bamboo, beetles, gardening, and power balances
November 14, 2021 3:56 AM   Subscribe

"The first time I tried to regreen our town, I was sixteen. I got sentenced to 150 hours of community service..." "Choose Your Battleground" by Andrew Leon Hudson is a short, light, triumphant science fiction story about urban ecology. "A bee man came by a few months ago. I don’t like bees much, but I took some." "The Restoration" by Karen Heuler is a little longer and slower and more unsettling, as humans reckon with our discomfort with real ecological balance.
posted by brainwane (8 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
The way "The Restoration" flipped towards the end was well done and exactly as you said, unsettling.

The evolving genre of realistic climate change fiction is something I both can't stop myself from reading and then feeling immense guilt over my own lifestyle afterwards. I drive a car. I live in a city. I package my products in foam. I don't garden. I fly on occasion. I am the person rationalizing that their own contribution is so minimal that it doesn't make sense to make radical life changes.
posted by jellywerker at 4:39 AM on November 14, 2021 [4 favorites]


The way "The Restoration" flipped towards the end

Where was the flip? I didn't feel it.
posted by flabdablet at 5:23 AM on November 14, 2021


I assume jellywerker meant from nice "yay planting trees" to "we are now spreading things that can hurt people."

Brainwane I continue to enjoy all these stories you post. Love the punchiness of Battleground. The Restoration works fine as a moody story but I'm a little skeptical of its biology. I get itchy when stories make too much of a binary between human society and sustainable wilderness. Also could these future biologists really not think of a better way to control mammal populations than reintroducing ticks? Blech.
posted by Wretch729 at 5:52 AM on November 14, 2021 [1 favorite]


from nice "yay planting trees" to "we are now spreading things that can hurt people."

Ah! That makes sense. I just had it in my head from the get-go that restoring an ecology involves restoring a whole ecology, so I experienced that not so much as a flip as the clear destination the story had been driving straight toward from the first word.

Nice economical writing. A+ will seek same author out again.
posted by flabdablet at 6:21 AM on November 14, 2021 [1 favorite]


If it's ecologically discomfiting scifi you're after, definitely add Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home to the list.
posted by viborg at 10:18 AM on November 14, 2021


A fair playing field, was how it was being described. The world had gotten destroyed by the apex animal, and it was because the apex animal had been unchecked. So bring back the checks. Make it fair.
posted by doctornemo at 12:17 PM on November 14, 2021


So what was outside the Service cabin? Was it the first predators already loose?
posted by doctornemo at 1:34 PM on November 14, 2021


“The first time I tried to regreen our town, I was sixteen. I got sentenced to 150 hours of community service..."

Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:45 AM on November 15, 2021


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