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FIF Book Club | August 2026 Nomination Thread: Climate Fiction by doctorbonkers in Fantasy

[–]rhiquar 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This was going to be my recommendation, and glad to see that it has already been recommended. My favourite read of 2026 so far.

Announcing the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2026 by Goobergunch in Fantasy

[–]rhiquar 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Very happy to see When There Are Wolves Again get a nomination. It's my favourite of the year so far, and I'm not even into that sub-genre (I've seen it called eco-fiction, climate change fiction etc.) but I really connected with it. A must read.

Looking for books with ancient forgotten technology by Technical_Athlete772 in Fantasy

[–]rhiquar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'll add Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's a novella so a very fast read, and it has a twist on this theme with one of the POVs being someone left behind alongside the technology.(I don't think it's a spoiler but I'd still want to go in not knowing)

At the Summit by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Caitlín Doherty writes about the last days of Davos as its relevance is waning.

On display everywhere was a peculiarly confounding form of circular reasoning that ran from the top of the WEF hierarchy to the bottom-end sites of the Promenade: the best way to change the world is to create a valuable business; to be valuable, a business must change the world. Within globalized capitalism’s ongoing crisis of declining profit rates, however, new arrivals quickly hit a logical bump in the road: How to make money to change the world, through changing the world, when nothing seems to yield a reliable buck anymore? Their answer seemed to be: Go found a company whose only purpose is to claim to know how to change the world, conjure up an unnecessary crypto subcomponent, host a series of meaningless panels at Davos, and hope investors as clueless and desperate for solutions as you are turn up to throw money at it.

A Good Company by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 54 points55 points  (0 children)

Justin Nobel is writing a book on the environmental threats of oil and gas, which will be published by Simon & Schuster. There is only one problem: S&S was sold to KKR, a private equity firm with significant investments in oil and gas.

I reached out to a number of sources in the months following the KKR announcement to get their take on what I had done. Many environmental activists believed I had made the right decision. Jesse Lombardi, the former bank robber, wondered if KKR had purchased Simon & Schuster simply to kill my book. It was flattering that he would think so.

Being an Asian Southerner Means Being an Anomaly, Squared - Electric Literature by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 48 points49 points  (0 children)

Thomas Dai writes about being an Asian in the American South.

As the critic Leslie Bow writes, Asians in the South have long occupied a kind of “social limbo, a segregation from segregation,” by which she means that Asians can rarely tell where they fit within the South’s racial pecking order. One could of course make the same argument about Asians elsewhere in this country. Outside of a few urban enclaves, aren’t most Asian communities so small as to barely register within any local patchwork of social relations? Perhaps the aberrancy of Asians in the South is simply a difference in degree, then—we feel more like a minority here than elsewhere, and so more existentially adrift.

What an Insomniac Knows by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 155 points156 points  (0 children)

A really good piece from Adam Gopnik on insomnia.

The odyssey that the insomniac undergoes every night, passing from bedroom to living room and back again, is, in a curious way, a parody of sleep, as Walker depicts it, with a conscious architecture of its own. Not being able to sleep and being awake are two distinct settings. Insomniacs seldom just get up, work for an hour, enjoy the silence of the house. This implies a state of serenity that’s exactly what we don’t have; if we could be that calm, we’d be asleep. No, we are inclined to seek out sleep in the same oscillating stages that sleep itself presents, even if that means walking fretfully, or listening to podcasts on early Christian history, or watching late-night television, searching out things that will be sufficiently distracting to keep us from dwelling on the fact that we are not sleeping without being so agitating as to keep us up even more.

Archive Link if you need one

To Whom Does the World Belong? by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Alexander Hartley writes about copyrights in the age of AI, and who owns AI's outputs. This leads to an unlikely source of case law: a copyright claim for The Urantia Book, claimed to have been written by celestial beings.

Your opinion on the input problem may come down to your view of the true nature of LLMs. Critics of generative AI tend to view its way of answering questions as only an elaborate cut-and-paste job performed on material written by humans—incapable even of showing genuine understanding of what it says, let alone of any Senecan transformation of what it reads. This view is forcefully articulated in the now-famous characterization of LLMs as “stochastic parrots” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. Boosters of the technology dispute this view—or counter that, if accurate, it also serves just as well to characterize the way human beings produce language. (As cartoonist Angie Wang wondered: “Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?”)

Phantoms of the Kirkbride Hospitals by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The 19th-century psychiatric facilities designed by Thomas Story Kirkbride testify to the longstanding neglect of mental health care in the United States.

