In this episode, I chat with Author and Editor Sarena Ulibarri about her novella, Another Life, how she was radicalized by The Conquest of Bread, and how social ecology, anarchism, and communalism inspired her worldbuilding.
Text Transcript:
Susan Kaye Quinn
Hello friends! Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode 14: Imagining Another Life with Author and Editor Serena Ulibarri.
I'm your host, Susan K. Quinn, and we're here to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there. Today, we're going to talk with Serena Ulibarri, who has been deeply involved in both writing and editing solarpunk for years. We're going to dive into her recent novel, Another Life, published by Stelliform Press, but she also has a long list of short fiction for you to check out in places like Dreamforge, Lightspeed, and Solarpunk Magazine, and most recently in Baubles and Bones, which I was very excited to see, given they're a brand new zine based here in Pittsburgh. Serena has also curated two international volumes of hopeful climate fiction, Solarpunk Summers and Solarpunk Winters, and co-edited the recently released Solarpunk Creatures anthology.
Hello, Serena. Welcome to the pod!
Sarena Ulibarri
Hi Susan, thank you so much for having me on.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It's such a pleasure and I can't wait to have our conversation and talk about all these cool things. But I'd like to dive straight into your novel, Another Life, which I just finished reading and was just enthralled with. And I'm excited to talk about that given that solarpunk and hopeful climate fiction novels are rather scarce. The whole genre is underserved and the stories that we tend to have are short fiction. So a novel is unique and cause for celebration. So I want to discuss that further in the pod, but for our listeners, I'll tell them a little bit about what the novel is and then hopefully have you read a little bit, an excerpt of it for us.
Another Life is a world-building-packed near-future climate fiction with a quasi-utopian city and society on the shores of a human-made lake in Death Valley. The novel layers in a fascinating story about reincarnation and past lives, neatly tying a problematic past character to the main character of the novel, who is the mediator of this society, and they're all trying to be leaderless and classless, and that proves difficult.
So much is in this novel, and it's not actually very long, although definitely a full novel's worth of storytelling. So why don't you go ahead and give us a taste of what that sounds like.
Sarena Ulibarri
Sure, I'm just going to read a couple paragraphs kind of from the middle and from the backstory of how this city of Otra Vida in Death Valley was created. So just a couple paragraphs from that backstory.
It was my arrest that incited the riot. The crowd surged forward, shouting, shattering the sliding glass doors with chunks of crumbling asphalt. The two other Protectors let them swarm into the SuperMart.
A newsthread video of Nylah, Mikki, and several others carrying off the solar panels from the SuperMart's roof was what earned us the nickname that had persisted through the years: the Solarpunks. To save face, the California Council later claimed that they had already agreed to release the SuperMart to us and that the Protectors had been ordered via their headsets to stand down. That last part might've been true, but I like to believe that they had made the choice themselves.
After I was bailed out, I graffitied OTRⒶ VIDA➔ on the wall of the desalination plant, loaded the last of my things into an electric car, and my friends and I headed out into the desert to prove there were other ways to live.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That's such a great scene. I loved how, I mean, so much of the novel is very evocative, but that was very resonant, of course, with a lot of the protests that we have going on, not just with climate, but various social justice issues for years. And I think it just was very, it felt very grounding to see that and go, okay, yes, this is very plausible, which we've talked about on the pod before, this is kind of a key aspect of these stories. Because a lot of times people will dismiss hopeful climate fiction or “utopian” with scare quotes stories as being unrealistic. And you do so much good grounding work in this novel to say, no, this is very realistic. These are real people with real problems and real situations that we encounter all the time, even in our current timeline. And I think just did a great job of that.
Sarena Ulibarri
Thank you so much. Yeah, I think that I'm trying to show complexity and I think that science fiction is always, it's about the future, but it's always really about what's going on now. And so we're just laying out the issues that are happening in our current world and putting them in a slightly different context so we can see them a little clearer.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, and novels are such a great bucket or carrier bag, to quote Ursula K. Le Guin, for complexity. And that's the great power of novels, right? Is to get into that complexity that you can't do in a short story where you're kind of more limited to one situation or idea or something. And you really, really went deep with stuff. So that's fantastic. And like I said, there's so much going on that it's hard to pick up like one thread that I would like to talk about on the pod, but we don't have infinite time. So I will try to narrow down. And like there's this whole civil war that happens. It's just like whoosh in the background. So and then we're onto the main events. So like there really is readers, there really is like a lot here for you to feast upon. So I look forward to that for you to experience.
The thing that I would like to focus on was more the conflict and the depths of the story about utopia. So you've got this utopian thing in Death Valley, and they're trying to very intentionally set up a society that is different, classless, leaderless, and of course, there are struggles there. And of course, one of the knocks on utopian stories is always like, where's the conflict? Where's the story? Which is always hilarious, deeply funny in a dark way to me because I'm like, there's so much conflict, especially when you're talking about climate stories, which is just like, I don't know, it just affects everyone on the planet in every possible aspect of their lives, but what could possibly be a source of conflict there? So anyway, you've done a great job of that and showing how humans work, all different kinds of humans.
