“The Swerve”

My Locus column on hope in the dark.

My latest Locus Magazine column is “The Swerve,” a short essay about the shape that hope takes when happy endings are off the table — it’s specifically about the looming environmental collapse, but it also describes my view on the polycrisis of musketfuckery, forced birth, and covid denial:

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

In this metaphor, we are in a bus barreling toward a cliff. The people in the front seats — who control the driver — insist that we don’t need to turn the bus before we go over the edge. Indeed, they insist that turning the wheel is reckless, because the bus might roll and someone might break a leg.

When we demand to know what they’re going to do about that cliff and the long plummet to the rocks below, we’re called alarmists. There’s plenty of time to build a bridge. Also, maybe we don’t need a bridge! Maybe we’ll figure out how to add wings to the bus, or a cool rocket engine!

I wrote this column back in May (print magazines have long production cycles). Back then, the southwest was on fire and The Guardian was reporting on the “carbon bombs” that the fossil fuel industry was planning to detonate around us:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2022/may/11/fossil-fuel-carbon-b…