Another interview with an author, Andrew Dana Hudson this time, about his new book. I don’t have much to add, especially since he was already in No.210 for the same book, but I had to include it here because I just loved his answers about scifi “as centering a particular theory of social change,” and fiction as a set of “seeing instruments.”
Often, we think of science fiction as any fiction set in the future, but I argue that it's more interesting and useful to think about science fiction as centering a particular theory of social change. Sci-fi is about science — about new discoveries and new technologies that result from the scientific process — and it imagines how the future will be made different by the impact of that knowledge and tech. In cli-ficlimate fiction, the core driver of social change isn’t science — it’s climate change. […]
I like to think of fiction as a set of “seeing instruments.” They can let us examine things more closely, examine things from far away, or at strange angles — all to grow our sense of the possible and the plausible, both good and bad. […]
We need more stories not just about the danger of climate change, but about the process we are using to address that danger — who the players are and how we set the terms of debate.