The Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors short story initiative hosts a climate fiction competition that encourages writers from across the globe to envision the next 180 years of climate progress. The initiative also aims to showcase stories of creative climate solutions and community-centered adaptations, with an emphasis on uplifting voices and cultures from the communities most impacted by the climate crisis. The founders of the project were inspired and informed by literary movements like Afro-futurism and Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, disabled, queer, and feminist futurisms, along with hope-punk and solar-punk. Since this project centers on folk who are marginalized, oppressed, and on the margins, queer folk of all stripes have submitted stories, and a handful have either won or been a finalist over the past three years. The conversation below features three queer writers who had their stories published in the Imagine 2200.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length
Anya Markov (AM): I’m calling in from London. I live in a lovely communal, queer household. Altogether there were 13 people, including five kids. Sorry. So, I’m just coming from having dinner with my housemates.
Michael McClelland (MM): Wonderful. I am in Champaign, Illinois, which is not the most exciting place in the universe.
Ailbhe Pascal (AP): I love that we’re all in different geographies for this call. Before this, I was out canoeing on the beaver bond in the Mohican mountains to observe and decompress.
AM: Let’s start with the questions! What queer literature has helped you in big and small ways develop as a person and author?
MM: I don’t know if you guys know Randall Kenan’s work. He just passed away recently—a wonderful, Black gay writer who wrote a lot of realism but also magical realism. I discovered him at an early age. We didn’t have a lot of gay books in my hometown library, but his novel, A Visitation of Spirits, which came out in 1989, was there. It was a powerful book, and he influenced me from a young age. Kenan did such a great job of merging queerness with the environment, as well as family lives and ghosts.
And I love the trans writer Charlie Jane Anders, whom I’ve always appreciated. Reading writers like her somehow felt like it permitted me to write in the queer space.
AM: That’s a great list. I was just looking at some Charlie Jane Anders books on my shelf, and I think they might have been part of my list, too. I think there are some queer books that I read for comfort, not necessarily because they’re comfortable, but because they sort of reflect bits of things that might be familiar to my life.
“I like queer happy books. If they’re not necessarily happy, then their book leads to a happy place. I love that.”
And bits of kind of maybe wish fulfillment through stories and exploring how it is to get what we want and then to get what we want in the world that we live in, that’ll also sometimes hate us for it. I’m thinking specifically of a book called Dreadnought by April Daniels about a trans girl superhero who suddenly, as part of receiving her superhero powers accidentally from another superhero, also gets the body that she’s always wanted, and she’s navigating all of that. I’m also thinking of Mia Mackenzie’s books–her recent one is Sky Falling, which is more of a rom-com. It’s just so cute! And it’s about a Black, queer woman finding love and finding family and recognizing them when they come to her. It’s just sweet and about finding your way into a happy place. I like queer happy books. If they’re not necessarily happy, then their book leads to a happy place. I love that.
AP: Though I am about to shout out books in the YA lane, Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Claire is a book that has helped me unpack disability, queerness, and relating to the natural world and heal my younger self. Then, how do we share stories of queer youth that honor the complex world young queer people are inheriting? The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus is a book that does such a good job of this. It tells the story of two black girls who don’t expect to fall in love, but when they do, they have elders all around them who love them. It’s profound how unique it is to say, ‘Hey, actually, our communities can love us, and not only that, we have queer aunties who are vibrant and grandmas leading magical, weirdo lives, too.’
I call on that book often. I also find inspiration from Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night, which has two timelines speaking to each other. One tells the story of a queer Syrian in the 1940s, and the other is a story of a queer Syrian-American in the 21st century, and then we see how their lives are connected. There’s so much grounding in having ancestors and telling their stories to younger people.
MM: I love that. I’m always listening to books on tape – I guess you don’t call them that anymore; I’m so old – recorded books? Audiobooks? Anyways, YA is so much fun to listen to, you know? I think it’s a little more cinematic just in its writing. I always love a good gay YA.
“I think we are seeing even more stories about trans joy being published, and we need more and more of that.”
I love that you both identified stories with happiness and love. Gay happy stories. Queer happy stories, trans happy stories. I think we are seeing even more stories about trans joy being published, and we need more and more of that. So it’s so great to hear that.
