Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction By John Joseph Adams
Collected by the editor of the award-winning Lightspeed magazine, one of the first anthologies of climate fiction—a cutting-edge genre made popular by Margaret Atwood.
Is it the end of the world as we know it? Climate fiction (cli-fi) explores the world we live in now—and in the very near future—as the effects of global warming become more evident. Join bestselling, award-winning writers like Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Kim Stanley Robinson, Seanan McGuire, and many others at the brink of tomorrow. Loosed Upon the World is so believable, it’s frightening.
Contents
01 - Paolo Bacigalupi, Shooting the Apocalypse (2014 novelette, p1)
02 - Seanan McGuire, The Myth of Rain (2015 short story, p25)
03 - Toiya Kristen Finley, Outer Rims (2011 short story, p39)
04 - Karl Schroeder, Kheldyu (2014 novelette, p52)
05 - Jean-Louis Trudel, The Snows of Yesteryear (2014 novelette, p88)
06 - Nancy Kress, A Hundred Hundred Daisies (2011 short story, p111)
07 - Tobias S. Buckell, The Rainy Season (2012 short story, p129)
08 - Jim Shepard, The Netherlands Lives With Water (2009 short story, p143)
09 - Sean McMullen, The Precedent (2010 novelette, p172)
10 - Robert Silverberg, Hot Sky (1990 short story, p203)
11 - Alan Dean Foster, That Creeping Sensation (2011 short story, p229)
12 - Kim Stanley Robinson, Truth or Consequences (2015 short story, p240)
13 - Vandana Singh, Entanglement (2014 novella, p269)
14 - Angela Penrose, Staying Afloat (2013 short story, p323)
15 - Chris Bachelder, Eighth Wonder (2009 short story, p341)
16 - Gregory Benford, Eagle (2011 short story, p362)
17 - Nicole Feldringer, Outliers (2015 short story, p386)
18 - Jason Gurley, Quiet Town (2015 short story, p399)
19 - Charlie Jane Anders, The Day It All Ended (2014 short story, p407)
20 - Chen Quifan, The Smog Society (2015 translation of 2010 short story, p419)
21 - Craig DeLancey, Racing the Tide (2014 short story, p435)
22 - Sarah K. Castle, The Mutant Stag at Horn Creek (2012 novelette, p453)
23 - Cat Sparks, Hot Rods (2015 novelette, p487)
24 - Paolo Bacigalupi, The Tamarisk Hunter (2006 short story, p511)
25 - Tobias S. Buckell & Karl Schroeder, Mitigation (2008 novelette, p527)
26 - Margaret Atwood, Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet (2009 short story, p556)
Afterword - Ramez Naam, Science Scarier Than Fiction Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction
John Joseph Adams à 2 Review
The rich fled the places where the sun was too bright and the rain was too rare, and when the places they fled to dried up in turn, the rich fled farther, looking for some promised land that had managed to remain pristine while they were busy wrecking the world the rest of us had to live in.
Loosed Upon the World is a finely crafted collection of 26 short cli-fi/sci-fi stories about the effects of climate change told by some of my favorites (Seanan McGuire & Margaret Atwood!)
After watching a video about the Lake Mead water levels declining, I was reminded of this anthology sitting on my shelf, where it's been for many years. BECAUSE OF COURSE. I knew now was the time to jump in. I mean, climate change is a *big topic* currently, as it should be! The urge lead me to finally reading this & I'm glad I did!
Water thieves & droughts & floods & giant bugs & cross-country pipelines & reflective aerosols in the sky & consumerism & mutated animals!
In a shock to no one, Seanan McGuire's story was my favorite from the collection! Some others include: The Precedent by Sean McMullen, Entanglement by Vandana Singh, The Tamarisk Hunter by Paolo Bacigalupi & Mitigation by Tobias S. Buckell & Karl Schroeder. English Anthologies are typically a collection of good material surrounded by weaker brethren; this one is no different. Its better works have one thing in common: they are more than just a tale of climate catastrophe. Some of my favorites: The Netherlands Lives With Water, for its living, believable characters, and Shooting the Apocalypse, for capturing the spirit of the those that will survie in the bone-dry Southwest US. English This book is a collection of extremely readable, extremely compelling stories that imagine the immediate future and the possible effects of climate change on the world and its inhabitants. I kind of think that this anthology, or something like it, should be required reading for everyone on the planet. The best speculative fiction challenges us to escape the fog of denial. I'm not talking about Denial, as in Climate Change Denial, I'm talking about the everyday garden-variety denial that lets us avoid going to the doctor to have them check out that new mole, because if it is skin cancer we'd rather not know about it. These stories make you think about the future, and the possible consequences of our current, business as usual path. But not by preaching at you: by making you feel. By creating characters and situations you empathize with. You can picture yourself faced with these same challenges and dilemmas. And you wonder, you have to wonder, what you would (will?) do in similar situations. English An anthology that is relevant, scary, and unfortunately, in some cases, provides portraits of very possible scenarios of how our children’s children may be living. While this large collection will not persuade anyone to not drive over the bridge, it will further motivate those of us who follow the science.
