I’m pleased to share a few of the books to cross our desks over the past month, a mix of nonfiction and poetry. Enjoy!
Science Fiction Ecologies: Worldmaking with Butler, Le Guin, and Merril
By Shelley Streeby
Science Fiction Ecologies traces how Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Judith Merril—three generations of groundbreaking feminist science fiction writers—used ecological imagination and rigorous memory-work to rethink environments, histories, and possible futures. Shelley Streeby mines their expansive personal archives of letters, journals, notebooks, annotated clippings, and other everyday materials to show how each writer documented environmental news, social movements, colonial and imperial legacies, and the accelerating militarism of the late twentieth century. This archival labor, Streeby argues, was not ancillary but central to their worldmaking: a form of “histofuturist” practice that linked creative speculation to the preservation and reimagining of knowledge.
Against a backdrop of shrinking public library budgets, intensifying weapons development, and the rise of privatization politics, Butler, Le Guin, and Merril fought for the survival of libraries and the democratic circulation of ideas. Their activism, along with their contributions to popular science-fiction culture and their public interventions, reveals how they imagined libraries, archives, and other knowledge spaces as living ecologies shaped by power, identity, and access.
Under One Canopy: Environmental Ethics and the Tree of Life
By Michael Caterino
Modern human society has become ever more isolated from its natural origins, obscuring our kinship with the rest of Earth’s biodiversity. Peeling away just a few of these layers reveals a world rich in connections, ecological and evolutionary, that tether us to this deeper history. Every cell in our bodies and every impulse we experience testify to our fundamental unity with all other life on Earth.
Human exceptionalism has narrowed our view of environmental issues like climate change and loss of biodiversity as threats primarily to our own livelihoods, denying any moral responsibility toward our evolutionary brethren. Yet, the recognition of our inherent biology should prompt deep reflection on the ethical status of other species. As our sense of kinship grows, our sense of obligation should expand accordingly.
Under One Canopy challenges readers to confront their biological selves. It argues that acknowledging our kinship with non-human lives demands a radical reimagining of our responsibilities as a society, one that holds a reverence for life as a bedrock value. Humanity must figure out how to prioritize the sustainability of the Earth’s living systems, for our own descendants and for those of our extended evolutionary family.
Go Forth: Lose Yourself into Life
By Gabrielle Myers
Go Forth calls on the contemporary woman’s knowledge of how to craft a life apart from traditionally prescribed roles and suggests how we might etch new narratives to fit our awakening self-possession and determination. Our speaker flees to a small town in the Sierra Nevada to heal after ending a turbulent relationship spiked with physical violence and verbal abuse. Immersing herself in wildlands re-emerging after a devastating fire, she reassembles her own fragmented identity and learns how to embrace the physical world around her and accept a limitless way of processing her story.
Lake: Love Poems
By Jeff Fearnside
Lake: Love Poems is a book of profound witness that never loses its lyric core. Rooted strongly in the concept of place, with a particular focus on environmental themes, its verses move from post-Soviet Central Asia, where author Jeff Fearnside lived for four years, to Oregon, his home for the past thirteen years, through landscapes that complicate easy sentiment, through the fragile ecotones of memory and belonging, everything connected by the thread of his courtship with and marriage to his life partner.
John is an award-winning author of stories, novels and plays. He is author of THE STANDING DEAD, coming in 2027. He is also author of the novels The Tourist Trail and Where Oceans Hide Their Dead and co-author of the mystery Devils Island. He is editor of Writing for Animals (also now a writing program). More at JohnYunker.com.