I don’t want to generalize, but I think those stories weren’t around when we were younger. I was trying to think about who the first gay characters that I latched onto were, and I think they were all side characters who died horribly. Even the happy ones were being bullied horribly, you know? And I was like, “I don’t wanna escape into this.” So, I think finding those books is really important now. That’s why YA, and fantasy, and science fiction appeal to me.
AM: Thinking about the question, what is the intersection between queer storytelling and climate storytelling? I see a shared problem between cli-fi and queer fiction. They are trying to move away from tragic stories into hopeful ones that still have the political depth we need. That’s what I appreciated about the Imagine 2200 competition prompt—acknowledging that it’s a challenge to write hopeful stories about a topic where there are a lot of dystopias already. For me, that’s a big motivation about kind of how I got here.
MM: I think that’s key. In my daily life, not just because I’m a parent but just being a human in the world, I feel a sense of sadness about the state of the world. But I don’t always want to put that experience, that feeling, on the page. I want to dream up more hopeful futures. [Imagine 2200] was such a good opportunity to have the chance to do that.
For me, it was nice to imagine a hopeful future. And to take action. Because I often feel like it’s out of my hands, even though that is a feeling I need to fight against because there are things that I can do.
But it was also nice to ask myself, “How would I imagine a world that isn’t the victim of humanity?” I imagined how the Earth might exist without us, and it was nice to have the opportunity to imagine that.
AM: Does climate fiction need some queering?
“That all absolutely should be interrupted with our imaginations and with the insistence that we are here and we are queer.”
AP: For me, the undercurrent of this question is: Does how we relate to nature need some queering? We know that how we have planted trees in American cities is sexist. How we talk about animal families is heterocentric, and the whole science of biology has cis-heteronormativity baked in. That all absolutely should be interrupted with our imaginations and with the insistence that we are here and we are queer.
I’m deeply interested in queer people like Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who published essays about sea mammals in her book Undrowned. She asks us questions like, “What is happening for these creatures who are in crisis? How can I empathize with them and recenter my worldview around them? And doesn’t it then allow me to better understand the conditions we’re all in together when I pay attention to fellow creatures on this planet?” Obviously, yes. This is what happens when we put a different lens on our world: we gain new and deeply important insights.
AM: I’m also a very big Alexis Pauline Gumbs fan and was going also say that that book is a big inspiration for me. I spend a lot of my time, [because of] my job, in circles of people who talk a lot about climate solutions and technology and “How do we start making steel in a way that doesn’t emit so many carbon emissions?” etcetera. There’s a danger of those conversations getting stuck around technology in a way that limits the imaginations of our future.
When I ask friends for recommendations of sci-fi or even hear people talking about sci-fi that tackles climate change and how we need to change things, people will talk about one specific author who I won’t name. It’s not his fault, but, you know, he’s a white, straight, male guy who is very well known for having written some very astute, very technologically interesting sci-fi novels.
But when I read them, I think, “Well, society hasn’t changed that much here.” And I think there’s a lot of reorienting of power that has to happen in the process of this transition–along gender lines, racialized lines, along class lines–and I think those are the more interesting stories that we need to be thinking about.
“Nature is a very gay concept. It just seems like it’s very queer. Just being in nature, being happy, flowers, all of those things – gay, gay, gay.”
MM: I love that, and I think you both make such good points. And I always think nature is gay anyway. Nature is a very gay concept. It just seems like it’s very queer. Just being in nature, being happy, flowers, all of those things – gay, gay, gay.
But I also think that we (queer folks and nature) are all things that those in power are trying to dominate. They’re worried they are losing power to us, so they’re trying to exert their power over us. For them, I think nature and this constant search for fossil fuels and natural resources are ways to show dominance over the world. To control it.
And they do the same thing with anybody different. Again, this attempt at domination. And that’s why I wish more voices, different voices, were being elevated in this space. When you think of climate fiction, opportunities for which so often exist within science fiction, it’s still so straight and white.
I’ve been surprised at how hard it is to wiggle into the fantasy and sci-fi space. And climate fiction ends up being nested within there.
You just see the same names over and over again, whether it’s in magazines or novels being published. But there’s such a large readership out there for it. People get excited about it. But then, when it comes to opportunities and who’s getting a paycheck out of it, it’s not people of color; it’s not LGBT+ people.
That’s what excited me about Imagine 2200. Just to get paid for writing queer climate fiction was cool. And I don’t think we see enough of that. I think Michael Crichton has another book coming out, and he’s been dead for like a decade, you know? We need new voices!