My analogy of driving over the bridge came from discussion of climate change (or, as Margaret Atwood calls it, “The Everything Change”) with a friend. He told me that any time a climate change denier converses with him he tells them, “Oh, you would drive over the bridge.” They ask what he means and he tells them, “Say you and your family are driving down a country road, round a bend, and come upon a wooden bridge. Before the bridge is a large sign that notes that 98.9% of structural engineers declare that his bridge will collapse when the next car drives over it. “So, you would drive over the bridge then,” he repeats.
Like its topic and all-inclusiveness, the locales range from Siberia, the Pacific Northwest, the Gulf Coast, Greenlad, Southern California, the Midwest, the Arctic, the Netherlands, the Himalayas, and other place to various states of character’s mindsets. Most of the stories are strong, and while some are short on characterization, the science seems very plausible.
The story that impacted me the most was “Entanglement” by Vandana Singh. It is really a set of interlocking stories: a lone woman scientist in the Arctic who puts herself in jeopardy ; a woman in the Amazon who receives help to get the message across; a young lower cast teen boy in India gains insight on his purpose in life; an older woman in Texas who shakes off the old thinking of her dead husband, and a young man in the Himalayas seeking guidance about his and the world’s malaise.
In addition to the mass of the world’s population wearing blinders, the other villain is big business as in Seanan McGuire’s “The Myth of Rain”, Toiya Kristen Finley’s Outer Rims, Jean-Louis Trudel’s “The Snows of Yesteryear”, Nancy Kress’s “A Hundred Hundred Daises”, and excerpts from Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent everything change novels.
Bottom line: an intriguing, thought-provoking, and disturbing collection of epitaph’s for a disappearing way of life on Earth.
English This collection did ideas right. Authors had a lot of great ideas. Authors had, however, terrible execution. I read about characters I didn't care for. I read rushed or broken arcs and plots. I read paragraphs that somehow made it through the copy editor despite grammatical and structural problems. The last hundred pages, combined with The Eight Wonder were the best pieces in the collection. But they why—why for God's sake—would you leave the best for last? I had to trawl my body through this brick of a book for a tale or two I could read in a Clarkesworld anthology at the beginning. Worldbuilding felt incomplete, characters felt like mouthpieces, scenes felt broken. I am surprised John Joseph Adams and Atwood got anywhere close to this stuff. Bleh. English
This was a great read. Some of the stories did drag a bit, but for the most part the short stories were full of intrigue. This anthology features many prominent fiction writers, but in my opinion the stories by the lesser known authors were remarkable as well. Reading anthologies like this one is a great way to find out about authors writing this type of speculative fiction. I have read Wastelands, another anthology edited by John Joseph Adams; Wastelands is less focused on climate-related the end is nigh scenarios, and concentrates on apocalyptic situations brought on by more varied catalysts. Though each short story in this anthology is a work of climate fiction, the theme is not belabored; each story introduces a fresh perspective on the catastrophes induced by mankind's carbon-spewing ways. Each story incorporates a non-fiction element, connecting each plot in one way or another to the reality we live in. With topics ranging from flooding and drought, to cross-country pipelines and radioactive animals, each short story elicits a genuine emotional response from the reader. No matter who you are, where you live, or how much money you have, climate change is an indiscriminate force indifferent to the continued well-being of the human population. A quote from Margaret Atwood's short story Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet succinctly epitomizes this anthology: Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could fly.
English 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.
English ...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 English As an avid reader of climate fiction (cli-fi), I was very much looking forward to the release of Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction. I’m pleased to report that this anthology definitely met and exceeded my expectations.
This volume brings together an impressive collection of authors with a wide range of writing styles and a variety of takes on the broadly-defined theme. As with almost any anthology, there are hits and misses. There were a few stories I’d read before, one of which is honestly not among my favorites and wasn’t what I have in mind when I think of climate fiction. However, even the “misses” were still decent works of fiction that only suffered in comparison to the groundbreaking work in the rest of the anthology.
