Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Fifteen: Climate Fiction Zines and Small Presses
I created Bright Green Futures to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
This episode, we’re going to talk about the people who publish hopeful climate fiction, both to highlight where you can find new stories and where you can submit your own, if you’ve decided to try your hand in this growing and exciting genre.
I’ll start by saying the easiest way to find stories is to check our very own, growing list of hopeful climate fiction on the Bright Green Futures substack. As we’ve discussed a few times on the pod, there aren’t a lot of novels on that list, and even fewer stories on the screen. Most of the exciting innovative works in solarpunk and hopeful climate fiction are being published as short stories or by small presses committed to grappling with the climate crisis in a real way—and many of those stories are still pretty dark, often outright horror, but some are hopeful as well.
Solarpunk Hasn’t Hit the Mainstream… Yet
While there’s not much solarpunk in the mainstream, many novels and TV/movies have hopepunk-ish storylines or themes, which I think is a sign that solarpunk ideas, at least, are percolating up into the mainstream. A good example of this is the Last of Us, which is a post-apocalyptic zombie TV series, but it has a narrative thread about cooperation and compassion, showing hope in a bleak landscape, and that freshens up a well-worn trope. It’s relevant that Last of Us was actually based on a game released a decade before the TV series came out, and that game itself broke new ground at the time for narrative storytelling, which was part of why it was so popular.
That progression—where it takes a decade from breaking new ground in one medium to translating it to a broader-based audience—seems relevant to hopeful climate fiction right now. I’m coming to grips with the idea that the genre hasn’t yet arrived in the mainstream, and that that may still be years away. But the groundwork for that is being laid right now in the innovative work being published in short fiction and small presses. Even Grist, one of the great promoters of hopeful climate fiction through their Imagine 2200 contest, is still primarily focused on environmental reporting, not their fiction. Grist is an example of how solarpunk is coming in sideways, through the backdoor or climbing the trellis, being unconventional all the way through.
It makes sense that stories which radically challenge the status quo—not just of the fossil-fuel driven world and capitalism, but of storytelling itself—are going to spend a lot of time on the fringes, frothily cooking up new ideas, playing with form, and trial running the approaches we’re going to need to survive in the 21st Century.
And I mean that quite literally as another town in Canada—beautiful and historic Jasper—has been lost to this season’s wildfires.
How do we write stories of hope when the world is literally on fire?
Start Imagining the Revolution
As the meme says, we need to stop imagining the apocalypse and start imagining the revolution. There’s no imagination needed for the apocalypse anyway—and yet, imagining the revolution can be extremely difficult.
This week, I got a message from my 21yo daughter that started: “I have a solarpunk/hopepunk writing question for you.”
I’m sure you can imagine my delight about that message on Discord, but not just because I like to talk about this topic so much I started an entire podcast about it, but also because this kid of mine has long frustrated me by refusing to write even though she was wildly talented at it. That’s been changing in recent years—you have no idea how hard it is for me to be cool about that—so when she says she wants her story to transition from a cyberpunk world in the beginning to a solarpunk one by the end… friends... you can be sure that I dropped everything and spent the next half hour talking about infrastructure and food systems, B-corps and the commons, writing craft and solarpunk storytelling and more. When your kid is actively imagining the better future they want their world to be, there’s not a much happier place for me as a parent. But I understand all too well how challenging it is to do that imaginative work—these ideas are still being forged in think tanks and research, in heated discussions on forums, and yes, in stories and the yearning imaginations of the young people who will live to see it all play out.
I ended our long Discord thread by sharing a quote from Mark Gonzales, which was shared by Walidah Imarisha and Rebecca Solnit:
Plant your story in the cracks.
This resonates so hard with me because the cracks are precisely where these stories are sprouting. They are in zines running on a shoestring, in non-profit and small presses, on kickstarter and backerkit, and yes, even self-publishing. It’s precisely in the wild unfettered spaces that new things can be grown.
But these places do have names, so let’s call them out.
Hopeful Climate Fiction: Small Presses
First, I want to highlight Milkweed Editions, which is publishing a collection of Grist-curated stories this fall called Metamorphosis. My story, Seven Sisters, is in that collection, along with previous podcast guest Jamie Liu’s excellent story, To Labor For the Hive, and T.K. Rex’s delightful Holdout in the Northern California Designated Wildcraft Zone. This is exciting for a couple reasons. Milkweed Editions doesn’t publish a lot of fiction—they’re a non-profit literary press famous for publishing Braiding Sweetgrass, and they mostly publish non-fiction and poetry. But now they’re venturing into hopeful climate fiction, and I’m hoping this won’t be the last chance they take on the genre.
One small press that’s been publishing in this space for a while is Stelliform, a Canadian publisher of climate stories—not exclusively hopeful, but they published previous podcast guest Sarena Ulibarri’s quasi-utopian novel, Another Life, as well as Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality, which won the Ursula K. Le Guin award. Stelliform has a fast-growing catalog, and I’m a big fan of the choices they’re making in publication.
Android Press is another innovative small press—they’re the publishers behind Solarpunk Magazine, but also previous podcast guest Renan Bernardo’s short story collection, A Different Kind of Defiance. They also currently have on backerkit a solarpunk graphic novel by Renan called Anticipation of Hollowness, which you should definitely check out.
Another strong press in this area is WorldWeaver Press, which has some great stuff, including Solarpunk Creatures, but they’re not open that often for submissions.
And that’s the very short list of publishers on my radar at the moment who are publishing hopeful climate fiction novels and collections. To be fair, I haven’t exhaustively looked, something I plan to do this fall as I evict this novel I have in my head out onto the page.
