003: Humanity V. Circumstance

Professor David Kaiser, Louise Erdrich, Ling Ma, William Gibson, Ray Bradbury + quantum physics and our first Doodle Dispatch.

Eminent Dystopians

What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future but the present— taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary. —Neal Gaiman in the preface to the 1960 edition of Farenheit 411

When I was a teenager, the happy survival training of my Wyoming childhood began to reconstruct itself into something darker.

Minuteman missiles had been deployed in Wyoming since the mid-60s (to this day you can still see the fallout shelter signs on buildings in my hometown), so when “The Day After,” a tv series about a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, came out in 1983, we all took notice. I was sixteen when the U.S. deployed the newer MX “ Peacekeeper” missiles to Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne. And, I was about that age when I watched the film, Red Dawn, …