Anthropocene Rag is "a rare distillation of nanotech, apocalypse, and mythic Americana into a heady psychedelic brew."—Nebula and World Fantasy award-winning author Jeffrey Ford In the future United States, our own history has faded into myth and traveling across the country means navigating wastelands and ever-changing landscapes. The country teems with monsters and artificial intelligences try to unpack their own becoming by recreating myths and legends of their human creators. Prospector Ed, an emergent AI who wants to understand the people who made him, assembles a ragtag team to reach the mythical Monument City. In this nanotech Western, Alex Irvine infuses American mythmaking with terrifying questions about the future and who we will become. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
This book explores how fire, plants and people coexist in the Anthropocene. In a time of dramatic environmental transformation, the authors examine how human impacts on the planetary system are being felt at all levels from the geological and the arboreal to the atmospheric. The book brings together the disciplines of human geography and art history to examine fire-plant-people alliances and multispecies world-making. The authors listen carefully to the narratives of bushfire survivors. They embrace the responses of contemporary artists, as practice becomes interwoven with fire as well as ruin and regrowth. Through visual, textual and felt ways of being, the chapters illuminate, illustrate, impress and imprint the imagined and actual agency of plants and people within a changing climate — from Aboriginal ecocultural burning to nuclear fire. By holding grief and enacting hope, the book shows how relationships come to be and are likely to change due to the interdependencies of fire, plants and people in the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene concept draws attention to the various forms of entanglement of social, political, ecological, biological and geological processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The ensuing complexity and ambiguity create manifold challenges to widely established theories, methodologies, epistemologies and ontologies. The contributions to this volume engage with conceptual issues of scale in the Anthropocene with a focus on mediated representation and narrative. They are centered around the themes of scale and time, scale and the nonhuman and scale and space. The volume presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, geography, political sciences, history and literary, cultural and media studies. Together, they contribute to current debates on the (re-)imagining of forms of human responsibility that meet the challenges created by humanity entering an age of scalar complexity.
The most celebrated science fiction short story editor of our time, multi-award-winning editor and Locus Magazine critic Jonathan Strahan presents the definitive collection of best short science fiction of 2020. With short works from some of the most lauded science fiction authors, as well as rising stars, this science fiction collection displays the top talent and cutting-edge cultural moments that affect our lives, dreams, and stories. These brilliant authors examine the way we live now, our hopes, and struggles, all through the lens of the future. An assemblage of future classics, this star-studded anthology is a must-read for anyone who enjoys the vast and exciting world of science fiction.
This book examines how contemporary artists have engaged with histories of nature, geology, and extinction within the context of the changing planet. Susan Ballard describes how artists challenge the categories of animal, mineral, and vegetable—turning to a multispecies order of relations that opens up a new vision of what it means to live within the Anthropocene. Considering the work of a broad range of artists including Francisco de Goya, J. M. W. Turner, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Yhonnie Scarce, Joyce Campbell, Lisa Reihana, Katie Paterson, Taryn Simon, Susan Norrie, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Ken + Julia Yonetani, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Angela Tiatia, and Hito Steyerl and with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this book reveals the emergence of a planetary aesthetics that challenges fixed concepts of nature in the Anthropocene. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, narrative nonfiction, digital and media art, and the environmental humanities.
Nature has gone feral. How can we re-attune ourselves to the new nature? A field guide can help. Human action has transformed our planet and ushered in a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene. The effects are global in scope, but take shape within distinct social and ecological "patches," discontinuous regions within which the key actors may not be human, but the plants, animals, fungi, viruses, plastics, and chemicals creating our new world. Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene takes stock of our current planetary crisis, leading readers through a series of sites, thought experiments, and genre-stretching descriptive practices to nurture a revitalized natural history. Field guides teach us how to notice, name, and so better appreciate more-than-human worlds. They hone our powers of observation and teach us to see the world anew. Field-based observations and place-based knowledge cultivation—getting up-close and personal with patchy dynamics—are vital to truly grapple with the ecological challenges and the historical conjunctures that are bringing us to multiple catastrophic tipping points. How has commercial agriculture runoff given rise to comb jellies in the Black Sea? What role did the Atlantic slave trade play in the worldwide spread of virus-carrying mosquitoes? How did the green revolution transform the brown planthopper into a superpredator in Philippine rice fields? Questions like these open up new ways of understanding, and ways of living through, the epoch that human activity has ushered in. This Field Guide shifts attention away from knowledge extractive practices of globalization to encourage skilled observers of many stripes to pursue their commitments to place, social justice, and multispecies community. It is through attention to the beings, places, ecologies, and histories of the Anthropocene that we can reignite curiosity, wonder, and care for our damaged planet.
In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.
This book elaborates the need, in a rapidly urbanizing world, for recognition of the ecological communities we inhabit in cities and for the development of an ethics for all entities (human and non-human) in this context. Children and their entangled relations with the human and more-than-human world are located centrally to the research on cities in Bolivia and Kazakhstan, which investigates the future challenges of the Anthropocene. The author explores these relations by employing techniques of intra-action, diffraction and onto-ethnography in order to reveal the complexities of children’s lives. These tools are supported by a theoretical framing that draws on posthumanist and new materialist literature. Through rich and complex stories of space-time-mattering in cities, this work connects children’s voices with a host of others to address the question of what it means to be a child in the Anthropocene.
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This exciting volume presents the work and research of the Rivers of the Anthropocene Network, an international collaborative group of scientists, social scientists, humanists, artists, policy makers, and community organizers working to produce innovative transdisciplinary research on global freshwater systems. In an attempt to bridge disciplinary divides, the essays in this volume address the challenge in studying the intersection of biophysical and human sociocultural systems in the age of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch of humans' own making. Featuring contributions from authors in a rich diversity of disciplines—from toxicology to archaeology to philosophy—this book is an excellent resource for students and scholars studying both freshwater systems and the Anthropocene.
