Hopeful Climate Fiction

The purpose of Bright Green Futures is to surface hopeful climate-fiction stories. The links below will take to you recommended stories across various media, plus authors’ websites to find more. Please see Featured Stories for those discussed on the podcast.

Grist’s Imagine 2200 stories

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Visit Bright Green Future’s Bookshop.org Page to purchase paper copies on this list!

RECENTLY ADDED

• Halfway to Better by Susan Kaye Quinn

• Different Kinds of Defiance by Renan Bernardo (Android Press)

• A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity by Renan Bernardo

• The Orchard of Tomorrow by Kelsea Yu (Clarkesworld)

• Solarpunk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso

NOVELS/NOVELLAS/NOVELETTES

• Nothing is Promised series by Susan Kaye Quinn (also in German)

• Monk and Robot series, Becky Chambers (2022 Hugo Award) (Sue’s review)

• Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson

• Roots in the Box and Roots in the Bones by T.K. Rex (in Asimov’s Jan/Feb 2023)

• Foxhunt by Rem Wigmore

• Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell (finalist for Philip K Dick award, 2023)

• Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri (2023)

SHORT STORIES

• Solarpunk Drabble by Danielle Arostegui

• Grist’s Climate Fiction Drabbles (100 word stories)

• Susan Kaye Quinn: Seven Sisters, Rewilding Indiana, Tombs Without Bodies

• T.K. Rex: Holdout in the Northern California Designated Wildcraft Zone, A Lot Full of Weeds, Davu the Explorer and the Druid Tía Yara

• Renan Bernardo: Eight Steps to Steal a Yacht and Build a Hospital, A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity, Anticipation of Hollowness

• The Hilarious Inside Joke of Our Overwhelming Melancholic Nostalgia by Francis Bass

• The Orchard of Tomorrow by Kelsea Yu (Clarkesworld)

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

• Halfway to Better by Susan Kaye Quinn

• Metamorphosis collection (published by Milkweed Editions)

• Different Kinds of Defiance by Renan Bernardo (Android Press) including The River that Passed Through My Life (originally published in Portuguese by Editora Dame Blanche)

• Grist’s Imagine 2200 Collections (2021, 2022, 2023 Editor’s Picks, Best of Audio, 2024)

• Real Sugar is Hard to Find by Sim Kern

• Solarpunk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso

• Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World edited by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, Translated by Fabio Fernandes (World Weaver Press, English translation of the world’s first solarpunk anthology from Brazil and Portugal)

GRAPHIC NOVEL

• Shifting Earth by Cecil Castellucci, Flavia Biondi, Fabiana Mascolo

POETRY

• We Must Believe the Road Ahead is Full of Light, Lisa Timpf

• The Terraformer of Bigotry, Dawn Vogel

NON-FICTION or MIXED COLLECTIONS

• Rebecca Solnit, What if Climate Change Meant Not Doom— But Abundance? (Washington Post, 2023)

• Rewriting the Future: Thesis on Writing Climate Fiction, Melissa Aïnseba, Utrecht University, 2022)

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)

• Rewriting the Future (Susan Kaye Quinn, DreamForge Magazine)

• All We Can Save (ed. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Katharine K. Wilkinson)

• Write the Future You Want to Live In (Ana Sun, DreamForge Magazine)

• The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

• Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone

• The Art of Activism by Steve Duncombe and Stave Lambert

• Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger

ONLINE PANEL DISCUSSIONS

• Virtual Hopepunk Author Panel (Watertown Library 2023)

TV/MOVIES

• Strange World (2022)

• Star Trek: Discovery, Season 3

  • Many say all Star Trek is optimistic SF, but ST:DiscS3 is intentionally, conspicuously hopepunk.

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (2022)

GAMES

• Terra Nil (2023)

• Stray