Sam Reader is a writer and conventions editor for
The Geek Initiative. He also writes literary criticism and reviews at
strangelibrary.com. At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog he tagged "
six science fiction novels about ecological disasters and environments gone mad," including:
Wonderblood, by Julia Whicker
An unexplained disaster in Kansas released “wonderblood” into the soil, causing mass destruction, disease, and death. In the years since, humanity has built itself a kingdom centered around the rocket towers of Cape Canaveral and perverted the studies of science into a weird form of religion, punishing actual science and medicine as a form of heresy and depending on astrology, religion, and the totemic worship of heretics’ shrunken heads. The world is thrown into an uproar by the arrival of Aurora, a young woman who gets caught in the struggle between a traveling carnival owned by a prophecy-obsessed megalomaniac and the kingdom’s chief advisor, just as mysterious lights appear in the sky. Whicker captures a tone somewhere between dark fairy tale and grotesque new weird fantasy, setting her violent, apocalyptic science-fantasy in a grotesque, fully-realized setting augmented by equally surreal illustrations, creating a strange and hopefully timeless work of climate apocalypse fiction.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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