John Michael Greer's New 'Cli Fi' Novel ''Star’s Reach'' Goes Deep Into the Future of Climate Change

Brian Kaller, reviewing the cli fi novel ''Star’s Reach'' starts off wise-cracking: "Because at 160,000 years, the party is just getting started." =============================== The review is titled "John Michael Greer's Novel: Back to Basics Future" and it starts off like this: ''Just for a moment, picture the future. Not your future - not this year’s harvest or your daughter’s graduation -- but The Future. You remember The Future; you’ve been seeing it all your life. If you were a teenager in the 1990s you remember the flying cars and giant holograms of 'Back to the Future II', set in the impossibly distant 2015. If you were a kid in the 1960s you probably remember the talking robots and interstellar travel of 'Lost in Space', set in the faraway 1990s. Similar-looking sci-fi fantasies date back to the 1800s, always looking about the same, and always just a few decades away from whenever Now was.'' ========================= THE REVIEW GOES ON: ''What we haven’t seen enough are stories that show a realistic future between these extremes. The coming decades will see many problems, of course – from global resources running thin to stranger weather – but they are likely to unfold over generations, and from day to day, life will go on. How and where it goes on is the really interesting question, one that popular culture has rarely considered. Now some authors are starting to explore the storytelling potential of such a future, most recently John Michael Greer in his new novel ''Star’s Reach''. His blog The Archdruid Report and his several non-fiction books have carved out an unusual but much-needed niche, discussing the ways that fossil fuel decline would affect our economy, politics, transportation, food supply and even religious attitudes. His novel Star’s Reach, however, uses his theories to paint a vivid picture of a much-changed future America. It is not, however, a world recovering from a sudden apocalypse, or one without any technological knowledge; rather, it’s a world without our vast reservoirs of cheap energy. =====================Most science fiction assumes that the world runs on technology, which - barring some apocalypse - will grow more advanced over time. =============[THIS BLOG EDITOR'S NOTE: But this novel is not sci fi, it is front and center part of a new genre dubbed cli fi.] ============== THE REVIEWER ADDS: ''One of the pleasures of ''Star’s Reach'', as with any futuristic [''cli fi''] novel that looks back, is in glimpsing the familiar in a strange world. ''Star’s Reach .......remains an entertaining read, though, and a thoughtful speculation of what our descendants might see," the review concludes. FULL COPYRIGHTED TEXT HERE: =======================================================http://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-and-environment/john-michael-greers-novel-zbcz1409.aspx#axzz3ENIkFnQp