So, I do think climate fiction needs to be queered, but I think it also needs to be funded.
AP: I appreciate you both making connections to the extraction economy as we talk about all of this. Mike, you even relate that to the economy of the publishing industry and how all of these different operators of oppression are interlinked. It feels like the perfect transition to this next question: How do we think climate injustice affects the LGBTQIA+ community? And what role should climate fiction writers play?
“You see this disregard for nature’s wonders, and that makes it easier for them to disregard the wonders of queerness.”
MM: I think just the general disregard for the climate – this kind of weird nihilistic attitude that those in power over the environment – also extends to how we are treated. People who aren’t the status quo. You see this disregard for nature’s wonders, and that makes it easier for them to disregard the wonders of queerness.
Those in power have just kind of collectively tossed away the idea that we’re going to do anything for future generations. And I think that affects attitudes toward anyone trying for progress. We want to be more accepted; we want it to be easier for us. So when you’re saying, “We’re not thinking about the future anymore; we’re only thinking about right now,” that erases us from the equation. Suddenly, you don’t have to get better. You can stay exactly how you are. I think that’s what scares me when it comes to climate injustice. If you’re willing to throw out the future of the Earth like you’re willing to say, “Oh, peace out, Miami, we don’t need that anymore,” then I think you’re probably not going to come around on different sexualities and different gender identities.
AM: In the place where I live now, in the UK, there’s a strong, in very empirical in terms of flows and money and things, a strong link between scapegoating and far-right attacks on trans rights specifically and a concentrated attack on any laws and government measures to reduce emissions, change our industries, things like that. Some of those things have overlapping narratives and money and political backers.
So I see intersectional storytelling as a way to counter that here, but also anywhere; I think it’s quite important.
The right also paints a picture of migrants as encroaching on the space of the working class, which is white and British and very socially traditional. So that sets up a completely false dichotomy, and I think it’s important for the storytelling that we do to think about class explicitly, workers’ rights, questions of labor, knowing it’s to counter the far-right.
AP: Right! Because the principal conductor of climate injustice is colonial imperialism through the class systems and power systems it created. That same oppression that has put people of the Global South on the front lines of climate change is the same that also has made it so that there can only be two genders in most of those countries. The very same that has policed and brutalized indigenous peoples who maintain traditional genders express diversity in sexuality or hold community structures that look nothing like the nuclear family.
“It goes back to the kind of stories I gravitate towards: There have always been queer people, and we inherit the vibrancy of previous generations, not just shame or pain.”
We have the power as storytellers to preserve and pass on the histories that tell us there have always been many genders, many ways to love, and that the narrow, colonial worldview is being pushed on everyone else. It goes back to the kind of stories I gravitate towards: There have always been queer people, and we inherit the vibrancy of previous generations, not just shame or pain.
As someone who writes for a younger audience, I’m invested in passing on that continuity because we lost so much of that in the AIDS crisis, and we’re in a deeply conservative culture war. We have so much power as writers right now to insist and to pass on.
AM: How does your queerness help you relate to or understand the environment?
AP: I loved it when, Mike, you said, “Flowers are gay. Sunshine is gay,” in a way that feels so resonant and obvious to me. I also found that my queerness has given me access to humility, which has helped me relate to the environment. In the same way, I don’t assume I know someone’s identity or how they’re moving through the world based on a face-value impression. I know I don’t actually know what’s going through this bird’s mind at first glance or if a flower feels a bee’s buzzing. What if I just sat here and quietly paid attention instead? And, most queerly, what if I imagined pleasure in the mycelial exchange of a forest or in the victory cry of an orca who taught other sea mammals to capsize whalers? Existence and resistance–so natural, so gay.
MM: I love that. I think nature encourages curiosity. Or maybe curiosity encourages time in nature? I’m not sure, you know if it’s the chicken or the egg.
I’ve always been gay as a picnic basket, but I realize there’s more texture to my sexuality than I thought there was. And I think that is very much like nature in that there’s so much I don’t understand about nature, too, and there’s still so much to discover. But it’s easy to be cynical about it, especially if you have a human-centric view.
“I do feel like I’m a part of this world, and by that, I mean the natural one rather than ‘society.'”
Nature, sexuality, and gender are things that can change and flow and move around, which is quite wonderful. I feel very accepted by nature. I don’t feel accepted by humans. So, I feel like that’s that, and to me, that’s spiritual in a certain sense. Because I do feel like I’m a part of this world, and by that, I mean the natural one rather than “society.”
AM: I remember being maybe 16 years old and coming across conversations about climate change and activism for the first time, and my first reaction was, ‘Oh, there’s so much wrong with people. Why do we want to also care about the environment? Why don’t we try and fix things for people first?’
Then, after a tremendous years-long moment, I realized that there’s no separate climate from people, and still to this day, I bristle when people say, ‘This is for green issues.’ As if green issues are something separate, aren’t in the air people breathe, the jobs that people work in, and all of those things.
AP: I have a question for you both, which you could riff on abstractly if it is too personal. One of my favorite pieces of climate fiction is C.L. Polk’s Kingston Cycle, a trilogy from Tor. The last book takes place in a communal clan house with many generations and something like 30 or 40 people under one roof. I remember being first immersed in that setting and thinking, “This is the ultimate culmination of a queer cli-fi story! We’ve gone from one individual to another, and now we’ve arrived at the collective.” Something about that just felt so immediately queer because we have different families. Even if it’s just two partners and their kids, queer folk make a different type of family, and that should be part of how we relate to things. So I’m curious: Is there something about your families that helps you relate to the environment or inform your writing?
AM: I think for me, being in this setup is the proverbial ‘it takes a village’ situation. I would not have a kid without having a village around me. There’s so much isolation that comes with normative family models, so, for me, a good life has a village around. And not in the rural sense but in the community sense. It means that my kid has people who can take them out on the water in a boat and up to the bank to climb a tree and watch trains from it or whatever it is.
MM: I love that. For me, it’s hard because my children are both adopted, and there’s this temptation for adoptive parents to kind of find narratives in nature and latch on to those. Like, “Animals adopt, too!” But making those mass generalizations or finding those easy links doesn’t do justice to each adopted child’s individual story.
“I love my kids, and I feel very lucky to be their dad, but I also know that their stories are their own and evolving stories.”
So I try to avoid that with my own life. I try not to say things like, “God decided this, or nature decided this, and it is perfect.” I love my kids, and I feel very lucky to be their dad, but I also know that their stories are their own and evolving stories.
What I will say is that – and I think this is probably a pandemic thing, too – part of me wants to take my kids and run into the woods and away from human society.
Everything just feels so dangerous at every turn. I think that, as an adult, I’d managed to hide well enough that I felt relatively safe in my everyday life. But now, with kids, I feel very exposed. Maybe it’s weird to feel more safe in nature – in “the wild”- than it is to feel safe with your fellow person, but especially in America, that’s how I feel at the moment.
I just want to run far away, put my kids in a tower, and keep them there until the world’s safe, which could be its own cli-fi narrative.
AP: Yeah, there’s a bit of non-fiction called Making Home by Sharon Astyk, who left New York City to live in rural New York, and in making that transition, she realized that we can’t all leave the city and move to the woods. The reality of the climate disaster is that we will have folks who must stay and make do.
And I thank you for the discretion in saying no one’s life is a metaphor. Absolutely. For me, at least, learning to care for others outside of normative family roles or expectations has meant that I could find a place in community activism and in my imagination for something different. I love that our families work differently and are vibrant for it, and I strive to represent that in my stories.
Before we close out, are either of you working on anything you want to plug or do you have any other closing thoughts?
MM: My novel just got submitted to publishers, so I’m in a state of stress. It just went out, and I’m already like, “Shouldn’t I be on Oprah by now? Why isn’t she calling me? Why am I not a book club pick yet?”
AM: I’m part of an anthology from Neon Hemlock called Luminescent Machinations. And it’s stories of queer bodies and queer mecha-big robots that walk around and fight. And mine’s about pregnancy and queer family and trauma and that whole sense of how we support each other to kind of grow out of a horrible thing that we’ve been put through.
AP: Wow, I’m excited about both of these announcements. I have a few small things coming up, including being published by Microcosm Press in an anthology of cat stories. As someone familiar with a lot of their fiction, it felt fun to write a little bit of that with my non-fiction hat on. Anyway, thank you for telling me what to read next!
AM: I’ll bring my cats–
MM: And I’ll read it. Yeah. Cats. I love anything about cats. I love cat writing. Well, guys, this was wonderful. It was really, this turned out to be so much.
