Fighting for the future we want right now, building what we’re going to need

Two competition winners discuss their climate stories

Grist's Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors contest celebrates short stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress. These stories are not afraid to explore the challenges ahead, but ultimately offer hope that we can work together to build a more sustainable and just world. Through rich characters, lovingly sketched settings, and gripping plots, they offer futures that celebrate who we are and what we can become — and, maybe, inspire you to work toward them.

Rae Mariz and Cameron Neil Ishee wrote two of the 2024 finalist stories, “The Imperfect Blue Marble” and “Accensa Domo Proximi.” In this Q&A, Grist’s Tory Stephens, creative manager of the Imagine 2200 climate fiction initiative, talks with them about how storytelling is part of how they grapple with the realities of climate change, why it’s so vital to have hopeful climate fiction, and where they find inspiration in the real world. Their remarks have been edited for length and clarity.

Read all 12 winners and finalists from the 2024 contest.

Submissions for the next Imagine contest open soon. Sign up to be updated when the contest opens.

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TORY STEPHENS: Can you recall a specific experience or event that sparked your passion for climate fiction and storytelling?

RAE MARIZ: I remember what rekindled it. 2019, my daughter was 9 years old and wanted to know what the political poster we passed on the street meant. “The Climate Can’t Wait.” And I was like, “Oh my child, I have been waiting for this day!” Not really, but I was ready.

I joined her at Fridays for Future climate marches and demonstrations in Stockholm. At the time, people were calling the youth movement “inspiring” and “hopeful,” but I thought it was disgusting that adults—myself included—had failed these generations so badly that the children felt they had to take this problem on themselves. So that’s when I got that jolt of … this is a lack I’ve noticed, and this is a way I can contribute: Use my radical imagination and decades of analyzing how the climate crisis has been talked about, and failed to be talked about, and use my storytelling toolkit to help people visualize what we could collectively do.

CAMERON NEIL ISHEE: Hurricane Katrina leveled my father’s hometown of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, when I was 9 years old. I was a kid who read the newspaper, who went to my first protest in a stroller, but going down to Ocean Springs and picking through the rubble of my Granny’s house—the house my architect grandfather had built before his death—was an early experience for me of getting loss right up under my fingernails.

Unlike many families, we lost no life to that storm. What we lost was a place. All these years later, I still remember so many sensory details of that house—the fuzzy green carpet on the stairs, the ceramic alligator on the landing, the chunk of twisted driftwood mounted on the wall as a piece of art. Writing has always been my way of engaging with my emotions, and the feelings attached to these details needed somewhere to go. We all need to be doing something about what is happening to our world, but part of what I need to do for myself is narrativize what has gone on for myself and my family, so I can make a little more sense of it.

STEPHENS: What are the biggest challenges in using storytelling to communicate the urgency and complexity of the climate crisis? How do you strive to overcome these challenges?

ISHEE: I finished undergrad remotely during the pandemic, and afterwards I spent about a year living out of my car, on the couches and spare rooms of my enormous extended family and circle of friends. Dropping into so many other families’ movie and TV schedules taught me a lot about how people bring their whole selves to their experience of art: their expectations from genre, their hopes and fears, their intuitive attachment to or detachment from certain characters, their varying levels of familiarity with tropes and narrative patterns. I can write whatever I want, with whatever I have in mind, but that doesn’t mean my audience is going to be picking up what I’m putting down. I could put down an orchid and there’s somebody out there who’s going to pick up a lobster.

Ursula K. Le Guin uses the idea of “the wall” in her utopian novel The Dispossessed, both in the representation of a literal barrier between cultures and the barrier that exists within the mind, when belief comes to block out logic and reason and evidence. I thought about that in particular when I was staying with an aunt and uncle in North Carolina, who live on an island off the coast of Carteret County. I’d visited a local museum, and they’d had an exhibit on climate change that was all about specific impacts of recent storms. No connection to any of it as being anthropogenic, even as it examined the property damage and coastal erosion and decline of connected industries. It mommicked me, to use a local term. [Mommicked: flustered, frustrated]

In some ways it is easier to be helpless in the face of an unknown, instead of woefully unarmed in the face of known but overwhelming adversaries like the oil industry, or even bigger, the entire system of incentives and wealth that has gotten us into this in the first place. There’s not going to be an IPCC report or a snappy infographic that can bust through that wall, for most people. But art, at the very least, can hurl feelings one at a time over the top, and maybe some of it will land. Storytelling is a mechanism of coming at the problem of the wall from a different angle, and it’s an avenue I’m going to keep down, even at the risk of accidentally handing somebody a lobster.  

