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Altered Earths – Storyteller as Scientist: An Experiment in Four Variables
By S.E. Hartz I want to write this essay as a scientist would. I do not come with a conclusive thesis but with a working theory and a hypothesis to guide my investigation. The theory: things I have learned or explored in the laboratory and field can guide my fiction in new directions. The hypothesis:…
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Altered Earths: Beyond Dystopia
Tackling the Narrative Challenges of Climate Change, On and Off the Page By S.E. Hartz This past weekend, I coped with a particularly bad bout of climate anxiety by watching seven straight hours of Stranger Things. Something about witnessing a group of young kids repeatedly face down various iterations of the same catastrophe, beating back…
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Altered Earths: On Genre, Worldbuilding, and Multiplicity
by S.E. Hartz My old journals mark the moment when I decided, in tenth grade, that I would be not a writer but a scientist. I was two selves already by that time, one writing maudlin poetry in the wings of the high school auditorium during theater rehearsals, the other delving deep into diagrams of…
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Perseids, World’s End, Last Year
Fiction by S.E. Hartz As I roll my dad up the hill from the parking lot of the World’s End Country Club, I pray for the clouds to part and make this all worth it. Dad’s gripping his hands to stop his tremors, and I can hear him working the dentures into his gums, nervous…