Friday, October 16, 2015

Over at io9, K. Tempest Bradford gives a nice 'shout-out' to the 'cli-fi' genre today

Over at io9, K. Tempest Bradford gives a nice 'shout-out' to the 'cli-fi' genre in her weekly review this week of new genre short stories. She writes:
 
Egg Island by Karen Heuler via Clarkesworld Magazine is one of the first stories I’ve read that fits into the ''Cli-Fi'' genre (of stories that are about climate change and global warming themes), and also one of the very few stories I’ve seen with a hopeful tone about our future. I don’t know if I am as positive about plastic’s role in our future as the author is, but at least she’s injecting some hope into the conversation.

K. Tempest Bradford is a speculative fiction author, media critic, issuer of the Tempest Challenge. Follow her on Twitter, G+, Tumblr, or her blog.

RE:
 

Egg Island by Karen Heuler | Clarkesworld Magazine

Audra Donchell’s right arm was 3D-printed; she’d lost the original in a scooter crash when she was a teenager. That was years ago; she had a number of arms she could take off and put on; she could remodel them and change their color. A different color for every day.

All the parts worked smoothly; all she had to do was think—or not think, simply imagine—and her arm moved and bent, her fingers picked and pinched and tapped. There was a certain distance to it, but she had finally adapted to the slight sensation of objectivity that had been her original experience with it. The other great thing about her 3D arm was that it could hold heavy objects, like her suitcase, for longer times than her other, natural, arm could.

Carrying her case effortlessly, she took the supertube to the heliport, then took the copter to the helipad that used to be an oil platform. There was a party there—teenagers, how tiresome—so she took a glider to Stepoff Point, the last bit of land before the ocean.

Her destination was a small spot on the planet where the natural evolution of plastic was taking place. She was interested in plastics and she was interested in this development; she thought (as many did) that plastics had in many ways shaped the present and would save the future. She was nearing thirty and it was time to think of how she could contribute to life; she might get a clue from this visit.
T

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