Future Primitive Book

It appears that we are destroying the Earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans, dehumanising ourselves, robbing our children of a future, so forth and so on. I believe what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges, one by one. We are burning our bridges to the past. We cannot go back to the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, or the canopied rainforests of five million years ago. We can't even go back to the era of the Houston six-shooter [??] of two hundred years ago. We have burned our bridges; we are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape.'Terence McKennaThe arrangement and selection of these stories and poems will evoke cellular memories of our origins and the yearnings for a future more kind than now.

You may find this book shelved as "science fiction" but it really is more fantasy or speculative in nature. These are stories which take place during or after some flavor of ecological armageddon or war. Each piece is different and the only ones that could be considered "weak" are the excerpts from novels'which is understandable given that novels have a different pacing than a short story. But, truly, this book is brilliant, as is Kim Stanley Robinson's method for dividing the contents thematically. The entire thing is prefaced by Gary Snyder's poem Tomorrow's Song. The other sections are Statements of Desire / Denial of the Body / But What Were They Really Like? / And Might They Ever Be Like That Again? / Parables.

This book is my favorite sort of anthology'the kind which introduces a reader to new and exciting ideas and authors. Terry Bison's story is charming (he wrote the short story They're Made of Meat'not in this anthology' which if you haven't been exposed to, go and google that now), Howard Waldrop's offering was a hoot, Rachel Pollack's Bead Woman was beautiful, Frederick Turner's poem is epic, and Ursula K. Le Guin's Newton's Sleep was haunting.

There is also a section of Endnotes for information on each author and their works.

And then there's the Further Reading section, a monster of a bibliography focusing on both the theoretical and practical concerns that are hand-in-hand with this book's focus. Because there are so many books listed in this last section (and I borrowed this from the library) I created a list of most of the titles here on goodreads. Unfortunately, listopia would not allow space for all of the titles, so there's about twenty or so of the last ones that would not fit.

The front cover notes that included is a new story by Ernest Callenbach, bestselling author of Ecotopia. The copy I read is the first edition; there is a more recent printing which presumably corrects the few minor typographical errors. Maybe they updated the Further Reading list too?

Other relevant books:
Unlearn Rewild Earth Skills Ideas and Inspiration for the Future Primitive
The Good Life Lab Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living
The Apocalypse Reader
After Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia