Welcome to Story Voyager, a newsletter about climate and fiction
An intelligent, almost spiritual, treatment of the nascent climate fiction subgenre.
— Johnathan Reid of ReidItWrite
Hi, I’m Claudia 👋. In this newsletter, we explore narratives about climate change, the human-nature relationship and our future on this planet through a blend of original climate fiction, narrative journalism, daily life projects, a cli-fi book club and participatory worldbuilding.
Substack is a new home for the creative scientist. People who take it upon themselves to explore topics of interest and present them in highly imaginative and engaging ways. Claudia is a shining example, taking climate science and fiction and bringing it to her subscribers in a creative fusion of styles.
— Shoni of Interested In Things
Story Voyager is a Substack featured publication, a Lunar Awards winner for science fiction, and appears on Feedspot’s top 15 cli-fi blogs. Join an engaged online community of over 2,000 subscribers.
Let’s change the narrative about the future of humankind.
Here you will find…
Climate series such as a narrative documentary about pre-industrial climate change or a climate fiction series about life on a planet devastated by climate change and the things that bring people hope.
Climate fiction in book or short story format including deep dives into worldbuilding. 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.
Climate talks through deeply researched and engaging essays on the future of our food, climate action and society.
A cli-fi book club where we share climate and fiction reading lists, read books together and reflect on the future through the lens of climate fiction.
Participatory worldbuilding, an upcoming project in which I invite you to write A Letter to the Future and be part of a virtual exhibition in the year 3600 CE.
Paying for Story Voyager
Paid subscribers get the eBook version of my upcoming climate fiction book There Is Hope. If you have the means, consider joining the growing group of paid Story Voyager subscribers.
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
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 I am
I’m a prize winning poet, fiction writer and screenwriter with an MA in Writing for Script & Screen from the Falmouth University. Currently, I work as a product manager in a climate tech start-up in the energy sector. In my free time, I write climate fiction and practice tea ceremony. I live with my husband in Vienna, Austria.
You can read more about me in this interview.
Creative, fun, thought provoking.
— Alexander Semenyuk of Lighthouse
Thanks for reading and I hope to meet you soon in the comments section!
—Claudia
