politics | Karavansara

I discovered The Expanse during a book haul, back when Leviathan Wakes was all that existed of the series. After reading the books, I went on to be a fan of the TV show, and I like The Expanse RPG a lot.
The Expanse universe ticks all my boxes as a reader of science fiction, as a writer of science fiction, and as a player of science fiction games.

Now, the British online magazine Red Futures, is about to publish a special issue called The Expanse Expanded, edited by Jamie Woodcock, that will hit the shelves in the first week of July, but can be pre-ordered from the magazine’s website.

The Expanse Expanded is a collection of essays exploring the many different facets of the Expanse universe – and its real-world fandom – from a progressive and leftist perspective.
The volume includes a piece by me, called The Politics of the Anthropocene: Environment and Society in The Expanse, in which I finally am able to put to good use both my PhD in environmental sciences and my misspent youth as a reader and writer of science fiction.

As a writer and a long-time reader of fantasy I like to take a look sometimes at the state of the genre in the place where I live – in part because it’s a good strategy to keep an eye on the market, in part because this is, after all, my tribe, and I like to see what the tribesmen are doing.

Being irremediably old, I have no problem mentioning the fact I find the current over-excitement of a juvenile part of the public for what Ian McShane called Tits & Dragons somewhat tiring. When somebody pops up and tells me they like Robert E. Howard for the relentless violence, the explicit sex scenes and the obscenities peppering the dialogues, I despair about the state of the genre and for literacy in general.

But together with the fixation for “fantasy of hard knocks” – basically an alibi for writers to write to the minimum common denominator – there is a new trend that is not new but is positively scary: the derailment of fantasy on the part of politics.

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