http://windupstories.com/about/
The website above is the home page for author Paolo Bacigalupi, a famed short-story author who recently branched out into young adult science fiction. I co-host a young adult book group at my local library, and Bacigalupi was one of our most recent reads. His two novels, The Windup Girl, and Ship Breaker, are both examples of technological pessimism. The Windup Girl starts in Thailand, and paints the picture of a world where oil and other fossil fuels have been consumed and are gone, with rising sea levels and - most importantly - engineered technological mutation of both food, machinery, and creations that are supposedly alternatives to actual living creatures. It is a warning of technological mutation pushed to the brink and gone horribly wrong. The Ship Breaker presents an equally grim future, in a world which also struggles with rising sea levels that have engulfed coastal towns, where so many oil tankers have poisoned the American Gulf Coast that small children are hired to climb down the sunken tankers ship ducts to retrieve copper wiring and other useful metals.
There are also some links on his website to interviews where he talks at great length about the urgent need for sustainability in today's world.
The above link provides a look at technological optimism in the form of genetically-modified food. This article discusses how Scotland's new chief scientific advisor urges the public to "embrace genetically modified (GM) food as an answer to poverty, hunger, and toxic pollution.
She argues that the public has been woefully and poorly informed on the subject and that labels such as "Frankenstein foods" are very misleading, as GM food actually has none of those horrible side effects.
