Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Twenty-Six: the Bright Green Futures: 2024 Anthology
I created Bright Green Futures to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
Friends, I’m very excited today to announce the Bright Green Futures: 2024 anthology is live with preorder links and will be releasing on Earth Day, April 22nd. This anthology is a collection of hopeful climate fiction stories by the wonderful guest authors we’ve had on the pod and edited by yours truly. I’ve optimistically called it the “2024” edition because I’d love to publish more in the future, maybe even annually, capturing the kind of creative works being made each year by the talented authors writing in this new and growing genre.
I have a lot of fun things planned to launch this beauty into the world, but first, I want to tell you a little about the anthology itself.
The Cover: Botanical Illustrations
The cover was a whole fascinating project unto itself. For podcast listeners, the cover has a white background with green titling that says BRIGHT GREEN FUTURES, but the most striking thing is the illustrated flowers… and if you look closely, there’s a bur oak acorn and leaf nestled amongst them. As listeners of the pod might recall, I’m fascinated with libraries and how they prefigure a solarpunk future, and I’ve been touring around my local libraries and generally spending time in libraries over the last six months. You may also have heard me mention the novel I’m writing right now has a lot to do with plants. Those things all intersected last fall, when I was visiting Rhode Island, and I happened upon a library established in 1747 with a “garden room” filled with botanical books.
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The gorgeous old books I found there reminded me that I’ve always been fascinated by those beautiful botanical illustrations that have filled books for millennia. It’s only in modern times that we’ve become so disconnected from nature that we’ve become mostly plant-blind. For most of humanity’s history, knowledge of plants—which ones can feed us, which poison us, which are medicine, which are mind-altering—has been essential, even sacred, knowledge. And that reverence was put into the careful art-making that created so many botanical illustrations.
I’ve even found the pull myself: to sit with my new native garden and draw the plants as they go through their cycles of growth and flowering.
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So one thing led to another and when I discovered the BioDiversity Library had scanned all kinds of old books with botanical illustrations and made them free for public use, I decided that was the perfect thing for the cover of the first Bright Green Futures anthology. Inside the anthology, you’ll find a note about the selection process and the meaning behind the plants chosen. The print version is worth getting just for the full cover spread of these gorgeous flowers.
The Stories Inside
What matters most, of course, is the stories inside. There you’ll find six short stories plus a prose-poem by six authors who were guests on the pod in 2024.
When I solicited these authors to write for the anthology, I didn’t give them much guidance on what I was looking for beyond “hopeful climate fiction”—the simple fact that I’d invited them on the pod meant I had already pre-selected them as authors whose work I loved, who were talented, and who deeply understood the work we’re doing here in creating narratives that grapple seriously with climate change but also show a world worth fighting for. So I knew they’d create amazing stories, and as you will see if you pick up a copy, they do not disappoint. But there was also a kind of serendipity in the stories they chose to write: the stories somehow all fit together, each complementing the others but not overlapping.
Story Theme Words
Which brings me to some of the cool ways we’re going to showcase the stories in the weeks ahead. First, I’ll be bringing each author back on the pod for a short episode to talk about their stories and the themes they cover. I asked each author to pick a theme word connected to climate that reflected their story and you can tell the range of the stories from the theme words alone.
In story order, they are:
CLIMATE ANXIETY
CLIMATE RESTORATION
CLIMATE ROLES
CLIMATE CONNECTIONS
CLIMATE RESILIENCE
CLIMATE HERITAGE
So in our short episodes with the authors, we’ll be diving into each of those climate themes in the context of their stories.
Anthology Giveaway
But in addition, I asked each author to pick a giveaway item that fit thematically with their stories. That giveaway will be ongoing, starting now, through launch on Earth Day, April 22nd and ending at the end of May, so make sure you check the show notes for the link to enter. In each of the upcoming episodes, we’ll talk about the giveaway items and their connections to the stories.
FREE Stories
And finally, each week that we’re featuring the individual authors, their individual story will be free for a short time. That will give you a taste and hopefully inspire you to buy the whole anthology. Plus setting stories free is a great way to make sure there’s wide accessibility and visibility for the project as a whole. So you’ll be doing us a favor by downloading them. But you’ll want to make sure to subscribe to the podcast and/or the substack to know when that happens. And to hear these delightful short interviews with the authors.
Hope in the Darkness
I’m so grateful to these authors for creating these stories, for lending their talents to the anthology, and for all the work they do to build a better world. As all of us struggle with the uncertainties and instability in the world right now, it’s all too easy to shut down and despair… but despair is a luxury we cannot afford. We need to each use our talents and our unique situations to work against the darker forces loose in the world, bent on blindly destroying everything for profit and their endless greed, where there’s never enough power or wealth or cruelty to satisfy them.
The world doesn’t have to be like this. We can build something better. And when things are coming apart at the seams, as horrible as that feels and as real as the carnage is, that’s also the time to press even harder for change: to remember that truth has value, that people matter, that money is not the arbiter of all things, and that we have never needed kings.
The wannabe kings of the world need us, not the other way around.
And we need to remember what we’re fighting for: a more sustainable and just world, one where people can live and love joyfully, where we have clean water and clean air, where our children have a future.
I’m proud to publish these stories of a better world in this time of darkness and uncertainty.
It feels like just what we need.
These hopeful climate-fiction stories include clicky space centipedes, sentient trees, a flooded future Rio de Janeiro and characters trying to find their place in a climate-impacted world. Each story imagines a way for us to survive the future, together.
Bright Green Futures: 2024 contains six short stories plus a bonus prose-poem.
The Doglady and the Rainstorm by Renan Bernardo
What Kind of Bat is This? by Sarena Ulibarri
Centipede Station by T. K. Rex
A Merger in Corn Country by Danielle Arostegui
Ancestors, Descendants by BrightFlame
The Park of the Beast by T. K. Rex
Coriander by Ana Sun
If you preorder the print version through bookshop.org, you’ll be supporting small bookstores, and if you have a local Barnes & Noble, you should be able to walk in and order a copy there as well—that helps alert the bookstore that the anthology exists and maybe they’ll decide to carry it.
Once the anthology publishes on Earth Day, April 22nd, it should be available for your local libraries to pick up as well, in both ebook and print. Making a request that your library carry the anthology helps spread the word and make it available to more people.
Make sure to subscribe, enter the giveaway, and watch for our upcoming free stories of the week!
Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists for further reading. Also check out the new Academic Studies section.
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