But your characters are striving for utopia, and that's not an easy road to walk. And you actually cite Peter Kropotkin, I'm not probably saying that correctly, but him and other theorists about anarchist societies in your acknowledgments. And so what I would like to have you do is tell me a little bit about how you used those nonfiction political theorist resources for inspiration for your utopian society and what ultimately you hope readers will walk away with from this novel thinking about or struggling with.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah. So just to go backward a little bit with what you said about the conflict and how people have trouble like figuring out how they're going to have conflict in a story about climate change. I think it's kind of that climate change is so pervasive and it does affect so many aspects of our lives that if we say, we solved climate change, then people are like, well, what's left? It's like, if that's fixed, well, then everything's fixed. Right. I think that it is a lack of imagination, of course, and nothing is that simple. But I think that's kind of where it comes from. It's like it is so pervasive.
Anyway, but regarding the theorists, so Peter Kapotkin is a really interesting Russian philosopher who wrote about anarcho-communism. And I don't remember how I came across him, but I discovered him probably in about 2016, 2017, something like that. There's this meme that I saw a long time ago that's a cartoon of a woman wearing like a Bernie Sanders pin and finding The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, picking it up. And then the next panel is she's like totally got like an anarchy symbol and like, you know, transformations, like you were already inclined to this idea and then now you're totally radicalized. And I feel like I was kind of that cartoon.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I think you weren't the only one, just to jump in to share a funny story. Cause my first encounter with Peter Kropotkin, however you say it, was exactly through the Conquest of Bread. And I still haven't read it, like the whole thing, like I kind of just glanced at it, but it was through my middle child who was that meme. Started out like Bernie fan. And then they were like, Mom, just one day out of the blue, Mom, have you read The Conquest of Bread? I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about, but say more. I often say my kids have radicalized me and I feel like anyone who's a parent of Gen Z, if you're like actually paying attention to what your kids are saying and doing, they will tend to radicalize you, but that's neither here nor there. Okay, back to you. Tell us more about your discovery process and radicalization through this.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, that's awesome. So yeah, I just I devoured it. And it's a really interesting vision of what society could be. And it showed like just what was possible. And it also created this sense of grief for me, sort of like, This is what they've taken from us. Like this this is what we could have. And you know, and it's not perfect. There are issues with it and it was written a very long time ago. So it's not really transferable entirely to modern society, but there are some things in it that are just like, it could be this way and it could just be so easy. And so I definitely pulled… I think I was reading it while I was writing the first draft of another life in about 2017. And I just pulled several little, often it's little things that I pulled into the world building. Like there's something in there about having like a communal food source, like a place where everyone sort of tends and grows the food and everyone has access to that. But if you want your extras, you just do it at home. So there's things like that in the book where they have the farm towers that everyone has access to. Galacia mentions at some point that she wanted to go home and grab some of the peppers from her window box. You know, it's just like little things like that that got added in.
I think it was Kropotkin and also Murray Bookchin, social ecology and communalism. These were the two things that I was reading that were just really infusing my world-building and the way that I was thinking about how we could create a better society. And I have no illusions that it would be perfect society, but just how we could live differently and how we could live more sustainably. So there's a scene that's in the backstory where the characters are sort of driving through the desert and talking about what their ideal city, their ideal society would be. And I think a lot of what I was pulling from Kropotkin and Bookchin went directly into that scene. You could probably piece out the lines that are directly inspired in there, but it's infused throughout.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Just to jump in one more time and praise the book… I tend to write philosophical tracks myself into some of my fiction because a lot of that is… I mean, that's just what my books are about. And you do a nice job of bringing that in in a very human way and making it very understandable to the reader, because I think that's a challenge sometimes. Like you say, The Conquest of Bread was written a long time ago. It's very of its time, I'm sure. It might be not as relatable, although, you know, apparently to my sixteen year old, it was very relatable. So there you go. But yeah, I think that's a skill. And that's something that, again, is more accessible in the complexity level you can get into with novels, because you can have a scene where you're like, hey, let's have a discussion between our characters, which is totally a thing we would do as we're on our way to the desert and trying to figure out what we're actually trying to do here. So they're going to have that conversation. That's very realistic. And it's your chance to bring those concepts to resonance for the reader. So anyway, carry on. I'm just saying, great job. Carry on.
