 Hello everyone and welcome to this British Library event, which is part of our nature season, the natural world. My name is Maya Marichu, which I'm Head of Higher Education and Science at the British Library and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this conversation where we're looking how to harness the power fiction in the fight against the climate crisis. Just before we start, before I introduce our Chair Claire Armstead, I'm just going to give you a few points of housekeeping for this event. We will be asking questions at the end of this event. If you'd like to ask one, you are going to find a form just below this video where you can do that. Also below the video, you will find links where you can find more about all our speakers for tonight. And also you will find a link for a very exciting postcards from the Future Project by our partners, the State University of Arizona, and we are going to tell you about this later as well. Above the video, you can leave us your feedback. You can watch our previous events, maybe not just now, but you can certainly go back to that and you can donate to the British Library. So that's all housekeeping from us. And now it's my pleasure to introduce our Chair Claire Armstead. Claire was born in South London and spent her early years in Northern Nigeria. Today she's Associate Editor of Culture for The Guardian Newspaper and has worked as arts editor, literary editor and head of books. She presents The Weekly Guardian Book Podcast and is a regular commentator in radio. Claire also leads workshop and chair literary events in the UK around the world. And we are very, very glad and delighted that she's doing that with us today. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Claire. Thank you very much, Maya. I'm absolutely thrilled to be involved in this project because I've been doing a lot of thinking around it recently, as I'm sure anybody with half a conscience and half a brain has been doing. And so it is fantastic to see the University of Arizona and the British Library partnering to encourage a new generation of thinking to come through. Because as we will hear a bit later on, this hasn't always been the case. And we've been perhaps a bit slower off the mark than we might have been. Anyway, I'm not going to do the first introduction. I'm going to leave this to one of the instigators of this initiative, Ed Finn. And Ed is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he's an associate professor in the school for the future of innovation in society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. He also serves as the academic director of Future Tense, a partnership between ASU, New America and Slate Magazine. And is a co-director of Emerge, an annual festival of our art ideas and the future. So he's pretty much got it all taped. His research and teaching involves working with the imagination, with digital culture, with creative collaboration, and at the intersection of the humanities, arts and sciences. His books include what algorithms want imagination in the age of computing. And he's co-editor of Future Tense fiction, Frankenstein, annotated for scientists, engineers and creators of all kinds, which sounds like a sort of book that should be next on my reading list, Ed. Welcome. Hi, Claire. Thank you so much for moderating this and for welcoming us to this wonderful event, this conversation today. Really excited to be here. I want to talk a little bit about the Climate Imagination Fellowship, which is the project and the fellows we're going to be hearing from later today. And our inspiration for this was really exactly what you were saying a minute ago. We've been thinking about climate for a long time. Many of us have been worried about it. And even the people who are in the trenches trying to make changes, battling over policy, battling over carbon parts per million and all of these different issues, often struggle to articulate a positive vision of the future we're working towards. We are so worried about all the bad things that might happen that sometimes it can feel too complicated, too overwhelming. What can one individual do? What is a path forward? How do we actually grapple with a crisis at a planetary scale? So we have this real need, this desperate need for positive climate futures, for positive imagination. And writers like Amitav Ghosh have talked about how in a lot of ways what we're containing with here is our own failure of imagination, the crisis of imagination around climate and positive planetary futures. So this aligns with the mission of our center, which is to inspire collective imagination for better futures. And what we've done is we've identified these four fantastic writers around the world, three of whom will be joining us today, to write positive climate futures connecting with different communities and regions around the world, not just so that we get some stories, some possible visions, not because these are crystal balls about what's going to happen, but so that they can expand our thinking about the possibility space and most importantly, fire our own imaginations to inspire communities around the world to start asking, well, what are we working towards? What do we want the future to look like? And obviously it's not going to be unicorns and sunshine all the time. Well, maybe a lot of sunshine, certainly here in Phoenix. Things will be hard and we will have to adapt. We will need to fall back on human resilience and the resilience of communities. But we need to understand what the positive visions of the future are that we can work towards. And that's how we motivate real change in the present. You know, we can't only do this through fear and anxiety. We also have to have hope. It's maybe the most fundamental human thing that we all share. So these writers are engaging not just in writing stories that we're going to be compiling into a book that will come out next year, but also engaging in conversations like this, meeting with policymakers and climate experts, scientists and other researchers. And what we're hoping to do through all of these efforts is to inspire positive futures that other people come up with in the present. And so we hope also that people in the audience today will take our call to action and take a little step, write a postcard at the end of this event. So all of this will come together, different outcomes from workshops and gatherings and conversations