Hello there. Welcome to the Story Voyager community, this is an intro to this newsletter including an overview of everything I’ve written so far.
Thank you for being here. 💚
—Claudia
P.S. I also have some great news! My short story Illegal won the Lunar Award 🏆 for science fiction this week. ✨ You can read more here and checkout the fiction entries from 20+ talented writers.
Welcome to Story Voyager, your climate fiction newsletter!
Hi, I’m Claudia 👋, the author of Story Voyager, an 'intelligent, almost spiritual' climate fiction newsletter for all sci-fi and climate-interested readers. Find gripping dystopian yet hopeful short stories and cli-fi series with charismatic female protagonists and a diverse cast that aim to change the narrative about the future of humankind.
Good stories here that are contrary to the ordinary. They will change your mind.
— Henry Mitchell of Dovers Gap
Story Voyager has been a Substack featured publication, a Lunar Awards winner for science fiction, and appears on Feedspot’s top 15 cli-fi blogs. Join a vibrant sci-fi community of over 2,000 readers.
An intelligent, almost spiritual, treatment of the nascent climate fiction subgenre.
— Johnathan Reid of ReidItWrite
Why subscribe?
I grew up reading science fiction, Claudia’s work is the first fiction on Substack that has seriously attracted me. I'm hoping to read more conceptualizations of a future where AI and environmental conditions play significant roles with charismatic characters.
— Michael Spencer of AI Supremacy
Free subscribers get
Climate fiction short stories
Monthly cli-fi book reviews
Monthly sci-fi recs. from Substack authors
A pop-up book club*
*The pop-up book club is a special event in which we read and discuss a book together. Last year we read Dune by Frank Herbert. This year we’ll read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. I will announce the date soon.
Paid subscribers get
Exclusive cli-fi story series (seasonal)
Curated cli-fi reading lists (annual)
If you have the means, consider joining the growing community of paid Story Voyager readers.
Creative, fun, thought provoking.
— Alexander Semenyuk of Lighthouse
Index
Here you’ll find an overview of everything I’ve written so far. I will update this index on a regular basis as I publish new work.
Story series
I’m currently writing There Is Hope, a climate fiction series and my first book.
All my climate fiction is placed in a secondary universe with the working title The Deep Dive that spans from 2400 CE to 3600 CE.
Cli-fi, short for climate fiction, is a form of fiction literature that features a changed or changing climate. It is rooted in science fiction but also draws on realism and the supernatural.
There Is Hope
There Is Hope is a climate fiction series about life on a planet devastated by climate change and the little things that give people hope.
All caught up on what’s available from ‘There Is Hope’ and boy was it a cathartic ride. My grief surrounding the deforestation and desertification of Iran—and, let’s be real, the world at large—has really bubbled to the surface through these pieces. What a beautiful planet we have the privilege of inhabiting. And what beautiful stories Claudia has written to remind us of that.
— Keyon Hejazi of Tales from the Bazaar
There Is Hope will include five short stories and five letters from the future that are interlinked through recurring characters and a unifying plot arc.
Table of contents 👇
Story 1 → Human Island: Part I, Part II
While making a documentary about a sacrificial ritual, a grieving mother comes to terms with the untimely loss of her daughter.
A letter from the future → The day I learned I would die
Story 2 → The Seed Grower: Part I, Part II, Part III
A farmer grows illegal seeds of resistance, but her life gets complicated when an unlikely guest joins the Midsummer festival.
A letter from the future → Seeds of resistance
Story 3 → Dust Pirates: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
During the rainmaking festival, a young boy rescues a teenage girl from danger, but her secret sets him on a perilous journey.
Story 4 → The Cooperatives
Story 5 → There Is Hope
I aim to write and publish There Is Hope until the end on 2024.
Cli-fi shorts
Stand alone climate fiction short stories placed in the same universe as There Is Hope.
A young teacher at a school for gifted children is looking forward to getting her first student.
Illegal - this story won the Lunar Award 🥇 for science fiction
A smuggled climate refugee must survive her first day in a high security city.
Reviews & recs
In this section you can find monthly sci-fi and cli-fi book reviews including sci-fi recommendations from other fiction writers on Substack.
Curated reading lists
Every year in February I publish my climate fiction & non-fiction reading list. Are you looking for a good book to read? Take your pick from my curated bookshelf:
The pop-up book club
This is a special pop-up event in which we read and discuss a book together.
This was the first pop-up book club👇
Dune by Frank Herbert
From December 2023 until March 2024 we read Dune by Frank Herbert and watched Dune Part Two by Denis Villeneuve together. A series of Letters from Arrakis written in collaboration with Nathan Slake of Slake, Alexander Ipfelkofer of Tales from the Defrag and Vanessa Glau of Occams Lab invites you to dive deep into the Duniverse.
Letters from Arrakis I: In which we discuss the worldbuilding of Dune
Letters from Arrakis II: In which we talk about the Fremen and their Arrakis
Letters from Arrakis III: In which we discuss, well, Book Three
The next book that we’ll read together is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. I will announce the date soon.
Worldbuilding
Deep dive articles on worldbuilding for the cli-fi series There Is Hope including background information and research for the various story elements.
The Museum of Life
A virtual space hosted on the Deep Dive servers that allows people to upload their consciousness. It was created around 2700 CE by Shia Santos, the main character of There Is Hope.
When I started this museum, I wished to preserve the human minds that cross in and out of existence. I hope that you will enjoy my curated collection of lives.
— Shia Santos, founder of the Museum of Life
Soon, you’ll be able to upload your own memories to the museum and be part of a virtual exhibition in the year 3600 CE. Interested in participating?
Climate articles
Occasionally, I publish non-fiction articles about climate change, modern society, and the challenges and opportunities our future holds.
Access to seeds will determine your social class in the future
Allow me to get rich and I will save the world
This story was published in Volume I of the Elysian by Elle Griffin.
I’m also working on a narrative documentary about the history of pre-industrial climate change 👇
Climate change in the pre-industrial era
Over the course of four episodes, Climate change in the pre-industrial era presents the true story of how climate change shaped human society from the agricultural to the industrial revolution and in between.
Well, this just blew my mind...
— Peter Clayborne of Anarchy Unfolds
This is an independent research project aiming to shed light on our history on this planet through the lens of climate change.
Episodes👇
The Great Dying and the Little Ice Age: Unraveling a climate mystery
From ice to empire: Climate’s role in human history*
Past, present, planet: Unraveling the human-nature connection*
*The remaining two episodes will be released in 2025.
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
About me
I’m an award winning poet, fiction writer and screenwriter with an MA Writing for Script & Screen from the Falmouth University in the UK. Currently, I work as a product manager in a climate tech start-up in the renewable energy sector. In my free time, I write fiction and practice tea ceremony. I live with my husband in Vienna, Austria.
Interviews
Thanks for reading 🙌!
— Claudia
P.S.: Thanks for your interest in Story Voyager 💚
Nice work, Claudia. Very organised. Great to see all the things so far and where things are at and headed!
Great to have your work laid out like this. Thanks for putting this together, looking forward to keeping up with Story Voyager! 🌿