Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song: Speculative Fiction for Today

Next, Monday May 5, 5:00 pm US ET 

Check next week for May-June plan!

Join with the Science and Visionary Fiction book group to read Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, very much an authoritarian future in the present. Lynch won the 2023 Booker Prize for this novel, which seemed dystopian just two years ago, and now seems eerily just around the corner. Most everyone finds this book disturbing, frightening, yet also instructive and conversation starting about what to do now, at home, at work, in the unions, in our communities.

Lynch’s narrative style steadily adds to the mesmerizing impact of the book. Take part to discuss this unique and critically important novel of our time, the present regime, and our survival.

Lynch’s novel belongs perhaps more properly under the banner of speculative fiction. In this novel and others, science fiction and its cousins, speculative fiction and visionary fiction, have long provided a way to poke holes in the unabridged faith in corporate-dominated science and authoritarian redefinitions of truth. At the same time science fiction also has aided reflection on what we do and can know about the world. In our reading and discussions this spring, we want to probe our own thinking on these issues and also enable us to better converse and reach others not so certain of these matters.

We select one book a month, meet for a first look while everyone continues to read, and then again two weeks later for a full and deep discussion. We additional short stories, essays, film based on interest, sometimes with additional sessions.

We read with an 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.