Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness.

SF is practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene.

This book argues and tries to perform that, eschewing futurism, staying with the trouble is both more serious and more lively. Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all. That kind of material semiotics i

How to address the urgency is the question that must burn for staying with the trouble.

Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the-minute.

The first is easy to describe and, I think, dismiss, namely, a comic faith in technofixes, whether secular or religious: technology will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but very clever children, or what amounts to the same thing, God will come to the rescue of his disobedient but ever hopeful children.

Sympoiesis—making-with—is a keyword throughout the chapter, as I explore the gifts for needed thinking offered by theorists and storytellers.

I think the odd coupling of actually working and playing for multispecies flourishing with tenacious energy and skill, while expressing an explicit “game over” attitude that can and does discourage others, including students, is facilitated by various kinds of futurisms. One kind seems to imagine that only if things work do they matter—or, worse, o

Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters,