Some really good stories in here. Try "The Precedent" on for size. ( )

Climate Change Fiction anthology that is horribly plausible, deeply frightening and that fills me with guilt about the mess the generation now in school will inherit from us.

“Loosed Upon The World” is a collection of twenty-six short stories that imagine our future in a world undergoing dramatic climate change.

The message that they have in common is that the next generation will be facing some hard choices, that science may mitigate the effects of climate change but that the way we live today will not survive.

Most of the stories give grimly pragmatic views of how the next generation will play the hand we've dealt them. I find the stories so depressingly credible that I feel I need to apologise in advance to the next generation.

While this IS a collection with a message, it is primarily an collection of excellent, innovative Science Fiction.

I've reviewed my six favourite stories as I've gone along. I've summarised them below.

In addition, I really liked:

"Outliers" by Nicole Feldringer which was an amusing, quirky view of how to outsource solving the climate emergency. I'd love that to work in real life.

"The Mutant Stag At Horn Creek" by Sarah K Castle which gave me a close-up view of how life might change in the Grand Canyon.

"Hot Rods" by Cat Sparks, an enigmatic but very atmospheric tale of the young racing old cars and contracting out to a secret base in the Australian outback in a prolonged drought. I've now bought her short story collection "The Bride Price" to read more of her work.




"Shooting The Apocalypse" by Paolo Bacigalupi is a grim tale set in the same world as his novel "The Water Knife" that describes a brutal future defined by the struggle to control the supply of water in a US that doesn't have enough for everyone.

His message seems to be that the shift, when it comes, will be fundamental and irreversible. The future goes to those who adapt and move forward, not to those who bemoan what they’ve lost or who try to create pockets of wealth where they can pretend nothing has changed.

"The Myth Of Rain" by Seanan McGuire is a chillingly prescient 2015 view of the near future struggle between the rich and the rest of us as the climate fails. Here's part of her vision of the future:

“The thing about lies is that no matter how often you tell them and how much you believe them, they’re not going to become true. “Fake it until you make it” may work for public speaking and falling in love, but it doesn’t stop climate change.

By 2017, it was pretty clear who the liars were, and they weren’t the scientists holding up their charts and screaming for the support of the public.

By 2019, it was even clearer that we’d listened to the lies too long. The tipping point was somewhere behind us, overlooked and hence forgotten."

"A Hundred Hundred Daisies" by Nancy Kress is a story of a boy, Danny, coming of age in the an environment of escalating violence and the looking threat of failure caused by climate change.


What made the story for me was that, in the midst of this clearly-painted grimness, Danny focuses on creating a moment of beauty, related to the “Hundred Hundred Daisies” of the title, for his little sister Ruthie, .

I loved this acknowledgement that creating beauty is important, even when the world you’ve known is ending and that creating a good memory for someone you love is a way of seeding your world with hope.

"The Precedent" by Sean McMullen is one of the stories that has stuck with me most, perhaps because, if I survived to this future world, I'd be one of the people on trial in this story

The narrator is a climatologist, now in his eighties, who spent his life campaigning to prevent or delay climate change. He intends to beat the audit. We get a ringside seat on the audit as he attempts this.

The power of this story comes from the plausibility of the idea and the matter-of-fact way in which these acts of institutionalised cruelty by the self-righteous young are experienced by the mostly guilty but seldom repentant old.

This was my first Sean McMullen story. I've now bought "The Ghosts Of Engines Past" to read more of his work

"Eagle" by Gregory Benford and "Hot Sky" by Robert Silverberg both focus on characters doing difficult and unpleasant things in the face of melting Polar Ice Caps.

"Eagle," tells the story of a woman carrying out an act of eco-terrorism because she believes it is necessary to push people to change their behaviour.

"Hot Sky," tells the story of an ambitious corporate manager hunting icebergs to two home who has to make hard choices when he responds to a distress signal.

Both are character-driven stories that reminded me that the best Science Fiction has real people at the centre of it.



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"Hot Sky," by Robert Silverberg (1990): 7.75
- A flaky little moral exploration, moderately ill-suited to the collection at hand, given its relative age compared to other entrants. Construction-wise, the discrete story-parts hang by a thread, namely in the straining-for-a-conflict introduction of the marooned ship struggled against either mutineers or crazed first officers. The section, while the fulcrum for the Moral Quandry [is it, in the end, much of one?], too little touches the Big Pic thematic/sfnal elements at play [climate, iceberg towing]. Moreover, that quandry itself, might've easily existed outside the specific realm posited by the main sfnal conceit in the story. Not wholly damning, just not less than what it demonstrates: that such scotch-taped narratives are more likely the rule than the exception when someone reaches the five-hundred short story marker.

"Shooting the Apocalypse," by Paolo Bacigalupi (2011): 7.25
- The hard thing about having a clear, black-and-white moral vision (right or wrong) as a fiction writer is that the only difference between you and a humorless scold (again, sadly, right or wrong) is the quality of your fiction. And, so far as I can tell from Bacigalupi’s short fiction, he’s too often on the mediocre range of that spectrum — albeit totally competent and with the beneficial fact that the majority of his literary “sins” are more or less ubiquitous in his genre, and therefore far from worthy of outright dismissal (as, for example, the same sins might be in someone aspiring to something more Literary). Namely: flat tough talkers abounding, workmanlike prose otherwise, and small stories that remain small regardless of the monumental circumstances off of which they’re playing. The story: two journos in near-future, barren SW USA — in which Texans, in an unsuccessful attempt at the old SF ‘but what if it was happening to white people’ twist (think “People are Alike All Over” Twilight Zone), have to illegally steal into Cali and Arizona to escape water scarcity — uncover evidence of murdered refugees, only to realize thereafter that this is actually the smaller story compared to the climatological context around them.

