Nature Narratives in Fiction & Photography
Cockatoos outside echoed my screams when I woke to news that the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Roe vs. Wade. More than half of Americans believe abortion should be legal, but the 2016 presidential election proved that popular majority is no guarantee of political outcomes. Once again, well-funded reactionary agendas corrupted the system, this time... Continue Reading →
Some stories are like favorite family vacation spots. They promise a certain kind of experience and, even though you've done it before, it doesn't diminish your enjoyment. On the contrary, the good-time guarantee is what keeps you coming back. The Netflix original series The Rain is a summer-vacation kind of story, familiar narrative territory with... Continue Reading →
I knew something was wrong when I woke to the television muttering downstairs. My parents rarely watched anything other than evening news and weather. If they’d turned it on at nine a.m. on a Tuesday, it could only mean trouble. In trepidation I crept downstairs and into the living room. Mom sat in front of the... Continue Reading →
1984 is often regarded as the original dystopia, but Orwell himself acknowledged that the novel was somewhat derivative. His inspiration? Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We, evolutionary ancestor of the totalitarian sci-fi stories so popular today. It’s easy to dismiss the book as cliched until one places it on the continuum of speculative fiction and remembers that... Continue Reading →
Climate fiction, like the global average temperature, is on the rise. If you haven't heard of this genre, you're probably not the first. Themes of climate change and ecological disaster have appeared in contemporary fiction since the mid-20th century, but the concept of these as an independent genre is relatively new. The term climate fiction... Continue Reading →
After several weeks of compulsive reading, I just finished the Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy. Few series are engrossing enough to compel me to read all of them in succession, but this one joins The Warlord Chronicles and The Hunger Games trilogies on my short list of exceptions. Even if dystopian fiction isn't your thing, it's... Continue Reading →
Wild Type 