MARIZ: The challenge that frustrates me most is how hard it is to connect the writer’s story with its intended reader, and to do that quickly enough for whatever strange magic a story can work on a person’s mind to be relevant and effective.

For a climate story to communicate anything, it has to first exist in a form where a reader can find it. Putting aside that many publishing professionals “aren’t interested” in climate stories, if you manage to sneak one in and everything goes as planned, the timeline from book deal to book shelf is two years at best. And for a relevant climate story, so much has already changed by the time that story is available for a potential reader to pick up.

The first Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest was what inspired me to pivot to short fiction. I wrote about a future society organized like fractals found in nature and a culture focused on caring for each and every child. That story didn’t win that year, but I got to develop it into a kind of interactive fiction piece with the encouragement of an editor at khoreo magazine (“The Field Guide for Next Time” 2023). It’s the foundation for the world that “The Imperfect Blue Marble” takes place in, featuring ideas I’ve been working and reworking, trying to find the best way to tell this story and get the reader to meet me in that place.

Art by Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayo

STEPHENS: “The Imperfect Blue Marble” takes an unconventional approach to storytelling. Rae, can you talk about the techniques you used and why you chose them?

MARIZ: “The Imperfect Blue Marble” is the latest iteration (but I don’t think the final one!) of my attempts to find the most accessible way into this imagined future. There are subtle assumptions fused into the backbone of the story structures we’re most familiar with—a single “relatable” protagonist overcomes a series of obstacles for a satisfying resolution. That’s super simplified, but I don’t think repeating the expected story, even with climate-focused settings, is what’s going to help inspire the kinds of thinking and action that I hope climate storytelling can manage.

This is a deep cut, but I think about Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. He was talking about television and passive consumption of messages, and that passive part is what I want to get rid of. I want to create a reading experience that the reader has to engage with a bit from their own POV—no cheating and transporting yourself into a radical revolutionary protagonist to live out an escapist story for a moment.

At least, that’s what I’m trying to do … without frustrating the hell out of the reader. It gives me so much hope that people respond so positively to my mad scientist story experiments. That they take me up on the challenge and play along with me. It’s important to me to write stories that are playful and irreverent, fun and subversive. That whole “make the revolution irresistible” stuff.

STEPHENS: Across podcasts, interviews, and articles, I'm frequently asked why climate fiction often leans dystopian. How do you counter this tendency in your own narratives? And why?

MARIZ: This “dystopian lean” is why I sometimes struggle to even say that I write climate fiction. I think people assume that climate fiction is about loss and grief —which makes sense because a preponderance of climate stories published thus far have been writers working through their anxieties about climate change, which I often have a hard time connecting with. The emotional core gut-punch about climate breakdown for me is that it’s a PREVENTABLE crisis but is rarely presented that way. Those freak tornadoes and devastating cold snaps and flash-flooding aren’t “natural disasters” they’re manufactured catastrophes. So I get impatient with all the pre-emptive grieving. It’s still too early to be writing requiems for planet Earth.

ISHEE: Hope takes more effort. Mariame Kaba, working in the similarly grim and uphill-battle fight of prison abolition, writes that hope is a discipline, and that resonates with me. Hope is something you practice, on purpose. I often find myself saying to myself, “You’re not going to freak out about this, because remember, we decided not to.”

The reality of what is happening to our world is so grotesque, so I completely understand the writers and artists and activists who are venting this pressure and creating work that reflects their own despair. But I’ve learned that that is bad for me, personally. It puts me in a place I don’t want to be, where I can’t work. I lean away from it for myself as much as I do it for my work. I need to be looking for community, for solutions, for beauty.

MARIZ: I think dystopian fiction often tells the story of “what if this despicable structural inequality that traditionally affects Black and Indigenous, poor or disabled people happened to us!?” Gasp! Shocked face emoji! Could you imagine?! The “us” implies that the demographic of the voices most often listened to in literature—climate fiction or otherwise—are from people who haven’t previously suffered many systemic indignities outside of speculative daydreams. It’s also part of the popular climate narrative that wealthy people will be able to hoard their way through the coming crises, and that’s what I consider to be a naïvely hopeful climate story. Sure. You keep telling yourself that, buddy. If the planet is made uninhabitable, it’s made uninhabitable for everyone.

