Climatic - A Climate and Genetic Engineering Science Fiction Novel

Climatic - A Climate and Genetic Engineering Science Fiction Novel
Author: Blade Cort
Publisher: Blade Cort
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2024-02-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

In the restless heart of Austin, Texas, where suffocating heat darkly complements the stifling societal pressures of 2034, Rose Rulapaugh—besieged by life's harsh realities—struggles to find her place. Shattered dreams line her path: a high school pregnancy ending in tragedy and a promising education never pursued. Jobless, languishing, and living in the family's rented duplex the last five years, the burdens are multiplying. Her mom's medical condition is deteriorating, and her younger brother Jack is tripping down the father's path of irresponsibility. A hurricane sets off local tornados, destroying the duplex and swamping Austin with millions of coastal immigrants. Rose is forced to quickly find shelter for her and her dog. By a stroke of luck, she encounters Tyren, a genetic engineering postdoc student working a secret project. Tyren provides lodging in his converted garage while promising to help Rose achieve her dream of genetically resurrecting an ancient Shasta Ground Sloth. Rose's native skepticism is on high alert. Nothing could be that easy. She wonders if Tyren's generosity is from the heart, or if he's expecting 'recompense' that she's unable to provide given her difficult past and restrictive reproductive laws. As she expects, every silver lining has its clouds. Dr. Amy Lee, Tyren's boss, offers her a no-questions-asked job at a genetics company. She then chastises Rose for exposing critical projects and potentially releasing virulent pathogens. And, despite Rose's best efforts to avoid it, she and Tyren might be getting closer. Too close. Can Rose find meaning and purpose as she navigates her existential future in a city bursting at the seams from global warming? Will she be forced to choose between succumbing to life's relentless grind or embarking on a transformative quest for personal identity, agency, and even redemption?

The Quiet War

The Quiet War
Author: Paul Mcauley
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2009-12-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616141166

Twenty-third century Earth, ravaged by climate change, looks backwards to the holy ideal of a pre-industrial Eden. Political power has been grabbed by a few powerful families and their green saints. Millions of people are imprisoned in teeming cities; millions more labour on Pharaonic projects to rebuild ruined ecosystems. On the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Outers, descendants of refugees from Earth's repressive regimes, have constructed a wild variety of self-sufficient cities and settlements: scientific utopias crammed with exuberant creations of the genetic arts; the last outposts of every kind of democratic tradition. The fragile detente between the Outer cities and the dynasties of Earth is threatened by the ambitions of the rising generation of Outers, who want to break free of their cosy, inward-looking pocket paradises, colonise the rest of the Solar System, and drive human evolution in a hundred new directions. On Earth, many demand pre-emptive action against the Outers before it's too late; others want to exploit the talents of their scientists and gene wizards. Amid campaigns for peace and reconciliation, political machinations, crude displays of military might, and espionage by cunningly wrought agents, the two branches of humanity edge towards war...

Glowing Bunnies!?

Glowing Bunnies!?
Author: Jeff Campbell
Publisher: Lerner + ORM
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2022-05-03
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 172845607X

Our brave new world is here. With modern genetic technologies, science fiction's "what if?" has become the scientist's "why not?" Bioengineering has the potential to remake animals in almost any way we can imagine, and it's being used to solve a range of urgent global problems, including climate change, species extinctions, the destruction of natural habitats, and human health issues. But just because we can do all these things, does that mean we should? In the pages of Glowing Bunnies!? you will encounter some of the strange and wonderful genetically modified animals of tomorrow. Learn why scientists are going to such lengths to mess with genes and what the ethical and health-related consequences might be. By understanding both the science and the stakes, you too can judge the potential of this budding science to save—or ruin—the world. Presented as a compendium of existing and proposed creatures, this book describes the animals being created, the scientific techniques involved, and each animal's purpose. Additionally, it addresses bioethics, unintended consequences, and animal welfare.

Falter

Falter
Author: Bill McKibben
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2019-04-16
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1250178274

Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience. Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben’s experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We’re at a bleak moment in human history -- and we’ll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away. Falter is a powerful and sobering call to arms, to save not only our planet but also our humanity.

