Travel your imagination
Hi, I’m Claudia 👋
I’m writing There Is Hope, a climate fiction series about life on a planet devastated by climate change and the little things that give people hope.
There Is Hope will include five short stories and five letters from the future. This is what I’ve written so far.
Why subscribe
Story Voyager is a newsletter dedicated to exploring the human imagination through fiction writing under the motto travel your imagination.
The first topic to which we will apply our imagination is climate change through the lens of climate fiction or cli-fi. In this journey we will explore climate fiction through reading, researching, writing and talking to like-minded people.
Join the conversation, let’s change together the narrative about the future of humankind.
Free subscribers
Read There Is Hope my first book that I write and publish on Substack
Read my essays about climate topics that I tackle in my climate fiction
Read The Deep Dive in which I explore a utopian cli-fi world through short stories based on writing prompts
Join a community of cli-fi enthusiasts - in the comments section!
This newsletter is sent out whenever I have an essay or short fiction ready. By subscribing, you will get the newsletters directly in your inbox.
I’m looking forward to having you here 💚.
Why climate fiction
In his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Indian author Amitav Ghosh argues that:
The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture and, thus of the imagination.
About three hundred years ago, humanity entered an age of enlightenment, placing the human being at the center of creation. Humanism was born to absolve humans from the pains inflicted on them by the gods of the dark ages and free them so that they may become gods themselves and inflict that pain on the natural world.
While it is arguable whether nature can feel pain, there is no denying that the human species has acquired god-like powers capable of changing essential functions of nature, such as the climate. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty writes in his paper The Climate of History: Four Theses:
Humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth.
Or as Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science and geologist, elaborates:
For centuries, scientists thought that earth processes were so large and powerful that nothing we could do could change them. This was a basic tenet of geological science: the human chronologies were insignificant compared with the vastness of geological time; that human activities were insignificant compared with the force of geological processes. And once they were. But no more. There are so many of us cutting down so many trees and burning so many billions of tons of fossil fuel that we have indeed become geological agents. We have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere, causing sea level to rise, ice to melt, and climate to change. There is no reason to think otherwise.
Climate fiction is an attempt to do what science, activism and the increased natural disasters driven by climate change have failed to accomplish so far: bring climate change to the human imagination. Everything we have achieved as a species—the good, the bad and the ugly— is the fruit of our imagination. But as Einstein once famously said:
We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.
Therefore climate fiction is needed to understand the most urgent topic of our times—climate change—and explore new ways of thinking about our planet, the human species and the role our imagination plays in shaping the future of both.
People have the power to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools.
—Patty Smith
Who am I
I’m a product manager in a green tech start-up in the energy sector. In my free time, I like to write climate fiction and practice tea ceremony. I live with my husband in Vienna, Austria.
Born at 340 ppm.
Subscribe to Story Voyager
People
