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MaddAddamites and other futures July 26, 2015

As usual, I’ve been listening to audiobooks while photographing caterpillars and doing other repetitive tasks in the lab. Some of the first books I listened to this summer was Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy. They’re really good, although some of the characters have a questionable grasp of some aspects of biology. When that happens in fiction, I’m never quite sure whether it reflects on the character or on the author. Regardless, the trilogy is a very interesting vision of a post-climate-change, post-apocalyptic world.

That was the only problem with listening to those books here and now. When everyone’s saying next year will either be a normal year or even drier than this one, the last thing you want to be asking is “what if there are no more normal years?” So since then I’ve stuck to space-based science fiction or classic literature. I’m currently listening to War and Peace, because marching through the Russian winter with Napoleon is about as far away from dried-out Palo Verde as I can get.