Sarena Ulibarri
Thanks so much. Yeah, there's one other that was pretty influential and that's Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. And the backstory behind how I discovered this was it was actually in early 2020. So I'd written several drafts of the book. I'd actually queried it to agents and then sort of put it aside. But I came back to it in 2021, but in early 2020, before all the shutdowns happen, I had a job that I really enjoyed the work. I really enjoyed the job and I had a lot of problem with the owner of the business that I worked for. Had a lot of conflict with this person. And I was ready to just like quit and go do something else. And I found a job listing for a bookseller for the Nonviolent Communication Bookstore. And I was like, that sounds amazing. What is this? And I should probably like learn something about this before I actually apply to it. And so I ordered one of their books and I read it and I applied for the job and then the shutdown happened. The pandemic started in America and the bookstore for that company actually like… I don't know, their local distribution center closed. And so the job was no longer available, but I had this book that I'd bought from them and they were still selling books just not through the same distribution method they had. So I had this book of nonviolent communication. I was like, you know what? I can use these tools to like, help me keep my current job and maybe learn how to communicate better with the person that I'm having conflict with. I did eventually end up leaving that job, but those principles helped me with that situation with some conflicts with my family. And I also, when I came back to Another Life to revise it and try to resubmit it again, I realized, well, Galicia is a mediator. She would be using these kinds of techniques. And so I looked at every interaction where she's like solving a conflict between people in Otra Vida. And I tried to sort of infuse the nonviolent communication language into that and just to try to put little pieces of that into the story and it becomes part of the world building because this becomes part of the paradigm of how they function. Even if they're not using the very specific language of nonviolent communication, it just becomes sort of the way that they interact with each other until they don't, right? And then, and that's part of where the conflict in the story comes is when that starts to break down.
Susan Kaye Quinn
And it's not the utopia where we've solved… like everyone is perfectly the perfect nonviolent communicator already. I did notice that and I'm like, Oh, this is like social worker language. I really like this. And that's one of the functions of books, too, is it models things and you're like, Hey, why? You know, it can kind of intrigue the reader of like, Why can't we have that? Almost like you were saying. The Conquest of Bread had for you this grief of Why can't we have this? This is good. Like it would be so much better and not even that it's like super idealized in a ridiculous way, but just like a better way of being human. And there's always those little pieces… like I say it's social worker language because I know social workers today who literally use those kinds of strategies, but it's not taught, you know, in our schools… well, not in all of our schools, some do. But it's culturally, it's not taught. Culturally, we're taught to be a very different way with people. There's such a depth to what has to change for us to get out of this mess. And I think that gets very overwhelming, very quick, which is, of course, again, why having a story about it helps people access that.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yes.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I didn't mean to cut you off there, if you had more you were going with that or should I move on to my next question?
Sarena Ulibarri
No, not necessarily. Yeah, we can move on.
Susan Kaye Quinn
OK, let's go to the next thing because it's kind of related. You know, we're talking about all these wonderful things that you can do with the novel and have done with novel. And yet novels are scarce in this genre and in this space. A lot of the genre is still in short fiction, which, again, you can get those little think pieces or those little challenging.ideas, but it's very hard... I mean, you can, of course, portray a full world in a short story. You just can't get into the complexity part of it as much. You can tease it, but you can't really dive in. And so I know that you yourself have curated and co-edited several anthologies of solarpunk works, not to mention being a judge at Grist Imagine 200. Sorry, not a judge. What's the right word?
Sarena Ulibarri
Story reviewer.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Story reviewer, thank you! Sorry about that. I was trying. So I know you know about this genre, what's out there pretty well, probably more than most because you've read a lot of what's being submitted and also what's being published. So I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are about what's going on here with the lack of published novels. Is it publishers are reticent to acquire these works so writers will shy away from even trying to write them because it's a bigger commitment. To sit down and write a novel when you don't see it out there getting published. You know, that can be a deterrent. Or is it because it's an inherently difficult thing to do, writing this kind of story in novel form, which is like, again, a much larger work? Is that dissuading people? Is that a mindset barrier? Like, what do you think is going on here?
Sarena Ulibarri
Yes, I actually have a lot of thoughts about this issue and some of them have to do with the genre itself and the publishing industry and some of them have to do with just like the larger cultural zeitgeist. So one thing I'll say about solarpunk is that I think it does lend itself very well to short fiction in terms of being a thought experiment. You know, if you're looking at a particular climate solution, a short fiction creates a great playground to just play with that idea, a great sandbox to just see what can I shape with this idea. And I think often it is sort of more satisfying to do that in a short fiction space rather than a full length. So yeah, I think it lends itself very well to short fiction because of being a thought experiment.
I think the longer you go, the more complex it becomes and that can be overwhelming, especially for someone who's a science fiction writer and it's like, I have to learn about all of these different things and all of these different issues that tie into climate change and it can be overwhelming to try to flesh out the entire world rather than focus on just a single thing. And that's true no matter what type of science fiction you're writing. That's why it is a challenging genre to write whether it's climate science or quantum physics or whatever type of science you're doing. And also it can be kind of preachy, right? Like when you're dealing with climate change and the changes that we need to make as a society, it's easy to fall into message fiction, right? And to be too on the nose, too direct. And that often turns readers off. And it turns writers off too, like when you get too into the weeds of that, it's not fun anymore.
