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Our lives, our culture, our community all start with and revolve around food and eating. Sharing meals with family and friends has been a hallmark of human society from our earliest beginnings. But we are entering an era of unprecedented change. Climate, technology, the global spread of crop diseases, droughts, and the loss of pollinators threaten to change not only how much food we eat, but what we eat and how we eat it.
Devouring Tomorrow explores this strange new menu through the eyes and palates of some of Canada’s most exciting authors. See a world with no bees left to pollinate our crops. Encounter lab-grown meat so advanced that it becomes sentient. Visit a land where diseases wipe out a common fruit and the society of a nation changes around its loss. This is not the world of the distant future — this is tomorrow.
Featuring stories from:
Sifton Tracey Anipare • Carleigh Baker • Gary Barwin • Chris Benjamin • Eddy Boudel Tan • Catherine Bush • Jowita Bydlowska • Lisa de Nikolits • Dina Del Bucchia • Terri Favro • Elan Mastai • Mark Sampson • Ji Hong Sayo • Jacqueline Valencia • Anuja Varghese • A.G.A. Wilmot
Like an Alpine train hurtling through the mountains, Devouring Tomorrow insists to be heard in all its ominous augury and undeniable beauty. Through sixteen stories, it conceives a world of food insecurity — chilling and unprecedented — that will make us question everything we know about food and where our food comes from, now. It might also make us relish our food better, and not take a bite for granted.
From designer cannibalism to post-apocalyptic food insecurity, this collection is a harvest of sinister possibilities featuring a killer crop of locally sourced writers. Devouring Tomorrow serves up a fresh, culinary twist on classic dystopian themes.
Reading the evocative, deeply imaginative anthology Devouring Tomorrow left me alternately awed and unsettled; its vivid imaginings of humanity's future sparked both a deep appreciation for its creativity and an urgency to confront the issues therein. From Catherine Bush's haunting "Pleased to Meet You," which gives voice to sentient lab-grown meat, to Carleigh Baker's "Pollinators," a poignant exploration of survival without bees, each story offers a chilling yet hopeful glimpse into a world shaped by climate change, innovation, and our primal relationship with sustenance. Blending humour, pathos, and razor-sharp insight, the raw emotional resonance of these stories lingered long after I turned the final page.
Each story in Devouring Tomorrow is evocative and memorable in its own way: Some satisfy our darkest and most primal curiosities; others experiment with form and point-of-view, serving up food for thought that will leave readers ravenous for more; all lead us away from what we think we know about ourselves and our world, stomachs bursting with the kind of laughter and anguish and awe that only the best of books can provide.
The earth's climate in the twenty-first century is an altered and oft-troubling phenomenon, and the stories we tell about this unsettling new place are vital for helping us learn to navigate it. This cornucopia of dietary dystopias is a welcome addition to the conversation about how we will feed ourselves in this radically changed climate.
Devouring Tomorrow is an intriguing, intermittently humorous if uneven short story collection edited by Jeff Dupuis and A.G. Pasquella.
Extractive capitalist systems ensure that we thirst for escape — to a somewhere, someone, or sometime else. And this is the marrow of Devouring Tomorrow, which is less about possible futures than it is about pasts full of painfully disconnected and alienated consumption. Grow something instead, these stories suggest, if you want to be fed. Grow something that matters. And savour it, so it knows it is loved.
Authors yoke together satire, realism, and science fiction in winning ways to characterize future foodstuffs that may not be desirable but are undoubtedly interesting.
In this collection of 16 stories, you will find a wide variety of voices and ideas, with plenty of food for thought! ... Each story drives you on to see what the next author has dreamed up for you. Highly compelling.
Devouring Tomorrow will leave you thinking about what the future holds, who gets to survive and thrive and just what food might mean at the end of time. Some of the stories are truly bizarre, but all will leave you pondering the coming days and what surprises the future of food might hold.
Devouring Tomorrow delivers a grab bag of gut-punching stories, provokes a fearsome menu of outcomes for humanity’s future, and provides a decadent, diverse feast for thought.
Devouring Tomorrow is not only a glimpse into the upcoming times, but also a cautionary compilation of tales. The short stories are immersive, memorable, and very entertaining. Not to mention that it works as a catalogue of current Canadian writers to keep on our radars. So, if you’re looking for a short-and-sweet ride through the future, be sure to give this a go. It’s a marvelous book to invest some time in.
This smorgasbord of stories is an inventive, playful, and sometimes disturbing collection ... Recommended especially for those of us drawn to depictions of eating in science fiction films and readers curious about climate change’s implications.
A.G. Pasquella is the author of the Jack Palace series. When he’s not writing, he makes music with the bands Miracle Beard and LaserGnu. Born in Dallas, Texas, he now lives in Toronto, Ontario.
- Introduction
- Pleased To Meet You - Catherine Bush
- I Want Candy - Dina Del Bucchia
- Succulent - Elan Mastai
- Pollinators - Carleigh Baker
- Time To Fly - Lisa De Nikolits
- A View Worth All The Aqua In The World - Anuja Varghese
- You Need A Licence For That - Sifton Tracey Anipare
- Novel Suggestions For Social Occasions - Ji Hong Sayo
- Just A Taste - A.G.A. Wilmot
- Rubber Road - Terri Favro
- Unlimited Dream - Mark Sampson
- Marianne Is Not Hungry - Jowita Bydlowska
- Lorenzo And The Last Fig - Eddy Boudel Tan
- Food Fight - Chris Benjamin
- The Crane - Jacqueline Valencia
- Recipe From The Future - Gary Barwin