and the wonderful work that our writers are doing in a Climate Action Almanac that we're hoping we can put out by Earth Day of next year. So with that, I think I've said enough. I'm so excited to see the conversation unfold today. And again, delighted to be here with all of you. Thank you very much, Ed. Now I'm just going to briefly introduce our three, the three participating fellows. Beginning with Hannah Onogway. Are you there, Hannah? You could show your face and give us a wave. So those people who can't see you on Zoom. Hannah is a writer based in the south of Nigeria, an area which is well known for its oil industry. And she's been published in Imagine Africa 500 and Strange Lands Short Stories. In 2014, her collection, Cupid's Catapult, was one of 10 manuscripts chosen for the Nigerian writer series. And in 2016, she won the ANA Poetry Competition. In 2020, she was longlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize. So Hannah, you're a real all-rounder. And boy, do we need people who make those sort of connections between all the different genres. Welcome. I can't actually see you on my screen, but I trust you're there. I know you're there in the back. I am. Good to very good to see you. Next, I will turn to Libya Brenda. Libya, welcome. Hi, thank you. Oh, you've come very quickly up on the screen. Brilliant. Libya is a writer, an editor, and a translator based in Mexico City. She's a co-founder of the Cumula de Tesla collective that promotes dialogue between the arts and the sciences. And was the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo Award for her anthology, A Larger Reality, which in Spanish is, oh, I don't know whether I'm even going to try that one. I'm afraid, Lydia. I will embarrass myself. Don't worry. In 2020, she edited the Mexico special issue of the speculative fiction magazine, Strange Horizons. So I'm expecting a very particular perspective from you about this extraordinary snobbery, which Amitabh has identified as one of the problems of the literary ecosystem. So welcome. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Claire. Our third fellow is Vandana Singh. Vandana, are you going to come and give us a wave? She is here. I know she's here. And Vandana was brought up in New Delhi and lives near Boston, Massachusetts. She's a writer and professor of physics at Framingham State University and an interdisciplinary researcher on the climate crisis. She's the author of two collections, the woman who thought she was a planet and other stories from 2014, and ambiguity machines and other stories from 2018, which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. So again, another person who ventures beyond the enclaves of the beyond the ivory town comes back with all the important news. I would repeat what Ed said that we will be hearing from Amitabh Ghosh a bit later in the program in a little interview we did earlier because he's unavailable today. And he, as I'm sure you will all know, has become a really important thinker in the area of climate change and the literary imagination, and particularly in regard to the great derangement climate change and the unthinkable, which was published in 2016 and which he has since followed up with a novel which answers some of his provocations. And he's just about to publish the nutmegs curse where he's turning to nonfiction to put this whole great crisis we're facing in its true political historical context. But first, I'd like to ask a very general question to each of the fellows in turn. And that is, what does the word clifine mean to you? Now, I did some research on this, and I gather it only actually made it into the mainstream in 2007, mainstream media by 2007. So yes, what is it? Is it just a gimmicky word? Does it mean anything? Who's going to start? Lydia, you are on my screen, so why don't you go first? Oh, OK. Well, I think, at least for us, maybe in our conversations, and I know that for me, climate fiction or clifine, it's sort of a way of writing and making art from a speculative fiction perspective that focuses on the climate crisis, which means that includes maybe reflections about what is happening right now, but it has been happening for years, of course. So right now, I think it's a hot topic, like in the general culture, but science fiction and speculative fiction and a lot of writers that are not realists have been writing and making reflections about the subject from years now. I will dare to say that the word for word is forest from Ursula K. Lewin could be climate fiction today, and it's completely present. I don't remember the word in English, but it's behemt right now. So that's my very short answer. I'm not going to, sorry, I've muted myself. I'm now going to move to Vandana to ask Vandana to unpick a little bit this idea of science fiction versus speculative fiction, which I know is something that has come up a lot around in the last few years, particularly in relation to the work of Margaret Atwood. Do you have anything to add? Yeah, actually, that's an interesting distinction, but people make it in different ways. Margaret Atwood has at least in the past famously distanced herself from science fiction and said that what she writes is speculative fiction. I don't know if she's changed her perspective since that time. There are probably as many definitions of these as there are people working in the area. For me, and I know that others, many others share this, speculative fiction is an umbrella word that includes science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, all of the, what I call imaginative literature under one umbrella. And there's a great literary tradition in speculative fiction, which I think is, to go back to what you said earlier about snobbery is not acknowledged in the literary mainstream, what I call the literary mainstream genre, which is a pity because a lot of really interesting conversations and experiments in fiction have been going on for quite a while in under speculative fiction umbrella. Thank you very much. Hannah, I know Nigeria is making, is doing, there's some really interesting science fiction coming out of Nigeria at the moment. Where do you stand on this issue? Well, it's interesting, like previous, I haven't always thought of myself as a science fiction writer. And it goes back to, I think the snobbery thing again, you know, I've heard them say, or maybe the West say, why would we talk about science fiction? When we