- Are you on the front lines of your job or your family, not just burning a candle at both ends, but taking a blow torch to the entire thing?
- Do you read sci fi or fantasy with its world-ending villains or super technology that wreck everything with a spooky sense of déjà vu and doom?
- Are you having a hard time staying sane in the avalanche of information and misinformation? Let alone find the bandwidth to solve problems, create new ideas, or find a new perspective?
Welcome to Postcards from Pluto
A weekly newsletter by speculative fiction author Kyler Anne Ford for storytellers, geeks, misfits, inventors, cube dwellers, food growers, artists (even if only of sketches in the shower steam), and all those who are curious, alone, and hurting because they don’t believe in the party line and who want more out of their life than surviving it.
It’s becoming increasingly clear we must radically reimagine how we live immediately. We need to imagine life off the dinosaur juice and a society without growth and the radical change this will bring to every corner of our lives, and we need to do it yesterday.
Contrary to the articles that start with some version of “just put up a solar panel,” we don’t have all the solutions we need, nor a good enough picture of what tomorrow can look like. Top to bottom, everything will be different, and we can’t build it if we can’t see it.
Reimagining everything has always been the purview of speculative fiction authors – building elaborate alternative worlds full of new technology or old myths – that help us see the water we’re swimming in. But there isn’t time anymore for long novels with esoteric alternative civilizations. We need new ideas now.
Explore!
Every week we dive into a piece of the world (usually one that is on fire. Sometimes literally.) Diving deep beneath the media coverage and the easy answers we were fed in school to surface hidden causes, expose blind spots, highlight propaganda, and then ask why and just possibly where it’s going. This is just world-building. Authors do it all the time – only this time it’s the real world.
We do not need more information or more news, we need a way to imagine the implications, make decisions, weigh risks, change our minds. This takes creativity, imagination and to do that impossible thing: see the world differently.
Each week, you can learn to think like a writer – air out your assumptions, question problems, dig for root causes, and deconstruct settled “facts,” and then play out the consequences: good, bad, and perverse to come up with new solutions, new points of view, and creative idea
Who’s Kyler?
Kyler Ford writes brainy, funny, feminist, and diverse speculative fiction that explores what it means to be human, the old myths we tell ourselves to help us sleep at night, and our dreams of what’s next.
Her Orange Sinclair Urban Fantasy Series follows a hobgoblin named Orange and her quest to help the FBI wrestle Washington, DC from the djinn, dragons, fae, old gods, and fairy tales that seek to destroy it. Get a free prequel at www.kylerford.com.