Reading Science Fiction Politically: In Ascension

March 17, Mondays, new season continuing every other Monday at 5:00 pm US ET

The long-running Science and Visionary Fiction book group next reads In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. Set against looming climate disaster, MacInnes’s powerful story moves from the still-unexplored vastness of the ocean to the beckoning vastness of interstellar space. For politically-oriented fiction readers, MacInnes provokes discussion of how social relations and contradictions shape and distort scientific discovery and research. The novel explores these themes from the vantage point of richly-drawn Dutch marine scientist Leigh Hasenbosch.

Join us March 3 for lively discussion on this 2024 Arthur C Clarke Award winner for 2024, also long-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize. In Ascension offers a powerful opportunity for introspection and intentionality as we all explore our relationship to and our agency in the ongoing crisis around us.

We read this and all our selections mindful of our book group’s overall commitment, To build a better future, we have to envision it first (adapted from Walidah Imarisha). Reading science, speculative and visionary fiction, discussing it together, and reading it politically, offers one tool for envisioning a future worth building. This spring, we will continue our explorations of diverse points of view of social conflict and resolution, possible and imagined just worlds, here on Earth and perhaps afar.

Whether you have always read science fiction or never given it a second thought, consider spending a season with the MEP Science and Visionary Fiction book group.

And help us choose our spring list, from among these and other titles under consideration: