I’m going to be one of the judges for Grist.org’s Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction Writing Contest. All the details on the contest and how to submit are here: https://grist.org/climate-fiction/imagine-2200-contest-submissions/
I’ve often heard from people that I write too many depressing stories about the future, and I understand that criticism.I firmly believe that science fiction can play a role in shaping a positive future by giving us ideas of how to live, what to build, how to construct societies, create new technologies, and how utilize current technologies in better ways.
I also believe that if all we write is apocalypse, we start to believe in apocalypse, even though it doesn’t yet exist, and doesn’t have to.
By imagining better futures, and by telling stories that allow us to exist inside of those futures– to imagine them, to believe in them– it allows us to lean toward them, to have faith that better futures can exist. These stories of smarter, more clever, more efficient, more inspiring futures, also give us the first parts of a map for building toward them. They point the direction for the work we need to do, whether as citizens, as engineers, as parents, as stewards of this planet, or as caretakers of one another, and they help us steer away from the futures we don’t want.
So send us your story about a sustainable technology, a sustainable culture, and a sustainable world. Help us lean into the future, instead of hiding from it. The deadline is June 13, 2023.
So get writing!
