“I myself actually turned in a very late piece—I reviewed the Kafka study K by [Roberto] Calasso three or four months after it was published. It’s not a bad thing. It breaks the spell of everyone necessarily hanging on that review, at the instant of publication, to set the tone for everything else. It might free us and also free up the Times from any sense that it’s somehow in charge.”

“Reading the paperback of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain the week after Hurricane Katrina was eerie,” says former Amazon editor Ron Hogan. “I knew that the novel hinged upon the efforts of D.C. scientists and lobbyists to force the government’s hand on global warming issues, but I had no idea that its climax was going to be the arrival of a massive storm system which overflowed the Potomac and turned the streets of Washington into rivers. Some of Robinson’s descriptions of the storm’s impact seemed a little tame in light of what we’d just seen on TV, but other scenes—like the evacuation of the animals at the National Zoo—felt vividly authentic. I can’t wait to see how he plays out the aftermath in the upcoming sequel, Fifty Degrees Below.

“Science fiction has always had an apocalyptic streak running through it,” Hogan continues, “but there’s usually a sense that if we just listen to the scientists, everything will turn out OK. Robinson’s latest story seems to have that optimism, but there’s also a hint of fatalism, too—as if to say that things have just about hit the breaking point, and we’re going to have to start performing triage just to keep things going.”