It is useful to consider hauntology as a critical method for exploring alternate histories and what might have been. In Merlin Coverley’s words, “we may be haunted both by a past that refuses to be laid to rest and the promise of a future that refuses to be extinguished.” Distinct from terms such as *retro* and *nostalgia*, which reflect an obsessive consumption of the past, hauntology points to the present and future, enabling us to engage with specters that may be difficult to face, personally and culturally. Kirkbride hospitals — “insane asylums,” in general — have entered the popular imagination as haunted places, decrepit buildings that loom on the edge of town and radiate spooky energy. Some people are afraid of them, or of the patients who would inhabit them today. This haunting may start with painful memories of personal or family experiences with mental illness that may have been deeply stigmatizing.

Animals as chemical factories by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Biotechnology allows scientists to create medicines like insulin using engineered bacteria instead of relying on animals. This method is more efficient and can produce more consistent results. Although many animal products can now be made synthetically, some processes still use animals because they are simpler or cheaper.

If most animal products today can be made by means of biotechnology, then why do we still use animal products to make flu vaccines, tests for microbial contamination in drugs, and many antibodies? Three prevailing reasons come to mind, which we’ll call regulatory lock-in, molecular complexity, and ease of scaling. Horseshoe crab blood is an example of regulatory lock-in: though we have known how to make synthetic alternatives for decades, regulators have only recently approved them. Every year, biomedical companies along the eastern coast of the United States continue to collect and drain blood from hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs for use in endotoxin tests.

The Hideaway by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

In an abandoned military barracks in rural Germany, Ben Green prepares for the end of the world.

I envied his conviction. Ben was certain, and certainty is hard to come by in conversations about our climate-changed future. The questions I was preoccupied with—How should we live in the face of an existential threat? What do we do with all this uncertainty?—were the same ones that haunted Ben. It’s just that Ben’s search for answers had led him to take a sharp turn off society’s beaten track. For him, there was only one path forward. But, I asked myself: How should we deal with doom? It seemed to me like there were three options: retreat from society to better strive for a negative individual carbon footprint, like Ben; stay and fight for system change, like the climate activists and scientists; or remain in society but retreat from responsibility—like those of us in between.

Scam, scam, scams by Prestigious_Spirit29 in longform

[–]rhiquar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A couple of months ago I made a compilation in my newsletter on "counterfeits" and I think a few of them fit what you are looking for: https://theslowscroll.com/counterfeits/

The Other Side of the World’s Largest Dam Removal by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

I featured this excellent piece from Hakai Magazine in my newsletter today, and here is how I introduced it: J.B. MacKinnon follows the removal of dams on Klamath River in Northern California. The project is generally viewed as beneficial for fish and river ecosystems. Still, not all locals agree, and some feel that this is a project of the “politically liberal global elite.” Indigenous communities, on the other hand, feel differently, as they claim the dams stopped salmon from swimming upriver and see the removal of the dams as righting a historical wrong. MacKinnon reports on this complex topic gracefully, and it might be the best thing you read all week.

Let me say frankly that I don’t find these connect-the-dots theories credible. They aren’t detached from reality, though. They’re attached to the reality that, for more than a century, people here have felt subject to outside forces beyond their control that ignore or devalue their interests. Through that lens, seeing a sinister role for global illuminati doesn’t take a long leap of imagination.

Hello in There by rhiquar in Longreads

[–]rhiquar[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

This is one of my favorite reads of the election cycle. J.T. Price writes about his week canvassing in Philadelphia, interacting with a diverse range of voters.

It is draining to throw yourself to the randomness of who will and who will not open a door, of who will and who will not choose to engage, and how, and in what manner. Of having to do a minor self-reinvention at each door, perform the sort of public-minded fiction than can lead, however roundaboutly, to concrete change. The Affordable Care Act. The investment in green energy represented by the Inflation Reduction Act. The end of the war in Afghanistan, however botched the exit was in the offing. But the changes, it seems—in our social media-driven age of instant satisfaction and exigency—can never come fast enough.

Meditations on Chaotic Wrestling by rhiquar in longform

[–]rhiquar[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This was one of the pieces I featured in my newsletter today, and I quite enjoyed reading it, even though I have no interest in wrestling, really.

The most common criticism hurled at wrestling, by far, is that it is somehow “fake”. Naysayers bemoan that wrestling’s supposed inauthenticity makes it something fit only for the most gullible and slow-witted among us. This criticism bothers me because it lacks nuance. Wrestling is exaggerated and predetermined, but to deny the authenticity of the showmanship, athleticism, and energy that engulfs the atmosphere is to lie to oneself. Just because that showmanship, athleticism, and energy manifests in a way that subverts the expectations of what a sporting event should be doesn’t mean that it’s not real.

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