Whew, it’s been a month (or three) hasn’t it?! I don’t have much else to say except to thank Rebecca for continuing to push this blog forward when I ran out of steam for a while there. You can thank her too for dragging me back in by sending me these links and then haranguing me until I finally read them:

So Much Cooking

Rebecca sent me the link to this novelette (8,410 words) that has been making the rounds on social media lately. Written in 2015, it is eerily accurate for 2020, down to some of the tiniest details. Told in the style of a food blog, it stays grounded in everyday life, capturing the broader human experience through the smaller individual shared experiences. Though Kritzer is anticipating (again: frighteningly accurately!) an unusually difficult period in the modern era, she also highlights the strength and generosity that people can and do bring to shared struggles, making it a much more hopeful reflection than one would expect.

The Year Without Sunshine

This slightly longer novelette (10,883 words) came out in 2023, along with readers’ hopes that it doesn’t turn out to be quite so on-the-nose this time around, though it sadly doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. Though the scope of the crisis is even larger this time, so is the community that comes together to bolster each other in truly innovative ways. I very much hope it doesn’t come to quite this extreme, but Kritzer again focuses on the positive, the basic good of most people and how they want to and can help each other. Through this, she provides some innovative blueprints for what different kinds of mutual aid can look like, and isn’t that what scifi does best, showing us a path toward a better future? I look forward to more of her writing (with only a little dread, haha)!