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I enjoy a good time travel yarn. Two of the most enjoyable temporal tales of recent years have been Rian Johnson’s film Looper and William Gibson’s book The Peripheral.

Mind you, the internal time travel rules of Looper are all over the place, whereas The Peripheral is wonderfully consistent.

Both share an interesting commonality in their settings. They are set in the future and …the future: two different time periods but neither of them are the present. Both works also share the premise that the more technologically advanced future would inevitably exploit the time period further down the light cone.

Muscular imagination

Robin Sloan on The Culture:

The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently artic­u­late and defend their values. (Their enthu­siasm for their own politics is consid­ered annoying by most other civilizations.)

Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.

I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.

Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.

How to Imagine Climate Futures - Long Now

The best climate fiction can do more than spur us to action to save the world we have — it can help us conceptualize the worlds, both beautiful and dire, that may lie ahead. These stories can be maps to the future, tools for understanding the complex systems that intertwine with the changing climates to come.

Untitled: a novel

Ben is writing a chapter a day of this cli-fi story. You can subscribe to the book by email or RSS.

Why William Gibson Is a Literary Genius | The Walrus

On the detail and world-building in 40 years of William Gibson’s work.

A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment | The MIT Press Reader

From Mary Shelley and Edgar Rice Burroughs to John Brunner, Frank Herbert and J.G. Ballard to Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Octavia Butler.