Speculative fiction, science fiction, futurism, culture, and lore shape realities that challenge the status quo.
When I speak to Tory Stephens, Grist’s climate fiction creative manager, it’s October 9, 2024, and the floodwaters from Hurricane Helene still saturate the mountain towns of western North Carolina. Many residents are without electricity and running water, many without a home to return to. Artwork that had floated down the streets of Asheville’s River Arts District during the flooding—pottery, canvases, shattered glassworks—is now lodged in the dark muck of receding waters and newly created floodbanks. A family member, spared the worst of the storm, keeps us updated from his mountain home in Maggie Valley: “Getting gas and food availability back slowly.”
Meanwhile, Hurricane Milton strengthens to a Category 5 hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico, with record-high water temperatures fueling a rapid intensification as it approaches the west coast of Florida. My partner’s family, residents of Bradenton and Sarasota, evacuate. That night, we hold our breath as the swirling mass of white inches on the radar toward his childhood home, with threats of a 15-foot storm surge bringing tears to our eyes. Sitting in our rental home in coastal North Carolina, it is hard not to wonder when we will be next. The way our neighborhood flooded from the deluge of Tropical Storm Debbie is still fresh in our minds, how the waters rose above ditches and retention ponds to make access to the main roads impossible. I remark, almost callously, that the feared dystopia of a climate changed future is already upon us.
It is in the midst of these more visible consequences that climate fiction is entering the literary world with renewed force and a different angle.
On a global scale, 2023 was the hottest year on record. It was also the year the world exceeded 1.5C of warming on average for the first time, passing the original target of the Paris Climate Agreement. 2024 is predicted to break these records yet again. The intensity of the natural disasters we are experiencing—hurricanes, wildfires, floods, derechos, droughts—are the expected consequences of the climate crisis, catching up to us after decades of warnings and failed action. The idea of living in a climate dystopia feels more tangible with each passing day and with each subsequent disaster. It is in the midst of these more visible consequences that climate fiction is entering the literary world with renewed force and a different angle. Diverging from the well-worn path of dystopian narratives depicting an apocalyptic world, there is a growing collection of stories that seek to unveil resilience and resolution in the face of the climate crisis.
As a writer, I’ve always believed in the power of stories to catalyze change. As a human being, I know the captivating potency of a good story told well—one that evokes emotion, contemplation, a shift in understanding or perspective. When it comes to the climate crisis, the facts are undeniable, the breadth and consonance of research overwhelming and compelling. What’s needed are narratives that translate the facts and research into stories, into diverse settings and into characters with varied lives, relationships, and motives; stories that readers can engage with and relate to, can see themselves in. This is what climate fiction is doing—yes, through dystopian novels like The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson or The Bear by Andrew Krivak that warn us of what is to come if we fail to act, but now also through more hopeful stories, ones that seek to explore what the world could become if we change, if we start to get it right.
Tory is the creator of Grist’s Imagine 2200 climate fiction short story contest, which this year has 12 winning submissions being published by Milkweed Editions in the anthology Metamorphosis. The stories are climate fiction that envision “the next decades to centuries of equitable climate progress, imagining futures of abundance, adaptation, reform, and hope.” Yet when speaking to Tory, it is not so much hope as courage that is at the core of these stories—the courage to imagine a different future, and the courage required to change in order to bring that imagined future to fruition.
“What we’re trying to advocate for is that there’s more hopeful stories, but not just hopeful. Courageous stories. Justice-driven stories. Culturally authentic stories. Stories with diverse, intersectional characters.”
“Is hope—or courage—a more powerful motivator than fear?” I ask in response, the tactics of the 2024 U.S. presidential election colliding with the forces of climate change in my mind.
“Where I land is that the balance is off,” Tory replies.
I start wondering what makes dystopian tales of a climate-destroyed future easier to tell than the ones that explore a reversal of humankind’s current trajectory, and I’m concerned over how easily tales of drought-stricken lands, sea-covered islands, or an iceless Arctic landscape come to my mind. Is it because it’s easier to throw up our hands and admit defeat than labor through the work of conceiving solutions? Are we so resigned to the way things are, that our imagination struggles to envision what could be?
Perhaps seeing this need for a different narrative, “solarpunk” entered the literary arena in 2008 as a new subgenre of science fiction. In 2023, Sam Paul wrote about the genre for the Feminist Book Club, stating, “While the characters and species within might have endured cataclysmic change in many of these narratives, society has banded together cooperatively and is living in a somehow better, more moral and just universe in its wake.” While not necessarily utopian, the freedom to create an ideal world is unleashed and encouraged in solarpunk stories. Literary magazines like Solarpunk Magazine and The Future Fire have sprung up in response, providing avenues for these types of stories to be published and shared with a wider readership.
In my own exploration of some of the more recently published “courageous” climate fiction, it’s not hard to appreciate the impact. Speculative fiction, science fiction, futurism, culture, and lore shape realities that challenge the status quo. The worlds these authors create are usually not perfect—the road to change is inevitably challenging and nonlinear—but there is resilience and innovation, there is a pushback against injustice, and there is an audacious belief that we, as a collective species, still have the capacity to change course for the better.
Near the end of my conversation with Tory, I ask him if writing—and sharing—these kinds of stories truly carries the potential to transform the trajectory of our world at this moment.
“It’s no one story,” he says. Then, after a brief pause, “It’s a cacophony of stories that we need to help us.”
Later he will add, “And I think humans are largely driven by stories, right? Our collective narrative arc is driven by a story.”
If we as a species are truly driven by the stories we hear and believe, then crafting stories that create the narrative we want to be shaped by becomes undeniably important. The work of the authors writing these climate fiction stories, and the work of literary magazines and publishers providing a platform for these stories, becomes essential. And then we need to read these stories too, allowing ourselves to be moved in the direction of imagining and believing in a different reality. Doing this won’t make up for governments, politicians, and corporations failing to enact systemic change, but it could push against the apathy of individual inaction. It could give us some courage to act, maybe even to hope.
If we as a species are truly driven by the stories we hear and believe, then crafting stories that create the narrative we want to be shaped by becomes undeniably important.
Our family in Florida was spared the worst of Milton’s fury as it pummeled across the state of Florida—a few downed trees, a few strips of siding pulled off of the house. Other families, other homes, were not as lucky. My partner’s hometown of Englewood is unrecognizable in the hurricane’s wake. I look at images of Chimney Rock, a beloved destination in North Carolina whose small town was wiped off the map by Helene’s floodwaters. Where there once were streets and sidewalks and shops that I visited, there is now only brown water surging. This isn’t the world I want to live in, or the world I want my future children to live in.
In the words of James Baldwin, “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” Facing unveiled devastation from the climate crisis, it makes sense to me that the more climate fiction stories we create, and the more stories that dare to imagine an aspirational future, the more empowered we are to take “millimeter” steps—or normal steps, or giant leaps—toward a more hopeful future. For my part, I want to be moved by these stories in a direction that isn’t grounded in dystopian despair, but in a vision of sustainability, justice, courage, and resilience.
Justine Payton is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where she is the recipient of the Philip Gerard Graduate Fellowship and the Bernice Kert Fellowship in Creative Writing. She is the managing editor of ONLY POEMS, an editor for Ecotone, a guest editor for CRAFT and The Masters Review, and an editorial intern with Tin House. She has been published or has work forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, The Masters Review, Isele Magazine, and others.
Header image by solarseven, courtesy Shutterstock.