don't have, you know, going to our normal everyday lives, we don't seem to have a lot of scientific labs and things going on to fund all those imaginations. I read like one of Wanderna's articles, I think, where she said, we have no imagination, you know. So it's interesting that we have come to the points where writers, speculative fiction writers here are saying, you know what, no matter what they say, we're going to write what we want to write. We have all kinds of speculative fiction coming out. And we're just going to do what, regardless of what people think. So we have a lot of new writers, mixing genres. And although yes, like the umbrella, speculative fiction is, you just have a lot of work coming out. I think going beyond the limitations of what people expect and what people think, to bring out work that is remarkable. So I think whatever our roots or origins, we go for it. And I think over the past few years, it has really grown tremendously. Yeah, no, I want to sort of leading on from that. I'd like to ask about whether you think literature is actually important or whether we should all be putting down our pens and going and sitting on barricades or manning, you know, going and out to sea to rescue all the refugees who've lost their homes. What is the importance of it? It's important because it's one, I think like growing up with literature, even as a child, one of the main things was escape. So you can't put it down and say, oh, the themes have become too heavy and they're not important and there are a lot of things on ground. Even those scenarios you've described, refugees and so on, they get some sort of consolation from literature. And I think it's more important now because more people read it with technology, it goes around faster. You don't have to wait for your library to open, and then you go borrow books. You have access to all kinds of stories, short stories and no books. In the most unlikely places, you can find all kinds of things. So I think you can try and find a balance. Even as we do the humanitarian work, we can also push literature and the great space that it can do for us. Libya, do you have anything to add to that? Yeah, I think that even if we wanted to just sit and put down our pens or our computers, that's impossible. We are always going to tell stories. As human beings, stories are part of ourselves and it's part of our brain. And we need stories to understand the world better. So I think in that regard, literature is never going to disappear. Doesn't matter if it is in a screen, in a paper, or if it is mouth to ear, literature and stories are always embedded in us. I just watched a video that Neil Gaiman was talking about Neil Gaiman's stuff and he was talking about how stories can behave like living things because they grow and they change and they evolve. We are telling the same stories that we were telling 4,000 years ago and science fiction, of course, retails also those types of stories. And that is very important. As human beings, we need art. We are animals and there are, I hope we understand that, that we are animals because we can see animals in a different light and not just like beings below us. But the little things that separates us from animals, one of those things is art. So I think art, it's necessary. It's part of our life, even if it's not art like in the light of the snow very or art understand it like something high or intellectual. Art and imagination and stories are part of our daily lives. So they're never going to disappear. They're going to be necessary as humans remain. So I think we are doing what we have to do. You know, like we are meant to do this. I don't know, maybe it's a metaphysical answer. So, Vandana, I'd like to ask you a little to drill down into this a little bit beneath us. So we know that we're a storytelling creature. And that's sort of one of the things about our possession of consciousness. But how do we use these stories to address politics, science or on a local and on a global level? Yeah, that's such an important point. What do stories do when they're let loose into the world? And there is no one direct connection or there's no simple linear connection between the release of a story from a writer's brain and some impacts on that. We know that the way stories work is much more subtle and organic and syncretic. But having said that and remembering, for instance, that during the Occupy movement, one of the books that was being passed around from camp to camp was Ursula Le Guin's famous book The Dispossessed. And so stories do impact the world. And although the way they do it is, like I said, not a simple linear process, but particularly what imaginative fiction does, what speculative literature can do, is that because it makes the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar by immersing us in alternate realities. It throws us out of the trap of the imagination, which is part of the reason why the climate problem has not been solved as yet. We have not learned how to engage with it because it confounds all our frameworks. And what imaginative literature does is to put us in a different world altogether. So we suddenly realize that the default reality that we think is reality and the only way to be is actually just a construction. And so we can construct something better. That I think is the unique gift and the revolutionary potential of speculative fiction. And of course being story, all the various different threads, science, art, politics all come together just like in the real world. So I do believe that that's something that emerges naturally from story, but particularly with that special superpower that speculative literature has. And continuing on from that, now I'm going to ask each of you and we'll start with you, Vandana, since you're here at the moment. What are you doing with this? How are you going to address this in your project for this initiative? Well, let me give you a little bit of a general idea and then I'll give you a hint because I'm a little afraid of talking too much about my story in case it slips away from me. I don't know if that's a reasonable thing or a kind of superstition I have. But in general, the way that it comes to me is through a character and a landscape because landscape speaks to me. And my academic work on climate where I engage with the science talks to the part of me that is the imaginative storytelling part. So in a way, I think of the climate