sensibly enough, you can also subscribe by mail -- instructions are on the bottom of the order page.) Interested in writing for New Maps? Publisher-editor Nathanael Bonnell would love to hear from you; please check out the submissions page and proceed from there. Want to write a letter to the editor? Here's your link.
As we move deeper into the penumbra of the deindustrial age, and the failed certainties of the conventional wisdom collapse around us, new maps of the territory ahead are one of our most pressing needs. As I noted in a recent blog post, while politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from imagination, and the stories we write and read today are crucial resources for helping us navigate the possibility space of tomorrow.
Regular readers of my blog will be familiar with my longtime interest in deindustrial fiction -- that is to say, fiction set in the kind of future we're actually going to get, in which declining resources, crumbling infrastructure, and the accelerating failure of the grand myth of perpetual progress take the place of the shoddy Tomorrowland kitsch that provides so many minds these days with their prefab thoughts. There aren't many venues that will publish stories of that kind -- it's long been a source of wry amusement to me that so many of those cultural venues that like to strut around claiming to be antinomian and transgressive are the first to run like rabbits back into the conventional wisdom the moment anybody proposes something that actually contradicts the conformist beliefs of our time. 
