Interview with the winner of the Imagine 2200 competition Jamie Liu

Grist's Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors short story contest celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress. From 1,000 submissions, our reviewers and judges selected the three winners and nine finalists you will discover in this collection. These stories are not afraid to explore the challenges ahead, but 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 welcome you into futures that celebrate who we are and what we can become — and, we hope, inspire you to work toward them.

Jamie Liu wrote To Labor for the Hive, the winning climate fiction story for Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors. In the story, a beekeeper finds a new sense of purpose and community after helping to develop a warning system for floods.

Read all 12 stories in the 2024 collection, or listen to audio recordings of each story.

Illustrator: Taj Francis

Grist: How did you end up writing a story for the Imagine 2200 contest? 

Jamie Liu: I’ve always written stories, and since high school, I knew I wanted to center my career around the environment. But strangely, I didn’t think to incorporate environmental themes into my stories until the past few years. When I started venturing into climate fiction, I went the route most writers probably do, which is to create dystopian worlds and authoritarian governments. Coming across the Imagine 2200 contest was one of the first things that made me consider writing a hopeful story, and that suddenly seemed more interesting to me because of how it would challenge my imagination.

What sources of hope inspired you for To Labor for the Hive?

Jamie: Community and people power! Even when those in power prioritize wealth over humans and nature, it gives me hope to see people who care, who are trying to help, who feel angry and helpless like me but still find the strength to do something. I volunteer with Sunrise Movement NYC. We’re not here because we get paid. We’re here because we seek human connection, and want to be in solidarity with our communities, and share a vision where humanity works together to achieve the just and sustainable future we want.

What challenges did you face while writing your story?

Honestly, the research was a big one. Even though I have climate expertise from my job, I chose to write a story about bees, which I know very little about. And research can be fun, but it’s also intimidating, because I don’t want to get anything “wrong”. In the end, I did the best that I could, while accepting that this is fiction and we can bend the truth a little. Progress is better than perfection.

On a bigger note, coming up with a story idea was also challenging. If I wanted to write about an ideal future, where would the conflict come from? I had to rethink my preconceptions of conflict and utopia, and I started to see loneliness as a theme that took center stage. It drove the conflict for Huaxin, my main character, who isolated herself after being hurt, and began to see herself transform after reaching out to her community. Themes of loneliness also shaped the ideal future being built in my story – as we work toward a just transition, we can’t leave anyone behind.

Illustrator: Stefan Grosse Halbuer

Did your real world environmental expertise influence the story you ended up writing? 

My day job is in climate resilience, and I’ve worked with an international aid agency that carries out resilient food security activities. One solution I came across often was early warning systems, which distribute messages to communities prior to extreme weather events (like floods or heat waves) so people can prepare. Governments often trigger messages when some climate indicator, such as rainfall or tide gauge levels, reaches a certain threshold. But early warning systems are more effective when the affected communities are a key part of the planning and implementation process, and I wanted to emphasize the necessity of that local knowledge in my story. I also wanted to incorporate nature-based solutions, and in my mind, part of that means repairing humanity’s relationship with nature and learning how to listen.

Volunteering in climate organizing also has a large impact on my writing. I adore the idea of resilience hubs – I think so often how having a dedicated, multipurpose, free physical space could accelerate movements while also addressing issues of loneliness and inequity. It’s very hard to find spaces that are always available, safe and protected from climate hazards, and don’t force you to spend money to stay. Resilience hubs shouldn’t just be a place to get air conditioning on a hot day; they should be safe spaces to build community when nowhere else feels like home.

How do you balance fleshing out the practicalities of the climate solutions in your story with character-building and great storytelling?

I try to focus on just a few solutions, especially local ones, because that’s where change happens, and it shows readers what’s possible at a level they can influence. I especially love writing solutions that I desperately want to see in my community, because then it’s easy to get excited and use my creativity to imagine the most radical version.

I also choose solutions that match the aesthetic and themes of my story. This story was a lot about loneliness from abandonment and finding community, and how forming those connections can take a kind of work we’re not used to in a capitalist society and elicit discomfort we’re taught to shy away from. Pollinator relationships and resilience hubs are a great illustration of those themes.

As for character building, that’s one of my favorite parts of storytelling, particularly exploring character dynamics. Climate- and community-resilient futures offer so many unique relationship models to dig into. Solidarity instead of charity. Redemption instead of villains. Broad support networks instead of limiting care and love to blood relatives and romantic interests. Stepping outside of traditional tropes allows writers to really think about how their characters would live and react in a world with more just societal norms.

