Hot Equations

Inspired by the new diversity of science fiction fantasy and horror in the twenty-first century <i>Hot Equations: Science Fantasy and the Radical Imagination on a Troubled Planet</i> confronts the kinds of literary and political realism that continue to suppress the radical imagination. Alluding both to the ongoing climate catastrophe and to Tom Godwin's The Cold Equations--that famous touchstone of hard science fiction--<i>Hot Equations</i> reads the crises of our post-normal moment via works that increasingly subvert genre containment and spill out into the public sphere. <p/> Drawing on archives and contemporary theory author Jesse S. Cohn argues that these imaginative works of science fiction fantasy and horror strike at the very foundations of modernity calling its basic assumptions into question. They threaten the modern order with a simultaneously terrible and promising anarchy pointing to ways beyond the present medical ecological and political crises of pandemic climate change and rising global fascism. Examining books ranging from well-known titles like <i>The Hunger Games </i>and <i>The Caves of Steel </i>to newer works such as <i>Under the Pendulum Sun </i>and<i> The Stone Sky</i> Cohn investigates the ways in which science fiction fantasy and horror address contemporary politics social issues and more. The cold equations that established normal life in the modern world may be in shambles Cohn suggests but a New Black Fantastic makes it possible for the radical imagination to glimpse viable possibilities on the other side of crisis.