Where can we look for hopeful climate futures, when the global picture seems dominated by inaction or backsliding? While influential nations and international bodies seem adrift, absent, or flatfooted in the face of an accelerating climate emergency, vigorous action is happening at local and regional levels, propelled by coalitions of advocates, researchers, community leaders, and everyday people.

Science fiction often concerns itself with grand technological systems and nifty scientific innovations in future worlds far from our own. But speculative fiction can be a full-service “laboratory of the mind”—as useful for imagining alternate social, political, and community structures as it is new gadgets and their time warps. Social science gives us a lens to understand whether speculated futures are aspirational or ominous, and to determine the values and visions we want to prioritize.

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