How did “Travelers’ Tales from the Ends of the World” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

This story emerged from many years of studying, discussing, and worrying about climate change. Apart from being a speculative fiction writer, I am a physics professor and transdisciplinary scholar of climate change. However, climate is not the only problem before us: we also have species extinction and the unraveling of both natural biogeophysical systems and human social systems (all of which are interconnected), what is being referred to as the polycrisis.

Underlying all this is the power hierarchy, and I think of the super-rich driving it as deranged necrophiliacs of a kind, consumed by greed and drunk with power, pushing the world toward destruction. They create and maintain the destructive socio-economic system in which we are trapped. The system also traps our imaginations so that it is hard to visualize another way of living and being.

So the story is an attempt to break out of the imagination trap and consider other, better future worlds, and work to make them real. The reality of our current situation is horrific, and I am not denying that when I say that we need to dream about other worlds. Dreams are most honest and true when they look reality in the face and are informed by it, and then invoke the imagination to get through our present hell. I’ve written about it in other spaces: bit.ly/49NnaRB.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I write genre fiction because I can’t seem to help it. But more seriously, there is great potential in speculative fiction, especially from the perspective of people like me who come literally from other worlds, worlds that have been colonized and are still dealing with the fallout; I have tried to answer the question here: bit.ly/49Shci7.

What trends in speculative fiction would you like to see gain popularity in the next few years?

I’d like to see more fiction about the polycrisis we face, and especially about getting away from the exclusively human. Speculative fiction has a long history of engaging with aliens from other worlds. But we have fellow Earthlings all around us and research is indicating that the Western modern gaze has missed crucial things about other species: that they feel, they communicate, sometimes in such sophisticated ways (as in the case of cetaceans) that we can’t figure it out; that they have agency, that they have a lot to teach us, that connecting with them is one part of the answer to the modern human epidemic of loneliness.

Old World and Indigenous cultures have always known all this and more. There is much we can explore through speculative fiction. And this is, to me, part of the project of getting away from colonialist conceptions that we take as bedrock reality when they are just constructs. I’d also love to see alternative economic systems in spec fic. Our current economic ideologies generally ignore the rest of nature except as a resource to be endlessly exploited, but new economic ideas are emerging, for instance in response to the notion that there are limits to what humans can do on Earth—the planetary boundaries concept being one articulation. bit.ly/49uPfNO.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I have recently completed work on a novella and a short story as part of the Climate Imagination Fellowship from Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. These are part of the Climate Action Almanac freely accessible at climatealmanac.org along with stories from three wonderful international writers, Libia Brenda, Gu Shi, Hannah Onoguwe, and a number of scholars who have contributed essays. I’ve also just finished a book on a radical reconceptualization of climate change, at the intersection of climate science, pedagogy, and justice: bit.ly/3OZyceF. I don’t have time to write stories during the semester, so I am currently only reading academic stuff and student papers, but getting a lot of fiction ideas for summertime, which is when I get most of my writing done.