So those are some things that I think are just sort of inherent to the genre that makes it a little more appropriate for shorter forms, maybe. Although there are some wonderful solarpunk novels and there are several that have come out recently. But you're right, they are very scarce. And publishers, the big five publishers have been very reluctant to use the term solarpunk and they are not publishing as much climate fiction as they were at a certain point. Becky Chambers is the one that got to use the term solarpunk, is really the only one that it's actually been in the marketing materials. There are plenty of other books that I consider solarpunk. Kim Stanley Robinson's, New York 2140 is one that I always go back to, Ministry For the Future. These are, these are solarpunk works, in my opinion. Stan does not like the term solarpunk. He does not identify it with it. It is not his label. You know, he says he writes utopian fiction. That's his term. So that's fine. But you're not going to see solarpunk on any of the marketing materials for his work. Cory Doctorow does use the term solarpunk for Lost Cause. But again, it's not on the back cover. It's not in the marketing materials. It's something like he'll say it on Mastodon, in person in a con, but the publisher is not identifying with it.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I did just recently, just to jump in, I went to his website and I was looking, because I haven't read Lost Cause yet, but I want to. And so I was looking on his website and I'm like, whoa, he calls it solarpunk, excellent. Because I hadn't heard it identified as that before. So it slid under my radar for a while because I didn't realize… you know, he writes a lot of technology stuff. So I wasn't quite keyed into that. Now I am and I want to go read it. Just to touch back on your other point about who writes these stories. I think the people who are science fiction writers and are very comfortable writing the deeply complicated technological science fiction, like Cory Doctorow, right, will write things that are in their wheelhouse. So like, you know, he'll write about information technology stuff. And you know, he's a brilliant guy and he’s broader than that, but that's definitely one of his wheelhouses. And so he writes about that. If you're a more casual… there are a lot of scientists, a lot of engineers who write science fiction. They write about the spaceships that they've read about in their youth and those kinds of thought experiments. Not a lot of climate scientists writing fiction. I think more are starting to do that. Or people who are maybe not scientists, but activists who have a deep knowledge of what all the complexities are and are starting to maybe consider writing fiction. That's Danielle Arostegui who was on our pod earlier. So I'm glad to see that. And I think you're right that it can be daunting. I mean, like I have a PhD in Environmental Engineering and I had to do a heck of a lot of learning to be able to write it in fiction. Cause it's just like… you can't just know your one thing. You have to have this broader knowledge. And I think it was Danielle, actually, who made the point earlier that it's a great exercise, even for the people who are in climate but not doing fiction, to write the fiction part because it forces them to have the broader view. Like, wait a minute, it's not just my thing that I'm doing, which is super important and great, but how does it fit into the larger puzzle? So I think fiction helps, even the people who are working on it, it helps them, but it definitely could help the larger public. One of the reasons I think Stan's book took off so much is people are like, wait, here's a blueprint of how we fix everything.
Sarena Ulibarri
Exactly.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Why has nobody said this before? And of course it's just one option, and there's a lot of problems with it, which even he says. He's like, yeah, no, like I'm not actually endorsing the terrorism part. That resonates with me that we just don't have enough of the right people engaging in this work or the people who want to engage in it. It is a lot of work. It is a challenge. So I get that.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah, definitely. You're right. The people working in climate science aren't necessarily thinking of their work as science fiction, right? They're not thinking of it in even… there's a lot of climate storytelling, but it's not focused on the future in the way that science fiction traditionally is. So yeah, I think you're right about that.
Climate fiction as a genre sort of saw its peak in the 2010s, I think. And currently, some of it is still getting published. There's The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks Dalton, I think that came out recently. There's The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow. There are still really amazing climate fiction books being published by the big five publishers in New York, but there's way less than there was a few years ago. And it's very, very difficult to break in with climate fiction anymore. You do not see it on manuscript wish lists anymore. You do not see agents that are seeking that anymore like you did years before.
There's wonderful small presses that are popping up to fill that gap because there is still wonderful stuff being written and there is still a reader desire for this kind of work. But the big publishers aren't really buying it right now.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Okay, before you move on from that, because I've got like three questions already in my head and I will lose them.
Okay, so first is, I want you to name check those small presses, but not at the moment. In a minute, I want you to do that. Second is that when you say that it peaked in 2010s, what my head is saying, that's when the dystopian climate fiction peaked. And I think people did get... like, you know, they're looking out the window and they're like, I'm living the dystopia. I don't want to read about it. Or at least not that dystopia. And so the denialism and all that kind of stuff surged in concert with the increasing advent of heat domes and terrible storms and flooding all of Pakistan, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think people were not that excited about reading about the end of the world in a climate sense anymore. And so I kind of get that from a reader standpoint and then I can see the publishers following that.
What I don't understand is why, when we do have this buried subgenre of hopeful climate fiction, which is the thing that I think people really do want, why are the publishers resistant to that? Or do they just not see it? Do they not understand that it exists? Is not enough of it out there? Like, what do you think is really going on there? And then we can get back to the small presses.
