“The city was frozen, each house locked in place on the lake, arranged as they were when it all froze over, and the streets were ice. A great snow-caked forest on the far side of the lake embraced the white plain with towering firs. Birds rustled invisibly in the rushes and wild cattails. Their tips had exploded into fuzziness and froze that way, stuck between stages of a single life or caught between this and the next.”
Into the Ruins takes a neutral-pessimistic view of the future beyond the current Gaian change. My post-climate change cycle Many Seasons seemed a good fit, though it’s fundamentally a utopian project. This story lays out an alternative economy of the future, a sort of deep ecology economy of redistribution. Among other things.
Thanks to Nalo Hopkinson, who gave me some critique after being rejected from the MFA program at which she was a professor. I was content; she mostly liked it.