Total Oblivion, which has been getting rave reviews so far, deals with the problems of refugees pretty directly, as you can see from the synopsis:

In the summer between Macy Palmer's junior and senior year of high school in Minnesota, Scythians, Thracians, and other ancient European tribes invade the Midwest. America becomes a ravaged land where modern technology barely works, a strange plague is rampant, and American citizens flee for their lives. Many end up doing what the Empire – which comes equally out of nowhere to keep the peace – tells them to do. Macy and her family find themselves torn from their ordinary lives and in a refugee camp just outside of Minneapolis. They end up making a desperate journey down the Mississippi River, which has mutated into a dangerous waterway.

Macy loves her dysfunctional family but has to make difficult decisions about them during almost unbearable times. Through her journeys, she finds medieval skyscrapers and fast food joints run by horse lords, befriends an enigmatic submarine captain on the river, and stumbles onto a bizarre religious festival called Promcoming. None of those wonders, however, challenge her as much as just growing up, and keeping her compassion intact while doing so.

So DeNiro decided to combine his promotional efforts for the book with fundraising for Mercy Corps, which helps marginalized populations, including refugees, all over the world. But that's not all. If you make a donation to Mercy Corps via DeNiro's fundraising page, he'll write a special story fragment from the world of Total Oblivion, just for you. DeNiro explains:

In order to provide a more direct engagement with the book, in whose spirit this fundraiser is taking place, if you make a donation on this page, drop me a quick note (adeniroATgmail.com) and I'll send you something extra: a one-of-a-kind paragraph of ephemera and apocrypha set in the world of the novel, made just for you! It could be anything. And I can send it by post or email. I'm easy. (River transport of mail post is forthcoming.) Just let me know which you'd prefer and I'll get it out to you in about a week. So hopefully we can, in some small way, assist others in making an impactful change.

DeNiro's essay, "Why I Write Science Fiction: An Apology," has gone online at Bookspot Central. He talks about his journey from science fiction to the literary world, and then back to science fiction (with a healthy dose of "magical realism" mixed in.) Along the way, he discusses the thorny issue of why science fiction might be literary, or else as valid as literary fiction in its own way:

Since when was fiction “realistic” instead of fictive? As painful as it is to highlight the truism of “fictive fiction,” it’s almost necessary at this point of the game. All fiction, by definition, is highly unrealistic, imperfectly transposing subconscious thought and perception into words. Besides, there’s more than one layer of “realism.” The table top that I write this essay on appears to be solid, but even high-school physics tells me it’s not, that it’s mostly empty space. LeGuin’s introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness discussed some of the sexual assymetry in the characters (at least to our eyes): “Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean I’m predicting that in a millenium or so we’ll all be androgynous…I’m merey observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing.” When one glibly uses the term, “realistic fiction,” there must always be the awareness of the inherent paradox with those two words scrunched together, for there is more than one way to describe what is apparent.

But he actually hits on something much more interesting than the tired literary/SF debate — he sets out a few building blocks of a new theory of appreciating science fiction. For example, he talks about the way in which science fiction turns the metaphorical into the real, and allows the author's observations to become more vivid or heightened. He shows how language, in a science fiction story, can "actualize" an experience, using the first paragraph of David Marusek's "We Were Out Of Our Minds With Joy" as an example. And the way in which geographies, and locations, become characters in science fiction.

And finally, DeNiro makes a bold assertion: science fiction is about public, and social, interactions more than it's about science for its own sake. The science should be right, of course, but it provides more of the philosophical "texture" of the stories rather than their actual substance.

DeNiro's whole essay (it's not that long) is well worth reading, and it's over at the link. [Bookspot Central]

DeNiro's review starts out by asserting that space opera hasn't crossed over to the mainstream as much as other subgenres of science fiction have. Cormac McCarthy may have made the post-apocalyptic dystopia story respectable with The Road, but nobody's writing literary epics about "hyperactive starships."

And then DeNiro launches into his actual critique of The New Space Opera: most of the stories are actually about posthuman characters who have been modified to survive in deep space. They've given up so much of their humanity to become spaceworthy, it's made them emotionally inacessible to readers. And they're tiny, against the massive scale of galaxy-wide intrigues and thousand-year wars. (I definitely found this to be a problem with some of the stories in the volume as well, when I read it last year.) Contrast this with old-school space opera, which was comfortable putting regular old humans in charge of its starships.

But the stories fail to engage with the fact of their characters' emotional dissociation as part of the narrative. And if you're going to write alienating mini-sagas about transhumanism, DeNiro suggests, you need masterful prose instead of the merely serviceable writing in this anthology. Most of all, the anthology promises "fun," but delivers careful, hide-bound stories instead. DeNiro does pick out a few exceptions, including James Patrick Kelly's "Dividing The Sustain" and Tony Daniel's "The Valley Of The Gardens."

DeNiro's bracing critique gave rise to an interesting roundtable discussion, which he participated in, over at SF Signal, which mostly dealt with the meta-question he raised: why hasn't space opera crossed over to the mainstream the way other SF sub-genres have? Authors from the anthology tried to answer, or refute, DeNiro's question.

Kage Baker asks why space opera needs to be relevant anyway. Paul McAuley attempts to claim that Doris Lessing's Canopus In Argos series was mainstream. (It's probably the least mainstream of all her works.) Tobias Buckell cites the popularity of Star Wars as proof that space opera really is mainstream. Anthology co-editor Jonathan Strahan argues that you shouldn't think of space-opera as entrenched within the science fiction field, but rather as at the center of the SF field. Gwyneth Jones says space-opera is more versatile than people give it credit for, and it's a good vehicle for asking questions about statecraft.

In the end, though, none of them addressed DeNiro's question of whether "new" space opera has to gain its newness by jettisoning the humanity of its characters. And whether that might be part of the reason why it's not relatable for readers who aren't die-hard science fiction fans. [Rain Taxi] and [SF Signal]