Sarena Ulibarri
I'm not entirely sure why the publishers are resistant to it. I mean, I have some speculations, but yeah, I'm not entirely sure. But in terms of just the cultural zeitgeist of climate in the 2010s, so yes, what you're saying is all true that, I think a lot more people started to feel the effects of climate change in their everyday lives and started to see it more clearly. And that did lead to a lot of the fear and the dystopian visions and things like that. But what also happened in the 2010s was this radical drop in the price of rooftop solar and a radical increase in the installation of solar. I mean, if you look at the graph, it is really drastic. There was like a silicon shortage in 2008 coupled with the recession, but then 2010, it's like boom, it was exponential for solar. So there's the solar aspect and there was also the reintroduction of electric vehicles. We have had electric vehicles in the past that have been either just crowded out by gas powered or actively suppressed. But in 2010s, the electric vehicle started to become more of a reality. So at the same time, we have this increase in climate disasters and a more awareness of climate change. And every decade has groups of people that are becoming aware of climate issues and of environmental issues. And so, I'm not going to pretend like it was brand new in the 2010s, but it was becoming more obvious to people. And we suddenly had some of the technology to address this and that was becoming more common and more available to people. And so I think there was, there was a fear and there was also the possibility. And that was really active in the 2010s.
Now that we're halfway through the 2020s, almost, electric vehicles are slowly just making their way onto the road. More common. And rooftop solar is just common now. And so these things, became reality, but not in a real revolutionary way. It's like kind of a quiet encroachment. And all of the progress we're making with things like that is also being sort of canceled out by things like AI and cryptocurrency and all these tech things that are creating massive carbon emissions and using water at an unsustainable rate, things like that. And also governments of emissions producing countries especially have proven that they're just not going to do the work that they need to do, they're not going to make the the changes. So I think there was this sense of urgency and possibility that was happening in the 2010s that now has devolved into a kind of weariness where it's like things are changing not fast enough and also other things are just kind of canceling it out.
Part of that is behind the decline in climate fiction, where, like you said, it was very dystopian. And dystopian fiction is supposed to be a warning. It's supposed to be, okay, if this goes on, this is where we'll end up. So that's supposed to inspire people to do something different. And instead, we just get this weirdness.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That's a very interesting observation. And I just wanted to feed that back to you and saying, I hadn't put that together. I got solar on my roof and two EVs in my garage. And I did not quite put together that connection between… as it got worse, all of a sudden we had on the horizon the tech solution. And then people are like, well, yeah, sure, it's getting worse, and then there's fear and anxiety about that, but we’ve just got to wait because it's going to solve itself, which is really what the tech optimist approach is. We just got to wait. It'll all solve itself. The system is self-correcting. We will invent our way out of this, et cetera, et cetera. And that didn't happen, at least it doesn't seem like we're really making the kind of progress that we need to make and/or now people are very muddled about it.
So I can see that having an impact on climate fiction. I can certainly see that killing the dystopian climate fiction outright. I still believe that the hopeful climate fiction is offering an answer to that muddle. But I can see that we are still very young, early days in that sort of reckoning and understanding in society. Like I'm there, I'm ready. But it takes a while for people to kind of catch up with, okay, but now what? If that's not gonna be the solution or like… do we just still wait more time? Or now are we just dispirited and despairing and it's never gonna work? Or I just gotta go get groceries. So like, I just go on with my life and... you know, so I guess I'd like to hear from yoy: Where do you think this is going? Where are we headed with this now?
Sarena Ulibarri
Well, I mean, I think that solarpunk and other types of hopeful climate fiction do try to push against that weariness of like, well, you just got to wait or well, I guess it's not going to work. That's the punk part of it. That's the saying, well, we can't just wait around for the tech bros and the governments and all these people at the top to make these changes. We need to start organizing grassroots up. And that's some of the grittiness of solarpunk and of hopeful climate fiction. I do encounter people that are just resistant to that very idea. They're just, they're too enmeshed in the other trajectory. I think it's an issue of imagination. That's the whole premise of these genres. We have to be able to imagine where we're going in order to figure out the road to get there.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yes, absolutely.
Sarena Ulibarri
There are, like I said, wonderful small presses that are doing this work. My book is published with Stelliform Press, which is a Canadian small press focused on climate fiction. Some of it is like eco-horror and a little more dystopian, but some of it is very hopeful and very interesting and complex stuff.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I know it's a very short list. We're big fans of Stelliform here. I've been watching them for a while and what they're publishing. And then of course your book came out and I'm like, okay, tracks, Stelliform is doing great work.
I will call out Metamorphosis—Metamorphosis is my anthology that's coming out in the fall, with a story of mine that was published originally by Grist, and it's a collection of Grist stories, but it's published by Milkweed Editions.
Milkweed Editions doesn't actually publish a ton of fiction. They publish a lot of poetry and they publish a lot of nonfiction, but here we are, you know, starting to do this. And so I'm like hopeful to see even more of that coming out of perhaps Milkweed Editions.
Sarena Ulibarri
Is that the same publisher that did Braiding Sweetgrass?