Hopeful Climate Fiction: SF Zines
The short fiction market is much more diverse and vibrant. Solarpunk Magazine, of course, has been publishing explicitly solarpunk stories for years, and Little Blue Marble (another Canadian press) is currently on hiatus but has a lot of great climate-focused works. DreamForge Magazine just completed the kickstarter for a 6th year of publication of hopeful stories.
And Grist’s Imagine 2200 program stands alone as being exclusively focused on hopeful climate fiction. I so appreciate that they’re continuing to publish their annual contest winners but also are now publishing more stories throughout the year. If you want to write hopeful climate fiction, their extensive description of what they’re looking for serves as a great guide, plus they have stories—both fiction and non-fiction—listed for inspiration.
Another standout zine is Reckoning, which serves an important purpose with their focus on environmental justice, although I will say their stories aren’t primarily hopeful—they will publish hopeful stories, but they also embrace the darker side of the injustices everywhere in the climate crisis.
There are several other zines that are open to hopeful stories, not always specifically about the climate but not opposed to it either: Hexagon is open to climate fiction, Haven Spec publishes both “wet” and “dry” climate issues, Translunar Travelers Lounge is focused on joyful stories, Utopia SF definitely has cli-fi, and the new Pittsburgh-based Baubles From Bones is looking for hope in the darkness, among other things. Escape Pod is a prestige zine that also looks for more hopeful stories.
Many of the prestige science fiction zines—those paying “professional” rates—will accept eco-fiction, but it’s seldom of the hopeful variety. I’m not as familiar with the literary zine market, but I do need to start checking that out. It’s almost as if the more “mainstream” a publication is—whether zines or publishing houses—the less likely they are to consider hopeful climate fiction stories worth publishing.
Our stories continue to grow in the cracks and do the hard work of crumbling the status quo.
I’m sure there are zines or small presses I’m missing—and please feel free to leave a comment or send me a note if you’ve found one that’s doing great work in this hopeful climate fiction space—and I’m leaving out altogether the many smaller low-paying or non-paying zines, self-publishers (including myself), and various international anthologies and one-off issues of magazines or anthologies who have dabbled in this space.
Support the Art You Want To See in the World
I encourage you to patronize the folks who are consistently publishing hopeful climate fiction stories—that’s one way to make sure the art you want to see in the world continues to be produced. I also encourage you to try your hand at writing these works and then submitting them for publication. There’s a lot of imaginative work that needs to be done to lay the foundation for this better world we want.
My daughter wanted help in crafting her futuristic solarpunk story—she knew where she wanted the story to go but wasn’t sure how to get there.
Realistically, we’re all in that space: we know the world can be better than what we have right now, but how to get there can be murky and confusing, even outright contradictory. How will private property work in a world of collectives? Will family structure be the same? How do we heal so much environmental injustice when the legacy of imperialism is stamped on every aspect of our world? Today we have enough food to feed everyone, and yet we still fail to do so—what happens when the climate ravages crops and sends people fleeing from their homes?
How can we imagine a better world when the dark forces of the current one seem so powerful?
The truth is we can’t see the future—the unexpected happens every day, and in a world where the baseline climate of the world is constantly shifting, the unknown unknowns will come more frequently.
Which only makes it more important to do the imaginative work now before the truly difficult challenges arrive. When I look at all the accomplishments of the past, whether environmental or social justice or simply getting food to people in need, I’m struck by how much time and effort is required, particularly in education on the subject, both for the public generally but specifically for people doing the work. There’s a reason why social justice movements and political movements of every kind have training as part of how they mobilize people. That education and training takes time: the amount of time that elapses between the first person setting out to changing the world and a hundred people actively working on the problem, is not small. Or linear. It can seem very slow, the long work of learning and shifting mindsets.
As we talked about in the episode on Movement Building, a lot of time is spent laying the foundation, which is really important work to build the movement, long before a take-off event surges the movement into the public consciousness. We are definitely in the Stage 3: “Ripening Conditions” part of the movement to build hopeful narratives about the climate as a way to grapple with the climate crisis, a movement itself which has had to go through many iterations and stages to get to the point where the majority even believes the crisis is real. In fact, I’d say that hopeful narratives are part of the acceptance process—once you accept that the world is changing, that the challenge is real, that the work must be done, then the next question is precisely what my daughter posed to me: how do you do this? How do you create a world that’s different and better?
One thing I grow more certain of every day, and this is reinforced once again by recent political events in America, where we see the Democratic party quickly shifting to solidify around presumptive presidential nominee Harris, after round after round of infighting that seemed like it would never end: if we stick together and work together, we can create a future worth fighting for.
Go read some stories, friends. And if you’re ready, start writing them too.
Bright Green Futures is a weekly newsletter/podcast. Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists for further reading. The best way to support the show is to subscribe and share the stories with your friends.
LINKS Ep. 15: Climate Fiction Zines and Small Presses
Zines (open to hopeful climate fiction): Little Blue Marble, Grist: Imagine 2200, Solarpunk Magazine, DreamForge Magazine, Reckoning, Haven Spec, Translunar Travelers Lounge, Utopia SF, Baubles From Bones, Escape Pod
Small presses (open to hopeful climate fiction): Stelliform Press, Android Press, Milkweed Editions, World Weaver Press
Solarpunk Creatures (World Weaver Press)
Different Kinds of Defiance by Renan Bernardo (Android Press)
Metamorphosis collection (published by Milkweed Editions)
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)
Grist (Climate.Justice.Solutions), a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
Grist’s Imagine 2200 Collections (2021, 2022, 2023 Editor’s Picks, Best of Audio, 2024)—Submit to Imagine 2200
Ep. 15: Climate Fiction Zines and Small Presses