Future Tense: Mat Johnson & Jon Raymond

Two novels that explore our current moment through imagined futures: one on a moon colony populated by alien abductees, and one here on our home planet as the climate collapse accelerates. Moderated by OPB’s John Notarianni.

Mat Johnson‘s latest, Invisible Things, is a sharp allegorical novel about a hidden human civilization, a crucial election, and a mysterious invisible force that must not be named, by one of our most imaginative comic novelists. When sociologist Nalini Jackson joins the SS Delany for the first manned mission to Jupiter, she discovers an entire city encased in a bubble on Europa. New Roanoke is a city riven by wealth inequality and governed by a feckless, predatory elite, its economy run on heedless consumption and income inequality. But in other ways it’s different from the cities we already know: it’s covered by an enormous dome, it’s populated by alien abductees, and it happens to be terrorized by an invisible entity so disturbing that no one even dares acknowledge its existence. This is a madcap, surreal adventure into a Jovian mirror world, one grappling with the same polarized politics, existential crises, and mass denialism that obsess and divide our own. Will New Roanoke survive? Will we?

In Jon Raymond’s noir Denial, the year is 2052. Climate change has had a predictably devastating effect; yet it could be much worse. Two decades earlier, the global protest movement known as the Upheavals helped break the planet’s fossil fuel dependency, and the subsequent Nuremberg-like Toronto Trials convicted the most powerful oil executives and lobbyists for crimes against the environment. A few executives escaped arrest and went into hiding, including pipeline mastermind Robert Cave. Now, a Pacific Northwest journalist named Jack Henry who works for a struggling media company has received a tip that Cave is living in Mexico. Hoping the story will save his job, he travels south. The two men strike up an unexpected friendship, leaving Jack torn about exposing Cave. Who will really benefit from the unmasking? What is the nature of justice and punishment? How does one contend with mortality when the planet itself is dying?

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