Speaking of characters, how important was your characters’ identity for you? How do you think about whose voices show up in your storytelling?

I center my stories around Asian-American and queer voices, mainly because these are communities I belong to. My story is set in China, and I’m Taiwanese-American, so I can’t say I know what it’s like to be a Chinese resident. But I also feel disconnected from most traditional American stories; classic diasporic identity crisis. A lot of Asian-Americans my age are children of immigrants who grew up with a survival mindset and were taught to assimilate, and now we’re realizing we need to be part of the fight to build a more equitable future for all marginalized populations. Reading Asian stories by Asian authors, even if they’re based in a homeland we can no longer call home, is one way of trying to explore our identities and futures – especially since, for a long time, we only saw ourselves in stories written by white oppressors.

I’m also just another queer kid trying to find my chosen family. Queer people have been building non-familial support networks for ages, and that feels much more nurturing to me than the nuclear family model. I don’t want kids, and I don’t want to prioritize romantic relationships as the ultimate form of connection. In my story, the relationship between Huaxin and Anshui is queer – it’s somewhat platonic, somewhat romantic, and they form a strong connection even though they never see each other, and Huaxin never learns Anshui’s gender. Their relationship also helps Huaxin find her chosen family. If I’d seen more examples of that queer community-building growing up, I would have felt less helpless about my own future.

Has reading and writing climate fiction fed back into how you approach your climate work? Has it changed how you think about climate solutions at all?

I think reading and writing climate fiction has energized me and sharpened my focus when I do climate work. Climate goals can be abstract – we can say we want reduced emissions and more green space, but what does that actually look like? Climate fiction tries to answer that question. When we can visualize our future, suddenly it seems easier to get there. And when we compare that future to the reality we’re experiencing now, suddenly it feels more necessary than ever to work toward that future, as much as we can.

Jamie Liu (she/they) wrote To Labor for the Hive the winning climate fiction story for Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate fiction contest from Grist. Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress. Read all 12 stories in the 2024 collection.

Jamie is a writer, climate resilience planner, and climate activism volunteer. She was born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley, California, and currently lives in New York City. This is their first published story.

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Solutions Spotlight

Here, Donna M Cameron shares an extract from her novel The Rewilding. This shows the presentation of hope while 'maintaining the gaze'. Despair is our greatest enemy. It is leading to increased distraction and despondency. Below is one of the examples of hope as presented in The Rewilding.

'It’s bad. Actually, it’s worse than bad.’ Yet a smile springs into Will’s eyes. ‘But you know what? I met an astronaut – a real life, “I’ve been to goddam outer space”, astronaut. He sat next to me on the plane back from New Zealand. You know what he told me?’

‘What?’

‘The first time he saw Earth from space, he burst into tears. He said, every astronaut who’s seen our planet from afar has had the same reaction, because it’s like a living jewel in an oasis of dead planets. He said, you can actually see it breathing. And that’s why he’s not worried about the climate crises. He said the Earth is a living thing that responds so quickly to us, once we change our behaviour it’ll change with us. Wish you could have met him. He was bloody convincing. He talked about the ozone layer back in the 1980s, how it was so depleted the whole of humanity was at risk – and how once there was a worldwide ban on every substance causing the holes in the ozone, within months it started to heal. Months. The Earth responded immediately as a direct consequence to human action. He said, as soon as we change our behaviour, the Earth responds because we’re part of the whole bloody system. He reckons within weeks into the COVID pandemic, the rivers cleared, the air cleared. In India they could see the goddam Himalayas from parts of India where they hadn’t seen them in decades. It only took weeks.’

Will speaks with such passion, Jagger almost laughs. ‘Oooh, there’s a smile. Now we’re getting somewhere. And you know what? We don’t even need to wait for all of us to change. This Erica Chenoweth geek, a political scientist at Harvard, claims that once 3.5 per cent of the population is on board, change is inevitable – a domino effect. It’s already happening, so fast we can’t even see it.’

Jagger wishes he could share in Will’s excitement, but his morning reading about feedback loops has created its own feedback loop of despair.

‘We’ll turn this around,’ says Will. ‘We’re doing it already. They’re literally making power out of air – they’ve discovered this enzyme in the air that turns hydrogen into electricity. Regenerative farming practices are on the increase – food forests are replacing monoculture. There’s a growing pressure on the fossil fuel industry to decarbonise. They already know how to do it. And there’s big movement among the private sector, companies divesting overnight. Now’s not the time to get depressed – now’s the time to join the revolution! You should have seen how many marched in the last rallies. Biggest numbers in the history of the world. Believe me, mate, it’s happening whether those in power like it or not.’