[Editor’s note: I’m a volunteer advisor to Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and Joey Eschrich is a colleague of mine there; I invited him to write up his latest project, an anthology of science fiction about climate change.]
Joey Eschrich:
Today, the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative at Arizona State University published Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Volume II. The anthology features 10 short stories from ASU’s 2018 global climate fiction contest, plus a foreword by renowned science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, author of New York 2140, Green Earth, and other seminal climate fiction novels. The book is free to download in a variety of digital formats.
The stories, written by authors from six different countries, explore climate chaos and its aftermath through a variety of genres and styles, from science fiction and fantasy to literary fiction and prose poetry. In his foreword, Robinson writes that the stories, which unfold in far-flung locales around the world, are linked together by grief in the face of imminent loss:
The mood of these stories, repeated again and again, is grief at the damage climate change is doing to some particular place and culture. The specificity in these stories, the deep knowledge they display as they describe the places and cultures being lost, make them acts of love. The love is expressed as a kind of paying attention, as the detailed articulation of 10 beloved places and cultures in imminent danger of being lost. If they aren’t lost yet, they are likely to be lost soon—so soon that even if our global civilization were to start immediately to do everything possible to slow, stop, or even reverse climate change, these most vulnerable places and cultures are probably doomed. They are walking dead—not zombies, but rather condemned prisoners of history and geography.
Everything Change, Volume II [Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative/ASU]