The Days After Tomorrow: Climate Fiction for the Future
Can we reimagine our relationship with nature and protect the future? How can we marshal our collective imagination to accelerate global transformations and move towards a sustainable way of life? How can we get beyond dystopian visions of climate chaos and focus on more positive, equitable and community-led futures? Join the ASU's Climate Imagination Fellows, climate fiction authors from around the world, to explore these questions and more at an event presented by the British Library and ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination.
With roots in science fiction, climate fiction or "cli-fi" is now expanding across genres and styles, from poetry to thrillers and more experimental work. This vital area of contemporary fiction grapples with climate science, art, politics and technology, seeking to reinvent the way we envisage tomorrow. At this special event, Climate Imagination Fellows Libia Brenda, Hannah Onoguwe and Vandana Singh share stories that bring the future into the present. They will reflect on the essential role of storytelling in thinking through the consequences of our collective decisions and charting a path towards the futures we want to build together.
Speakers
Claire Armitstead was born in south London and spent her early years in northern Nigeria. She is associate editor, Culture, for the "Guardian" and has worked as arts editor, literary editor and head of books. She presents the weekly Guardian books podcast and is a regular commentator on radio. Claire also leads workshops and chairs literary events in the UK and around the world.
Hannah Onoguwe is a writer based in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State in southern Nigeria, a region famous for its oil industry. She has been published in "Imagine Africa 500" and "Strange Lands Short Stories." In 2014, her collection "Cupid’s Catapult" was one of ten manuscripts chosen for the Nigerian Writers Series, and in 2016 she won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Competition. In 2020, Hannah was shortlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize.
Libia Brenda is a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City. She is a co-founder of the Cúmulo de Tesla collective that promotes dialogue between the arts and sciences and was the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo Award for her anthology "A Larger Reality/Una realidad más amplia." In 2020, Libia edited the Mexico special issue of the speculative fiction magazine "Strange Horizons."
Vandana Singh was brought up in New Delhi and lives near Boston, Massachusetts. She is a writer, professor of physics at Framingham State University and an interdisciplinary researcher on the climate crisis. She is the author of two collections, "The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories" (2014) and "Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories" (2018), the latter of which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.