Eye-Catching

Behold a proposed cover for the next Praxis book, launching next September. This isn’t the final cover, so the published version might be somewhat different.

In the meantime, Tor.com published a piece by James Nicoll on five novels featuring a depopulated Earth, with my Knight Moves among them. Depopulating the planet seems to be a motif in some of my fiction, as a small-population Earth features in other work, including Implied Spaces and Aristoi (where the original population was wiped out, and the planet repopulated from space settlements after the planet’s ecosystem was rebuilt).

Reducing the population would be a way to reduce adverse environmental impacts, and in the first two books I found a more benign way to decrease the population rather than simply wiping them out.

Though it’s not explicitly stated, Earth’s population is greatly reduced in the College of Mystery sequence of stories, including “The Green Leopard Plague” and “Lethe.” This is following an event I called the “Lightspeed War”— I know what the event was, but I haven’t yet found a way to make it interesting enough as a piece of fiction to write about it.

My Metropolitan books feature an opposite scenario, with the planet’s population risen to cheek-by-jowl, living-in-each-other’s armpits density, so crowded that the only way to keep them fed was by generating food by magic. (There’s something called “vat curd.”) I once calculated the population, but it was so absurdly huge that I never mentioned it. (Never point out the absurdities in your own work— that’s someone else’s job.)

Another lovely piece of art may drop in the next day or two.