nalo hopkinson falling in love with hominids

A small-town California girl loaded with student debt, the only one of twelve college-bound students in a high school class of eighty to go east of Colorado, her best option on graduation is to “come back and work at the local utility” (9). The Circle takes the travails of the “newbie,” Mae, as its center.

But the books that embrace rather than evade their status as science fiction or fantasy are the ones able to imagine the resistance and change that Le Guin invokes.ĭave Eggers’s The Circle recounts the rise and triumph of a corporation that fulfills the aspirations of Google and Apple to an eternally “cutting-edge” hipness and electronic omniscience. Among the books considered here, some come to us as “literary fiction” others are marked as belonging to another, historically denigrated, form, “science fiction” or “fantasy.” This could be a distinction without a difference: two are near-future dystopian novels about corporate capitalism in the United States (both by well-established white authors) two are collections of near-future short stories that set out to critique the human powers that structure our world (written by both established and new voices, primarily writers of color). Le Guin is undoubtedly right about resistance in the “real” world, but in reading, only some books offer a call to resistance and the possibilities of a new reality.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

Nalo hopkinson falling in love with hominids