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!

• Solarpunk Starter Pack on Bookshop.org

RECENTLY ADDED

• The Working by BrightFlame

• The Reclaiming Tradition of Witchcraft (BrightFlame’s website)

• Thank Geo by BrightFlame (Solarpunk Creatures)

• Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

• Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis

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 (2023 finalist Philip K Dick award, 2024 winner Ursula K. Le Guin award)

• Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri (2023)

• Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 - 2072. It's a long title, by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien.

• A Hunger with No Name by Lauren C. Teffeau

• The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks Dalton

• New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

• Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow

• Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta

• Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup

• The Working by BrightFlame

SHORT STORIES

• Danielle Arostegui: Children of the Sea, Solarpunk Drabble

• Susan Kaye Quinn: Seven Sisters, It’s in the Blood, Once and Future Kilowatts

• 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

• Jamie Liu: To Labor for the Hive (2024 winner, Grist Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors)

• Ana Sun: Anatomy of Emotion – The Carving of Chance – Seize the Moon, Shadow Among the Leaves, Soul Noodles

• Sarena Ulibarri: The Spiral Ranch, Walking Through Fog, Wandering Star

• BrightFlame: Thank Geo, When the Web Went Down, Maybe We Are All Witches

• Sanjana Sekhar: Cabbage Koora: A Prognostic Autobiography, GARMI

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

• The Climate Action Almanac

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

• The Orchard of Tomorrow by Kelsea Yu (Clarkesworld)

• An AI plots to take over a community’s solar power by Paolo Bacigalupi (Grist)

• Under the Grid: Detroit goes full-on solar in this fictional future by Andrew Dana Hudson (Grist)

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)—Submit to Imagine 2200

• 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)

• The Bright Mirror: Global Solarpunk by Women (Future Fiction)

• Solarpunk Summers edited by Sarena Ulibarri

• Solarpunk Winters edited by Sarena Ulibarri

• Solarpunk Creatures (World Weaver Press)

• Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales (Android Press)

• Octavia’s Brood by adrienne maree brown

• Multi-Species Cities co-edited by Sarena Ulibarri et al.

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

• Seeds of a Good Anthropocene website

• 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

• Doing Democracy by Bill Moyer

• Grist (Climate.Justice.Solutions), a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

• Dear Tomorrow, sharing personal climate messages

• The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

• The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins

• Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

• The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin

• Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

• How Forests Think by Eduardo Kohn

• Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

• Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis

• On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

• Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown

• Social Change Now by Deepa Iyer

• This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

ONLINE DISCUSSIONS/PANELS/VIDEOS

• Virtual Hopepunk Author Panel (Watertown Library 2023)

• Fascism and the Failure of Imagination video by Zoe Bee

• Solarpunk Author Panel launching Metamorphosis, NYC Oct 7th Recording

TV/FILM

• 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)

• Taryn O’Neill, producer of Scirens, trailer for the Climate Action Almanac: “The Assignment”

GAMES

• Terra Nil (2023)

• Stray

• Daybreak, cooperative tabletop game about the climate

CONFERENCES/CENTERS

• Pittsburgh’s Solarpunk Future 2024 expo

• Solarpunk Conference: Rays of Resilience, an online solarpunk conference on June 29^th 2024

• Climate Imaginarium, center for climate and culture

• Arizona State University, Center for Science and the Imagination (Bright Green Futures highlighted ASU’s Climate Action Almanac trailer in Episode 9)