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yes, it is. They are wonderfully, their whole charter is very interesting. They're a nonprofit. And so they have a mission that is very much bound by their nonprofit status. And I'm a big fan of their work too. The stuff that they're going out and finding. And this is where you mentioned earlier you had a small bookstore that had introduced you to, like the whole bookstore was focused on nonviolent communication or relationship management. And that's one of the things that has happened in the last decade is this rise of small bookstores that are very, very niche. They're very into their thing. I have a bookstore out in New Jersey that I helped kickstart called The Nature of Reading that is all about nature and climate and environmental stuff. I'm like, amazing, I want this to exist here, take some of my money and make it happen.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah, I also back them.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yes, right? And it was just so amazing. And so the proliferation of that, I see that mirrored in the small presses, where you get this proliferation of small presses that are fulfilling that need. And when I look at those, I go, huh, that's grassroots. That's what that is. And that's how it's gonna happen. Or at least, that's how I see it happening right now. I feel like Hollywood and the Big Five are gonna be the absolute last people to figure it out. But I think a lot of other people are figuring it out. And I think it's kind of burbling down here in the grassroots level. People are not waiting. They're just like, okay, somebody's gotta do something and that somebody's me.
And so now I'm going to do the thing. And I think that's fantastic. And of course, that's why I'm doing the pod. It's why I'm trying to surface these stories. This is my little grassroots effort. But it's dependent on people like you writing them. So if you have any more, and those people will be more willing to write if they know where they can get it published.
So if you have any other small presses that you think are open to these, to novel length works especially like let me know and or say it now or let me know later and we will definitely get that surfaced.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah, like my brain is totally going blank with others. One other that I'm aware of is Future Fiction, which is run by Francesco Verso in Italy. And so he's not focused on English language works, but he's published some amazing solarpunk works in Italian and also translated between several other languages. So he's doing amazing work in the international solarpunk scene.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Fantastic. Yeah, and that's important.
Sarena Ulibarri
And I want to say too that like in terms of the big five and Hollywood being the last ones to get on this bus, I think that's probably true, but also I'm seeing it worm its way into things that are not explicitly about that. So, you know, I think, yes, a pure solarpunk novel is pretty rare. And yet I see solarpunk ideas in other novels. And I even in cinema too. Furiosa, the green place in Furiosa is a thousand percent solarpunk, in its imagery and in its idealism. And is Furiosa a solarpunk movie? No, but it's got that image in it. It's got that idea as part of it. And I think that's actually maybe a little more powerful than having just a full utopian story or a full solarpunk story when we see it in other things because climate fiction and especially I think hopeful climate fiction… the readers of that are kind of a self-selecting group. We're going to be the people that are already interested in these ideas, already craving this kind of thing. And the people that are just like, well, that wouldn't work or I'm tired of hearing about climate change or whatever, they're not gonna pick that up. They're gonna see that premise and say, yeah, not for me. But if they see a story that's focused on something else, and then in the world building of that story or within that, they get little pieces of this hope, I think that's actually pretty powerful. And I think there's a lot of that happening within publishing and within film right now.
Susan Kaye Quinn
No, that's an excellent point. And I've talked before about that only from the viewpoint of hopepunk. So not necessarily explicitly just with the climate aspect to it, but like hopepunk type tropes and cooperative rather than competitive and, you know, radical compassion concepts like that. Seeing that a little bit smeared all over stories everywhere. Why? Because it's fresh.
Sarena Ulibarri
Right.
Susan Kaye Quinn
And I do believe that, if you're just like a standard old storyteller for, you know, whatever mainstream presses or Hollywood, and you're looking for something fresh, you're looking, you're going to rummage around in the hopepunk bin or now the solarpunk bin and come up with something like, Hey, look at this fresh storyline that we've never heard before because we relentlessly do the opposite of that. Let's use that for a change. So like, yeah, I'm a hundred percent behind that.
At the same time. I feel like the grassroots publishing, whether it's self -publishing or small press or the short fiction market, all of that is the cauldron of innovation. That's where stuff is being created out of whole cloth. And we're learning how to tell these stories. We're creating the things that somebody else is going to notice and say, hey, that's fresh. I'm going to take that. Well, we're creating it here first. Maybe that's the synergy. Maybe they will eventually, you know, be 2035 and there will be like a full solarpunk movie coming out as a summer blockbuster. And people will be like, yeah, that's old hat now, man. Like, you know, we've been reading those forever.
Sarena Ulibarri
Right.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I almost feel like a reluctant hipster. I don't want to be a hipster. I want to be mainstream, but no, we're not ready for that yet. But you're right. And thank you for pointing that out because that is a very, very valid point. You come in sideways and you make a lot of impact that way. All right.
I wanted to move on to my last question because I feel like we could talk for more than an hour and I try to keep this to an hour. So I'm going to zoom ahead and tackle this last question and then we'll have our rapid round of three questions that I usually do.
So earlier in the pod, we had Ana Sun and we discussed her story, Nightfowls, which is in Solapunk Creatures, the anthology that you co-edited. And...there it is! Serena Ulibarri is showing me the cover. I will put that cover in the podcast. So it's a beautiful cover, by the way. I absolutely adore that cover. It's very vibrant. Anyway, that story, Ana's story, was absolutely fascinating to me. But I haven't had a chance to read the rest of the anthology. And I know that Solarpunk Creatures as well as another anthology you co-edited, Multi-Species Cities, both examine the non-human or the more than human, as you refer to it, characters and protagonists from the natural world, alongside the humans who are adapting to climate change.