"The Myth of Rain," by Seanann McGuire (2015): 4
- Dreadful. Dreadful dreadful. Take all my points about Bacigalupi and restate them here, amplified sevenfold. Bacigalupi’s take, in contrast to this, might as well be George Eliot. The horrible combination: her pestering, repetitive bombast next to a near-complete lack of actual narrative story ideas (the Original Anthology Problem rears its boring head once again). Witness the four pages of straight, boiler-plate exposition and the Absolute Heroes we end up following thereafter. And a personal issue: her prose tone exemplifies that certain type of SFF / WB humornerd I find to be an unequivocal negative most unique to the genre (for a nice example, see that Author Bio at the end).

"Outer Rims," by Toiya Kristen Finley (2011): 8
- The small story that works: a family fleeing an incoming climate-related hurricane inadvertently exposes itself to a malaria-like disease after Good Samaritaning a stranded motorist. The “climate” aspect here isn’t central, which is to its benefit, esp. following the collections first two stories. And there are a lot of small, nice human moments: such as the masked doctor wanting to connect with her frustrated patient over their shared blackness, or the dying motorist hoping the family made it.

"Kheldyu," by Karl Schroeder (2014): 7.5
- Our story: petty corporate rivalries corrupt an heir's attempts to get rich capturing carbon out of the atmosphere; (or) Capital gonna capital. A tired opening, but, there’s a lot to like here. There’s the successful big context through small story structure, and the smart look at the inevitable role the Technological Panacea will play. Most of all, however, it’s the absence of clear-cut Moral Heroes (as in that McGuire story) — i.e. there are those invested in “fighting”climate change who themselves are far from Pure Souls. But there’s also just a lot missing — from the over-descriptive monotony of the prose (I still really have little idea what this structure and its environs actually looks like) and to the absolute heartlessness of the proceedings in general.

"The Snows of Yesteryear," by Jean-Louis Trudel (2014): 8.75
- This does little to rise above its genre’s well-documented limitations—i.e. the characterization is thin, dependent on one or two combined anecdotes and descriptors (the Old Man tells tale tales from the C20; he’s smitten with Francine!), and the exposition disguised as extemporizing is failing (“you’re from the generation that ... [insert paragraph abt the progression of climate change])—but this works through the simple microcosm-ness of its “event” and it’s more complicated vision of the highly leveraged and highly vested means through which the elite will, inevitably, “come to terms” with cc and it’s effects (namely, profit-seeking).

"The Rainy Season," by Tobias S. Buckell (2012): 8
- The piece here: a small domestic drama, fixed up with some climatological effluvia, in which family bickering over house willed to black sheep of family finds the way to love each other again. Was initially refreshing to read this sturdy but otherwise cookie-cutter family-squabble story ably told, although increasing ludicrousness of the speculative apparatus got in the way, and demonstrated a greater uncertainty abt how Buckell actually wanted to fit climate into the story—as constant, dangerous, but otherwise now Normalizaed background aspect of life for people in these circumstances, or as existential danger quite conclusively reconfiguring all arenas of life for these people? I think, as a Story, he wanted the first, and as a reality, he got the latter, to the detriment of the actual story.

"A Hundred Hundred Daisies," by Nancy Kress (2011): 7.5
- A fine story that doesn’t totally know what it wants to be or say outside of its premise—which I’ve increasingly come to see as okay; it’s a completely valid mode of mid-tier sf and there’s no use getting riled up one way or the other.

"The Netherlands Lives With Water," by Jim Shepard (2009): 7.25
- An unfortunate perfect storm of mundanity: the mainstream author doing genre who, as usual, skips over the interesting shit genre qua genre can do, and also just so happens to not do any of the nice things litfic can do in the process. The sexuality of the marriage reads like the worst of genre's attempt at Cool Directness; the marital and maternal problems are largely disconnected from the climatic drama; and the attempts at litfic narrative evasiveness and ambiguity are more confusing than intriguing. The story: two Dutch engineers deal with their own marital problems and nation's climate change vulnerabilities, until the dams eventually burst in both (literally and metaphorically). Bigger Takeaway? Maybe climate change is not (current) sf's ideal mode, which is a worrying trend for the genre (or it's current crop of writers). There are a host of conjectures for why this might be so. Some of them: it's too near future; the sf and sf tropes they're raised/weaned on weren't primed to deal with something like this; small-scale domestic impacts and scenes have never been sf's strong suit, and that is currently how most sf modes are trending in the characterological framing of their works (i.e. gonna focus on smaller/less "important" units [the family, the community, the "impacted"] rather than the old top-down takes [what's the president/Russia/UN doing?]).

“The Precedent,” by Sean McMullen (2010): 9.25
- Considering my reservations about the other entries in this collection so far, what works here is precisely its distance from the actual, most immediate conclusions we can reach regarding its subject. And strangely, that also allows it to “say” something most resonant, perhaps, even if, impressively, it’s threading the needle between allegory and gritty dystopic realism.

This is an excellent collection, depressing, but excellent. ( )

...Although there are some stories in this anthology that I didn't really do much for me, and one - That Creeping Sensation (2011) by Alan Dean Foster - that left me wondering how on earth the author managed to sell that heap of nonsense, most of the stories were at the very least entertaining. A few reached into the excellent category. Adams managed to gather a diverse set of stories and as such, the anthology is likely to keep most readers on board until the last pages. Both Bacigalupi in the introduction and Ramez Naam in the afterword mention how interlinked all these changes are. It is not just climate that changes but the entire world around us. If there is one thing this anthology succeeds in, it is showing the reader how complex an issue climate change really is. You may argue Adams' selection of stories of course, but looking at it from that angle, I consider it a job well done.

Full Random Comments review ( )