I was glad to see contributions by Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Paolo Bacigalupi. These three big names were already familiar to me and are essential reading for the emerging cli-fi genre. Robinson’s piece was an excerpt from his Science in the Capital Trilogy. I had read the trilogy already, so this chapter was nothing new to me. But I was glad to see it here because it will point more people in the direction of this important and underappreciated series. I was also glad to see new (or at least new to me) works by Atwood and Bacigalupi, both of whom have crafted (and continue to craft!) excellent stories that include prominent climate change components.
My favorite part of this anthology was the wide variety of writing styles and content choices. If I had to pick one story that stood out, though, I’d go with “The Precedent” by Sean McMullen. This story’s premise is so dark and apocalyptic that it could have gone horribly wrong in the hands of a lesser author. However, for me, the vivid descriptions and rich characterization give this story a very real feel in spite of the incredibly stark plot and setting. This story speaks powerfully to the horrors of the climate crisis, challenge us to reflect on those horrors and our involvement in them without shoving any particular solution down our throats.
I would recommend this book both to readers who are looking for good cli-fi and to readers who are looking for good fiction in general. From now on, this will be the anthology that I recommend to people who are looking for an introduction to climate fiction. English As with so many anthologies, this was very much a mixed bag. I think it particularly suffered because the stories within were all reprints, so there was very little cohesion between them. It was obvious when a story had been written for a non-climate-focused project, because the authors felt the need to explain to us how, exactly, climate change was bad- not exactly necessary in the context of this anthology, because it is safe to assume that anyone who has picked up something described as an anthology of climate fiction is already rather aware.
There were a few standout stories:
- Shooting the Apocalypse by Paolo Bacigalupi: Bacigalupi had two stories here, and both were among the collection's strongest, but I think I like this one better; it had a lot of fascinating layers going on and managed to make climate disaster a powerful part of the plot while still telling a story about other conflicts. I also quite liked the way social media was integrated into the worldbuilding, which turned out to be a common theme across many of these stories.
- A Hundred Hundred Daisies by Nancy Kress: A story with some serious heart to it, which really focused on the difficulty of maintaining relationships under the strain of slowly-unfolding disaster. It asks the question how will we explain this to future children? and that question sticks with you.
- Enganglement by Vandana Singh: While the prose of this story felt weak, it was thematically very strong and had a perspective that resonated with me. It's a very clever way to tell a story about the rich interconnectivity of ecology through a human lens.
- Staying Afloat by Angela Penrose: In a practical sense, I am a big advocate of using ancestral knowledge to solve modern ecological problems, and this story both presented that idea cleverly and was a satisfying, tidy bit of storytelling.
- The Mutant Stag at Horn Creek by Sarah K. Castle: Definitely my favorite of the collection, even if its presentation of natural selection's effects felt rather exaggerated. Great character voice and sense of place, and successfully layered a story of climate impacts over interpersonal and societal critiques. Like Shooting the Apocalypse, there's a lot of stuff here about how social media might impact us in the future, but it's handled a bit more sympathetically, treated more like a coping mechanism than fiddling while Rome burns. I also loved the way the world of this story has become foreign in a very slow, inexorable way - that makes the changes all the more horrifying.
A couple I particularly disliked:
- The Precedent by Sean McMullen: Aside from an awful lot of history navel-gazing, this story felt like it was rebuking younger generations for resenting the wasteful choices of older generations. Comparing 'climate victims' to the Salem Witch Trials is not a good look.
- Hot Sky by Robert Silverberg: So, for this story to make sense, you have to believe that in a severe global warming situation where freshwater is extremely limited, San Francisco is somehow still around and powerful, and basically choose to ignore that South America exists, because apparently an iceberg valued for the fresh water it contains can float all the way north from Antarctica to California before there's any competition over it. It just felt profoundly sloppy.
- That Creeping Sensation by Alan Dean Foster: Contained the following actual segue into a historical info-dump:
As she and the corporal worked their way through the swarm, she reflected on the unexpected turn of history.
Seriously?
The rest were... largely mediocre. There were several which I felt could have been poignant if positioned differently in the anthology - Quiet Town by Jason Gurley is a small, straightforward portrait of the moment the seas rise too far for one town, but it just sort of vanishes between longer, more complicated stories. I am, in general, not impressed with John Joseph Adams' editing here. Personally, my takeaway was that I really, really need to read some of Bacigalupi's novels - and thankfully, I have a copy of The Water Knife on my shelf already. English