Writing the Future, eds. Dan Coxon & Richard V Hirst

Subtitled "Essays on Crafting Science Fiction", this is an anthology first published in 2023 comprising, in most cases, authors talking about their own practice, concerns and obsessions. There's a lot on the context in which they've written things, and the sense of genre as community where we're all in conversation. There's stuff about how we make readers engage with climate emergency - and not turn them off - as well as how we conceive of and convey the alien.

In Steering the Craft by Ursula le Guin, which I read recently, these kinds of discussion are a prompt for writing exercises, the reader as active participant and fellow craftsperson. By comparison, Writing the Future is more inward-looking, the authors reflecting on their own working methods but not inviting us to roll up our sleeves. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, just not quite what I'd expected. The call to action, instead, is to look out various the stories and books cited. 

I was particularly drawn to Aliya Whiteley's "A Crash Course in Black Holes", all about researching a story that never quite worked out and how she felt compelled to follow the threads of the idea anyway. Adam Roberts's "Wellsian Futures" has only whetted my appetite for his book, HG Wells: A Literary Life. (See my recent post on Wells's 1936 novella The Croquet Player.)

Nina Allen's "Running Out of Road: The Radical Modernism of JG Ballard" is a similar trawl through the ideas and obsessions of another writer. I also enjoyed Maura McHugh's "The Eternal Apocalypse: How British Comic 2000AD Remain Relevant", not least in its focus on more recent stuff which I've not read (having lost the faith in the mid-1990s). 

And my pal Una McCormack's "'Right now the building is ours': Affinities of Science Fiction and Historical Fiction", has given me lots to think about in the way SF uses or draws from history, and I've added The Dawn of Everything:A New History of Humanity by Davids Graeber and Wengrow (Penguin, 2021) to my reading list - as soon as the Dr is done with it.