So as it happens, I just happened to finish reading The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger, which isn't climate fiction, but it's an absolutely amazing read, I totally recommend. It's a wild nonfiction examination of the controversy among botanists, of all people, right now about whether plants have intelligence or a kind of plant language or even whole plant community survival strategies. And this is sort of like, you think about Finding the Mother Tree and fungi networking, that sort of concept has been in the zeitgeist for a while now. But this is like next level. They're talking about all plants and what are the mechanisms by which this is actually happening. It's just absolutely fascinating stuff. And I devoured it because I'm writing a novel that has to do with plants, has to do with renegotiating our relationship with nature, which is one of the themes of the pod, but also seems to be top of mind right now, not just in the science world, but in fiction with you and these anthologies that are looking at the more than human aspect and what is our relationship to those.
So when you were editing the anthologies, because you've obviously seen more than even just what's published, you've got all of these other sources, what do you find most illuminating, I guess, or interesting about these kinds of stories? And I would love to hear your recommendation for within those two anthologies. Like what's the next story I should read? Because I've loved Night Fowls. Tell me the next one that would be like on your list to recommend.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah, sure. Yeah, Night Fowls is a wonderful one because it's dealing with communication with birds and the conflicts within birds and also human stewardship of nature and things like that. So it's wonderful. Another one that I think you might like is called Our Minds Share a City by Katherine Yates. And this is it's got a similar kind of premise where a person is elected as a sort of representative to go commune with the mycelial network. And so the person is sort of going into this fungi network and engaging with the collective consciousness and yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
No, that sounds excellent. I definitely need to read that.
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah, so I think a lot of the stories in both of these anthologies have to do with communication between humans and non-humans and struggles of that and what is our responsibility when it comes to nature? What does stewardship actually look like in a multi-species setting, in a multi-species approach?
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, no, that's super fascinating to me. And also what was sort of the theme of The Light Eaters, strangely enough, because it was about the beingness of plants, how they have their own, they're not humans and we're not anthropomorphizing them by saying that they have intelligence the way we do, but they have sensation, they react when harmed, they send out signals to protect themselves from enemies, they recognize their own kin, they try to do better for their children. It's like, it's really hard to get away from the analogies to human behavior. And you see it reflected in something that is very much what we've categorized as not human. And I think the blurring of that boundary… If we're going to renegotiate a relationship with nature, we have to understand that there is a relationship at all. And what is the moral quality of the other half of that relationship? And how do you define that? And how do you construct rules and societal ethics around that? You know, plant ethics.
Okay. I mean, we don't even do ethics well with humans, much less animals, and now plants?
It's just radical enough that I think it starts to really get at and challenge a lot of fundamental ideas. So, and I think the whole fungi, mycelial network, there's this secret invisible network that connects the entire world to one another. It's such a resonant zeitgeist concept, right, in our world now that we're all connected.
Sarena Ulibarri
Mm-hmm.
Susan Kaye Quinn
So that's pinged so hard for people. And it's been fascinating to me to watch, like, people get so excited about fungus. I'm like, what is happening here? What is happening? And now I'm like fully on board with that. And, you know, getting into it in other ways. But I'm really looking forward to reading those two anthologies. I need to bump those up on my list. Because, like you're saying, it's, it is the relationship/ It's the communication that we have. How do we communicate? What does it mean? What is our responsibility as a human in that relationship?
Sarena Ulibarri
Yeah. There's so much possibility for storytelling with that question. There's just so much to explore. And a story from the Multi-Species Cities anthology that I recommend is one called A Life with Cibi. And Cibi is spelled C-I-B-I. It's a fictional creature that is sort of a plant, sort of an animal. You actually can walk around and you see a cibi, you can like take a slice off of it to eat. And the story revolves around, it's like a flash fiction. So there's hardly even a story to it, but it's just kind of a little vignette about a person who doesn't want to do that and who has a cibi and sort of just lets it wither. And that brings in that complexity, what you're talking about with the ethics of, okay, now we got to deal with plants. Well, it's not so simple as like, you know, as maybe PETA wants to say, like, we should, you know, never kill anything, right? And if now if we're dealing with plants, like, well, we can't do anything. We can't eat anything, right? It's not that simple. And this story shows that with like plants, some plants need to be pruned, some plants create fruit for us to eat. And if we're not doing that, we're actually not engaging ethically with it. And you can make that argument for certain types of animal stewardship as well. But it becomes very complex and it's just, it's not one, it's not black and white. Nothing is.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Now I'm super excited to go read those. I think you're right about it being such a rich category for science fiction storytelling. Like now we're right back in our wheelhouse. You know, we might not know anything about climate change and you know, what humans have to do to live in communes, but I'll tell you, we know how to deal with an alien substance.
Sarena Ulibarri
Sure.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Or an alien intelligence. We know what to do with that, or do we? But we know how to engage with that kind of storytelling. So in a way, it's almost like coming in sideways to… let's renegotiate that relationship with nature, but let's do it through science fiction. That's a great tool. I like that.
