The essay was written by Joey Eschrich, who is the co-editor of Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, a new anthology collection of speculative fiction, essays, and artworks edited by Eschrich and Ed Finn, publishing on December 2, from MIT Press. Here’s how the anthology is described by Eschrich:

We challenged our contributors, who represent 17 countries around the world, to envision hopeful futures shaped by climate action. These visions of the future are grounded in the scientific consensus about the severity and urgency of the climate crisis, but also in the cultural and geographic complexities of real places across the globe, and real communities on the ground.

The start of the third paragraph caught my eye, not at all surprising since The Steep Climes Quartet centers around Berkshire County, MA. “For me, the act of hope is easier when it attends to the local and the particular. The climate crisis is one vast phenomenon with which we’re all contending.”

Well, amen brother.

Eschrich continues preaching to my specific choir:

It kicks up chaos in disparate forms everywhere—a wildfire here, catastrophic flooding there; crop failures here, migration crises there—but it’s also a protean, or perhaps a tentacular thing. We’re all dealing with it locally, on our home turf, with our friends and neighbors. Climate stress and climate action are multifarious, which makes it easy to forget that we’re all in the same struggle together.

Some of the contributors—many, actually, is my guess, not having yet seen Climate Imagination, although the book is on order—hail from lands beyond America. It turns out that in lands other than the Western developed countries, talk about “climate fiction” is even less defined than the crazy quilt of pseudo-genre with which we westerners get to play. Environmental degradation, colonialism, and disparate cultures come into play, as one would expect. Hannah Onoguwe, who is rooted in West Africa, raises an interesting point:

I’ve found that with readers, when a story is rooted where they are, then it morphs into something that could be happening to someone they might have bumped into recently. When it actually resonates and the issues are close to home, they are more likely to be moved to action. It ceases to just be science fiction, something “out there” from the West created and consumed purely for entertainment.

Amen, sister.

Onoguwe addresses an essential dynamic in climate fiction. “I’ve heard some writers talk about jumping on this bandwagon of climate fiction just because it’s ‘trending’ and so, why not? Some are focusing on what publishers might be looking for, which might not always translate into actual care for the environment.” But her argument extends into the urgency of the crisis and beyond literary entertainment.

Yet Climate Imagination carries a subtitle: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures. There’s something of a cottage industry around climate optimism these days, and who can blame any so involved, but Gu Shi, who contributed two short stories, caught my eye. “City of Choice” presents a world where, “due to climate change, an annual ‘Flood Season’ arrives each summer, submerging the city’s roads, plazas, green spaces, and the lower floors of buildings. The protagonist, a mother who works as an urban planner, uses her professional knowledge to enhance the city’s resilience while repeatedly escaping crises with her three children, aided by artificial intelligence.” Shi’s take on optimism is that things can get worse, but we can take action. “I believe that this unwavering courage to never give up in the face of disaster is perhaps the greatest form of hope.”

Amen.

For Onoguwe, her novelette “Death is Not an Ornament” conjures up another Nigerian civil war for a hopeful climate future, because “much has to change besides the mindsets of stakeholders—it will require policies and institutions that ensure that countries are actually keeping their word when they make environmental commitments.” She continues:

To catalyze change, we will need people fueled by this radical passion who are also able to communicate in the local languages and proffer little everyday practices and manageable changes that work. I think if we turn away from purely economic considerations to a more nurturing outlook, then it won’t seem like we’re losing too many of the benefits and conveniences of the current status quo.

Civil war? Yikes. That’s quite a route to hope. I’m looking forward to reading this work, because, of course, in the end it is the writing that tells the tale.

But overall, the thing I’ll be most curious about is not only the grounded aspects of the anthology’s story settings, but whether or not these stories are temporally local, by which I mean near- and mid-futures that reflect the reader’s world. Future worlds are challenging from the writing perspective, but there lies a common problem with climate fiction: worlds decades and centuries past our own time may reflect consequences of climate change and even offer optimistic new worlds that have overcome or adapted to climate change. But, as they reputedly say in Maine, Yuup, you can’t get theyah from heah.

I’m inclined to consider that the most optimistic climate fiction is grounded in the world we recognize as our own but also shows how we can deal with climate change. Arguably, America under Trump is among the most pessimistic locales relative to climate change, even as many other countries find themselves leapfrogging fossil fuel infrastructure into clean energy. One can also argue that Trump will prove little more than a speed bump in America’s path toward the clean energy transition, but the real point is that in America, legislation is the biggest driver of the clean energy transition, even with Biden’s IIJA and IRA legislation getting killed in the crib. Economics plays another essential role, although the American concept of “free markets” is tainted these days when the concept of capitalism hope can seem dim and dimmer.

I’m most interested in stories that start here and end up there, moving from where we are and showing how we get to where we’re going. This is the story that needs believing.

The Steep Climes Quartet starts with Kill Well, set in 2026 (and, yes, believe me, I’m tempted to buy more time, but the first book is published and already revised to account for Trump winning a second term). Dear Josephine, also already published, is set in 2029. Over Brooklyn Hills is set in 2035, and the target publication is Spring 2026. The last book in the series, Farm to Me, is set in 2047, and this book is currently only pages of notes and the stories I tell myself about what this book will be. The series’ through characters live in one locale, although, of course, there are plenty of plot points and transient characters all over the place and all but the luckiest of us are already drowning in news. Nonetheless, climate change and climate change progress is seen directly and primarily through the Berkshires perspective.

Describing a path toward climate progress within a recognizable world for the reader is an act of hope, one grounded in today’s and tomorrow’s world where we live, with all the facts, political realities, societal struggles, business conflicts, household economic anxieties, personal relationships, and all the other big questions, just like in our very own lives.

The act of hope is showing how, with all our stuttering steps, we can get there.

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