When I write about radically altered futures where extractivist capitalism has gouged out the ground beneath itself causing economies to topple into the void, or where state and corporate powers can’t maintain their artificial systems of civilized violence when the actual world is on fire or underwater or has its power lines toppled and infrastructure frozen, I’m not preoccupied with describing the loss of those systems. I focus on the possibilities of what kinds of social structures might be allowed to flourish without the constant onslaught of state and economic violence.

I get panicked thinking about how many people could suffer if alternative organizations of care aren’t allowed to be put in place before the sand runs out. Or the number of species irretrievably lost in the panicked last grasps for material wealth. We’re fighting for the future we want right now, building what we’re going to need. That’s what’s so frustrating about dystopian storytelling, our collective imaginations have been preoccupied with imagining that future. 

Art by Stefan Grosse Halbuer

STEPHENS: Cameron, your story “Accensa Domo Proximi” doesn’t shy away from presenting the challenges ahead of us, but ultimately offers a hopeful message.  What do you want readers to take away about the future and our ability to overcome adversity?

ISHEE: Looking around, it’s hard to have any faith in the efficacy of politics to legislate our way out, or private industry to innovate our way out, or academic research to connect discoveries to action, or nonprofits to navigate aid to so much as functionally address symptoms and never mind root causes, or, or, or. I read these thinkpieces where members of the establishment wring their hands over young people’s loss of faith in institutions, and I just roll my eyes. Of course we’ve lost faith in institutions. How do you think we got into this mess?

So what is left? Your community, and art. Let other people in, let them stand with you. When I spent time in Barre, Vermont this past summer in the aftermath of the third once-in-a-century flood they’d endured in the last 23 years, I watched people spit on the empty promises of the aid organizations parachuting in with their top-down mentalities, and turn to their neighbors for support. That’s something I can still believe in, because I’ve seen it. Crisis can be unifying, and we only have a chance if we have our unity.

My Granny passed away days after “Accensa Domo Proximi” was published, at the age of 101.5, exactly. Katrina was the second time she lost her entire home to a killer storm—in 1969, when my father was nine years old, Hurricane Camille swept their house into the sea. Gladys Rae Ishee was a teacher and education reformer who, in her old age, became fatigued by trips to the grocery store because so many people would approach her to tell her that she’d changed their lives. Memorably, a convict working on a road crew once flagged down her car, and introduced himself as a former student. She is what it looks like to stay, to rebuild yet again, to stick it out and love your people even when they make you crazy. I am so honored that she got to see my work, a reflection of the love and the grief of her community, published before she passed.  

STEPHENS: One final question: Besides your own story, was there another piece in this year's Imagine 2200 collection that surprised, inspired, or challenged you?

MARIZ: I was really into “The Long In-Between.” Beautifully written. I love re-building ecosystem stories and when feral pigs get a pat on their heads for their instinctive behaviors to help things grow. It’s a present day story that hints at a further future. 

I also think it’s worth the extra reflecting on why this was a present-day story about a heartbroken man—who admits he doesn’t know what he’s doing to restore the land—handing it over to a national preserve when he ends up in legal conflict with his neighbor, when it could just as believably be a present-day story about land that has been taken by national parks being returned to Native stewardship who do know how to restore the land. There are movements actively making this second scenario a true story. It should be told just as loud.

ISHEE: “A Seder in Siberia” by Louis Evans gripped me, as stories that grapple with what it means to be a perpetrator so often do. The world I live in is completely unable to meaningfully engage with violent men: varyingly, we excuse their behavior and allow them to continue their harm unchecked, or we throw them away into a brutal incarceration system that makes things worse by nearly every conceivable metric. It is truly utopian fiction to me, to imagine us doing something different. To imagine consequences for the people who have done both interpersonal harm and society-level harm in the face of the climate crisis, consequences that are not bent on revenge or rooted in punishment but are actually a piece of making things right again. It really embodies what the Imagine 2200 contest is supposed to be doing: providing creative solutions and giving us hope, while still honestly reckoning with the truth of this crisis. 

Read the Grist stories here.

Cameron Nell Ishee (she/her) is a writer and research program administrator most recently from Vermont, whose roots include the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This is the first time her work has been published, and she celebrated with chilaquiles (the best breakfast food).

Rae Mariz (she/her) is a Portuguese-Hawaiian speculative fiction storyteller, artist, translator, and cultural critic with roots in the Big Island, Bay Area, and Pacific Northwest. She’s the author of the Utopia Award-nominated climate fantasy Weird Fishes and cofounder of Toxoplasma Press. Her short fiction has appeared in khōréō magazine and made the shortlist for 2023 IAFA Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden with her long-term collaborator and their best collaboration yet.