SCIENCE FICTION
Alien invasions can take strange turns. In “Cold People,” a fleet of bossy visitors arrive and immediately give humankind an ultimatum: relocate to Antarctica in 30 days or be destroyed. After a month of madly rushing south, a new society is formed on the icy continent and, with that new society, a new sort of human as well. The scientists have developed a plan to rapidly evolve a breed of Homo antarcticus equipped to survive under the most extreme conditions. But in the struggle for survival our parahuman descendants might not all be on our side.
Terraforming a planet takes a long time and costs a lot of money, so it’s no surprise that the Verdance Corporation has a keen eye on its bottom line in refashioning Sask-E for human settlement, which means selling Oceanside lots to people looking for authentic Pleistocene real estate. “The Terraformers” is a book that takes a long view of this process, being made up of three main narrative sections with breaks of 700 to 900 years between them. The plot feels a bit like one of those build-a-civilization-fromscratch videogames, but Newitz uses it to address interesting questions on environmental stewardship, responsible capitalism and the definition of personhood.
Most of “Why Don’t You Love Me?” a serial graphic novel, is about as far from science fiction as you could imagine. A man and woman share a loveless train wreck of a marriage. Claire is a stay-at-home alcoholic and can’t even take care of herself much less the two kids. Mark works for a company that does web development, but he doesn’t understand anything about the job. In fact, he seems to think he’s really a barber …
Then there’s a global event that hits a restart button. Or causes a wrinkle in the fabric of the multiverse. And Mark slowly breaks out of a bed that’s shaped like a cocoon into a brand new life.
Paul B. Rainey’s cramped and cluttered visual style is the perfect complement to a strange domestic tale of social order breaking down.
Sophocles’ play “Antigone” has been adapted countless times over the past two-and-a-half millennia, being the archetypal tale of individual conscience versus public conformity to the law.
Veronica Roth, author of the popular Divergent series, has reimagined the old story once again, this time set in a future city that has narrowly survived some kind of global apocalypse. In order to maintain genetic stability, the frightened new world strictly controls the process of reproduction by disallowing natural procreation and forcing new children to take the form of resurrected clones made from the archived “ichor” (DNA) of deceased citizens. Roth finds a number of interesting connections between ancient Greek debates and issues in our own time.