Beacons: Stories for Our Not So Distant Future - Softcover

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9781851689699: Beacons: Stories for Our Not So Distant Future

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1851689699 ISBN 13: 9781851689699

Publisher: Oneworld Publications, 2013

Beacons throws down the gauntlet, challenging best-selling and award-winning authors to imagine where we, and out planet, might be headed and, in imagining, help us transform the way we look at our world and change things for the better. From Joanne Harris’ powerful vision of a near future where outside’ has become a thing of history to Nick Hayes’ beautifully illustrated tale of the bond between man and nature, Beacons sees the coming together of dystopian satire, speculative and historical fiction, metaphorical flights of fancy, quiet tragedy, and farcical comedy in stories that are as various as our possible futures. Provocative, encouraging, and deeply moving, Beacons represents the best of short story writing and collectively illuminates the immediacy of the ecological problems at hand.

All author royalties will go to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, one of the largest groups of people dedicated to action on climate change and limiting its impact on the world’s poorest people.

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About the Author:

Editor Gregory Norminton is a novelist, actor, playwright, and environmental activist. His short stories and dramatizations have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the U.K. All four of his novels have been published by Sceptre.

From Publishers Weekly:

This collection features short stories about climate change penned by a variety of Great Britain's writers specifically for this book and to raise money for the Stop Climate Change Chaos Coalition. The best pieces are the ones that play not only with the prescribed subject, but also with form, like Marek's "The Great Consumer," an amusing one act play where time travelers attempt to go back in time to assassinate the inventor of mass consumerism, and Miller's wonderful "What Is Left to See," that uses a futuristic "dayblog" filled with hash tags, acronyms and commentators to envision the destroyed city of Miami. Some of the work bogs down with the assigned theme, where character and plot become more dictated to, rather than the reverse, and inform the reader from within. Two other exceptional stories are Howitt's "The Weatherman" where an ex-radical must choose between pursuing his past anti-government agenda or selling out to the regime in order to save his family, and McCann's "Holiday in Iceland," set in the near future, follows a family choosing to modify its ecological footprint by altering their summer vacation: A simple act that serves as a great beacon of light in attempt to rescue their own planet. (Aug.)

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