Sarena Ulibarri
And it's also coming back to just renegotiating our relationship with ourselves too, and our view of humans as separate from nature. Because really we think that we are this separate being, and in fact we are a product of evolution that has come from animals. We are an animal. We are also a collection of bacteria and a colony of creatures that have major influence on our consciousness and on our awareness of ourselves. So we are not a single separate being. We are actually very much a part of nature and we are a collective being already.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yes.
Sarena Ulibarri
So yeah, you say an alien creature, well, what's more alien than, you know, a virus, a bacteria, a fungi, these things? Well, they actually live inside us already. And yet they are the most alien.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right? It's like, I can understand why people are a little creeped out. We get into eco-horror pretty fast with some of those things if we want to go there. And we should. Absolutely people should.
Sarena Ulibarri
But does it have to be horror? Does it have to be horrific?
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right? And one of the more compelling… I mean, I was highlighting like crazy through this book, The Light Eaters, but one of the more compelling statements that she makes is that we're starting to think that… All of science says that evolution is the driving force for how things change over time, but there's a lot of evidence that shows that even more important than evolution, this sort of random genetic change thing or adaptation to the environment is symbiosis. And the time when a bacteria and a virus decided to get together and make plants, or the time when these microorganisms decided to live inside of us and inside of ourselves and inside of the inside of the bacteria that's in ourselves. Like it goes like all the way down this symbiosis that undergirds everything. And so when we made that work, we collectively, our little collective that we are, made that work… that is what queued us up for all these survival strategies.
Sarena Ulibarri
Hmm.
Susan Kaye Quinn
So arguably, that mechanism is more powerful even than evolution. So there's a lot of controversy, again, amongst the botanists. Who knew.
Sarena Ulibarri
There's conflict everywhere.
Susan Kaye Quinn
There really is. So just, again, deeply laughable that there's not conflict and drama in just about everything.
Well this has been delightful and I hate to wrap it up but we have to to stay under my hour. So we're going to go quickly through the three things.
First one, what hopeful hopeful climate fiction have you read recently that you would recommend?
Sarena Ulibarri
I mentioned The Light Pirates earlier by Lily Brooks Dalton. It looks dystopian on the surface, but it is actually quite hopeful in the long run. And then there's a book coming out in September by Lauren C. Teffoe, who you might have encountered with her book Implanted. She has a climate fantasy, I would say. It takes place in a secondary world, but it is very eco -fiction, very climate fiction. And it's called A Hunger with No Name by Lauren C. Teffeau. I was lucky enough to read an early draft of it and an arc of it, but it is coming out in September from University of Tampa, Opress.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Nice. Okay, great.
What do you do to stay grounded and hopeful in our precarious and fast-changing world?
Sarena Ulibarri
I look at birds. I look at flowers. I help them grow. Really, there's an initiative in my city to plant 100,000 trees. I don't know in what time period, but we're trying to plant 100,000 trees in our desert city. And I've volunteered with them multiple times. It's a really inspiring way to go out, actually get my hands dirty and be around other people who are actively trying to bring betterment to the world. There's a rewilding project that I like to volunteer with when I have the opportunity to. And when I can't do any of those, I go in my backyard and I make sure the birds are fed and I plant native wildflowers and things like that, that bring beauty to my space and also help all of those other species that we share the world with.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Engaging with the world in a positive way. I love it. All right.
What is, and finally, last question, what is next for you? Are you working on another novel? Please say yes. And any hints you can tell us what that's about, if so, or what do you have going on?
Sarena Ulibarri
I have several projects that I'm working on, as I think most writers do. There's one that is in very early stages. I don't know if it's gonna be a novella, novel, et cetera, but it is dealing with fracking and the horrible things that fracking can do in Oklahoma, which is a place that I lived several years and that now gets earthquakes. We didn't have earthquakes when I lived there, but fracking has now made it quite the seismic zone. And so I have this idea about a character who has birth defects and chronic pain and things like that caused by exposure to fracking chemicals and who is caught, who finds herself caught in a time loop, you know, a Groundhog Day kind of thing where, or the same days keep repeating over and over with a fracking induced earthquake at the center of that and trying to figure out how to get out of this cycle. So that's the longer project that I'm working on and it's still pretty early.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Sounds fascinating though, can't wait to read it. Hopefully you will decide to finish that and get it out in the world because we need more Sarena Ulibarri stories. Thank you so much for being on the pod. I super appreciate this and have so much enjoyed our conversation and your insights.
Sarena Ulibarri
Thank you so much.
LINKS Ep. 14: Imagining Another Life with Author and Editor Sarena Ulibarri
Solarpunk Summers edited by Sarena Ulibarri
Solarpunk Winters edited by Sarena Ulibarri
Solarpunk Creatures (co-edited by Sarena Ulibarri et al)
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri
The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks Dalton
Metamorphosis anthology published by Milkweed Editions
Rewriting the Future (Susan Kaye Quinn, DreamForge Magazine)
Multi-Species Cities co-edited by Sarena Ulibarri et al.
Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
A Hunger with No Name by Lauren C. Teffeau
PLEASE SHARE
Tiktok, Facebook, Mastodon, Instagram
Ep 14: Imagining Another Life with Author and Editor Sarena Ulibarri