Climate and Literature

Climate and Literature
Author: Adeline Johns-Putra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110852639X

Leading scholars examine the history of climate and literature. Essays analyse this history in terms of the contrasts between literary and climatological time, and between literal and literary atmosphere, before addressing textual representations of climate in seasons poetry, classical Greek literature, medieval Icelandic and Greenlandic sagas, and Shakespearean theatre. Beyond this, the effect of Enlightenment understandings of climate on literature are explored in Romantic poetry, North American settler literature, the novels of empire, Victorian and modernist fiction, science fiction, and Nordic noir or crime fiction. Finally, the volume addresses recent literary framings of climate in the Anthropocene, charting the rise of the climate change novel, the spectre of extinction in the contemporary cultural imagination, and the relationship between climate criticism and nuclear criticism. Together, the essays in this volume outline the discursive dimensions of climate. Climate is as old as human civilisation, as old as all attempts to apprehend and describe patterns in the weather. Because climate is weather documented, it necessarily possesses an intimate relationship with language, and through language, to literature. This volume challenges the idea that climate belongs to the realm of science and is separate from literature and the realm of the imagination.

State of Fear

State of Fear
Author: Michael Crichton
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 817
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 006175272X

New York Times bestselling author Michael Crichton delivers another action-packed techo-thriller in State of Fear. When a group of eco-terrorists engage in a global conspiracy to generate weather-related natural disasters, its up to environmental lawyer Peter Evans and his team to uncover the subterfuge. From Tokyo to Los Angeles, from Antarctica to the Solomon Islands, Michael Crichton mixes cutting edge science and action-packed adventure, leading readers on an edge-of-your-seat ride while offering up a thought-provoking commentary on the issue of global warming. A deftly-crafted novel, in true Crichton style, State of Fear is an exciting, stunning tale that not only entertains and educates, but will make you think.

Heavy Weather

Heavy Weather
Author: Bruce Sterling
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504063074

A near-future eco-thriller from the bestselling author of Schismatrix Plus and The Difference Engine. The Storm Troupers are a group of weather hackers who roam the plains of Texas and Oklahoma, hopped up on adrenaline and technology. Utilizing virtual reality, flying robots, and all-terrain vehicles, they collect data on the extreme storms ravaging an America decimated by climate change. But even their visionary leader can’t predict the danger on the horizon when a volatile new member joins their ranks and faces a trial by fire: a massive tornado unlike any the world has seen before. “A remarkable and individual sharpness of vision . . . Sterling hacks the future, and an elegant hack it is.” —Locus “Lucid and tremendously entertaining. Sterling shows once more his skills in storytelling and technospeak. A cyberpunk winner.” —Kirkus Reviews “So believable are the speculations that . . . one becomes convinced that the world must and will develop into what Sterling has predicted.” —Science Fiction Age “A very exciting coming-of-age story in a wild future America . . . What’s it got? Cyberpunk attitude, genuine humor, nanotechnology, minimal sex but some cool medications and very big weather systems.” —SFReviews.net “Brilliant . . . Fascinating . . . Exciting . . . A full complement of thrills.” —The New York Review of Science Fiction

Six Degrees

Six Degrees
Author: Mark Lynas
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2008
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9781426202131

In astonishing and unflinching detail, a noted science journalist explains how Earth's climate will be impacted with every degree of increase in global warming--and what can be done about it now.

Stand on Zanzibar

Stand on Zanzibar
Author: John Brunner
Publisher: Orb Books
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2011-08-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429978848

The brilliant 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, now included with a foreword by Bruce Sterling Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically---it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him. These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of now, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction

Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction
Author: P. L. Thomas
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2013-09-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9462093806

Why did Kurt Vonnegut shun being labeled a writer of science fiction (SF)? How did Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin find themselves in a public argument about the nature of SF? This volume explores the broad category of SF as a genre, as one that challenges readers, viewers, teachers, and scholars, and then as one that is often itself challenged (as the authors in the collection do). SF, this volume acknowledges, is an enduring argument. The collected chapters include work from teachers, scholars, artists, and a wide range of SF fans, offering a powerful and unique blend of voices to scholarship about SF as well as examinations of the place for SF in the classroom. Among the chapters, discussions focus on SF within debates for and against SF, the history of SF, the tensions related to SF and other genres, the relationship between SF and science, SF novels, SF short fiction, SF film and visual forms (including TV), SF young adult fiction, SF comic books and graphic novels, and the place of SF in contemporary public discourse. The unifying thread running through the volume, as with the series, is the role of critical literacy and pedagogy, and how SF informs both as essential elements of liberatory and democratic education.