I’l be reading from my new novel, When Shells Crumble, at Medicine For Nightmares bookstore at 3036 24th Street on Tuesday December 12, 2023 at 6:30 pm.
Here’s the wonderful blurbs I got from various friends:
Chris Carlsson is one of the great bards of San Francisco, whose activism and storytelling have reshaped the way we understand our city’s past—and changed its future. When Carlsson offers a vision of urbanism to come, you’d better pay attention.
—Annalee Newitz, author of The Terraformers and Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
Carlsson invites us to put the imagination back in the revolution. When Shells Crumble is reminder that the path from dystopia to utopia may not be as long as we have feared it to be.
—James R. Tracy, co-author No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements
Futurist and thought provoker Carlsson once again imagines a near-future scenario where disaster spawns opportunities for radical self-reliance. San Francisco and the greater Bay Area are where history, politics, culture and environment create a messy stew of biotech, inequality, activism, and overreaching federal crackdowns. But wait—mysteriously enabled flora and fauna may be allies in the struggle! As with his first novel After the Deluge, Carlsson’s ideas will stay in your mind long after you put down his tale of radicalized plumbers and urban gardeners.
—Laura Lent, retired, formerly Chief of Collections & Technical Services, San Francisco Public Library
Most dystopian fiction takes the reader to strange new worlds where mutations are large and grotesque. The strength of Chris Carlsson’s When Shells Crumble instead arises from how close its future-world is to our present-day Trumpland realities. Enriched by Carlsson’s deep, sympathetic understanding of San Francisco Bay Area alternative undergrounds, When Shells Crumble brings us into a landscape of martial law and spirited resistance to it, made all the more chilling by how little distance there seems between his imagined nightmare scenario and the near-nightmare we currently inhabit.
—Joseph Matthews, author of The Blast