itself as teacher. And places I've gone to for academic work, whether it's in Charkhand in India or Alaska, the North Shore of Alaska, they've always spoken to the story side. So the kind of work I'm trying to do is to let the place and the problem speak to me to think of the climate as an entity that is talking to me from which I'm trying to learn some lessons. And essentially the way I do it for me because climate is simultaneously local and planetary is to situate my story in different places around the world and thread those together. And so just to give you a hint, the way that this particular story is working out is that it's really representing two worlds or two future visions of a world where we have engaged with climate. And one of them is, one of those worlds is the technocrat billionaire's dream, very top-down and very much continuing the saga of the global north, trouncing the global south, including the north that is in the global south. And then the other scenario, the other world, the other possible future is a much more complicated and messy world where actually you have bottom-up grassroots efforts around the world actually speaking to and influencing and informing the top-down narrative. So I guess that's all I'm gonna say for now. Plenty there, yeah, absolutely. Well, go for tantalizing glimpse into what is to come. Hannah, will you give us a little insight into what you're working on? Okay, basically the thing I most stared me in the face was the oil. I live in the south-south like we talked about earlier. And it's kind of something you can't escape. And for some reason, even though the people who have suffered the most and the areas that have suffered the most have in some way benefited, there's been some increments in revenue to them, scholarships, and my issue was the land itself, nothing seems to be happening to it. It just seems to be as long as oil is generating so much revenue to Nigeria, then we can forget about whatever happened. Just in, I read, was it a report in May? Just, you had almost $39 million from May alone, from gas, and just a month. So it's like the government and everyone involved seems to think, look, this is too much money. Every other thing is a casualty, and you don't care. From when oil has been discovered, I don't think any appreciable cleanup has been done in Nigeria. Instead, you have people leaving, moving to cities. Many people move abroad. When these oil companies provide scholarships abroad and everything, a lot of people don't come back. They go and study and then they just, it's like, oh, better life. But what happens to those areas? Is it going to just be like that? And that was where I, that was what I narrowed it down to. Because I said, if it's like this, then why is it that we're like marking time? Nigeria doesn't seem to be moving on with the rest of the world, and it seems to be okay. So I was trying to imagine, okay, if we had to, if something was being done, then what has been done? So I kind of projected it a few years ahead. I was like, okay, let it be that some cleanup has been done. And then some other issues that arise from those things. So hopefully, and my imagination, let me just give you another hint is, it didn't happen in Nigeria as we have it today. Because I couldn't, to be honest, imagine anyone caring enough at this point. It has to be some kind of breakup or something. And then, okay. Let's see what we can do. So it was at that point that, okay, things are being done. And if you don't have the so-called people running things, will we be able to do any better if it's just us in this part of Nigeria? That was the story that came to me. Excellent, excellent. I'll be there. I'll definitely be looking out for that one. I'll add it to my Nigerian fiction shelves. Libya, over to you. Thank you. Well, I am working currently with the Cumulo de Tesla, which is this collective of scientists and writers and artists. And five of us are collaborating in each of us. It's writing like a short story that is connected with the others. And we situated our story here in Mexico. And we kind of propose that what if, which is one of the basis of science fiction, it's what if one of our main volcanoes erupted and that transforms the atmosphere and the conditions of the soil, et cetera. So we are going forward in time, 50 years, 25 years, 25 years, like in a family of women starting in 2025, just after the pandemic was surpassed and then going forward into the future. And our story deals with migration, with alimentation and food issues and agriculture issues. And also, we are going to, we are doing something like in a hope-punk realm because we're trying to build a fiction in which it doesn't matter how much you have to struggle. You are going to be able to not fix this, but survive this and maybe restart and doing things better. I'm sorry, there is something happening in the street that is a vendor that is very, very loud. So I'm going to put my headphones because it's getting near. Can you hear me now? Yeah, okay. Well, this is a vendor that is very popular here in the city that it's not a vendor. They buy all stuff from the houses like all refrigerators or all beds and stuff, but it's very loud because it has a speaker. So anyway, our short stories are interconnected and we are working like in a very collective way, which is, it's very interesting, but it's very nice because we have like an underline, but each of us has a different voice and of course, different characters, et cetera. So that is in very general terms. How are we, how we are working now? Thank you. Fascinating reflection on how the means of production is absolutely connected with this issue at every level, absolutely every level. We have to find new ways of collaborating, new ways of giving voice to people and to sharing a vision and developing a communal vision. So yeah, sounds like a great project. We're now going to leave you three for a little while and we're going to go to a short pre-recorded interview I did with Amitav Ghosh last week in which he looks at the challenges that he sees as facing writers and reads from his novel Gun Island in which a rare book dealer, a linguist and a marine biologist find the whole weight of colonial history bearing down on a boatload of migrants in the Indian Ocean. Hello Clara, thank you so much for having me. I want to get straight down to the great arrangement. Just give us what you said in that 2016 pamphlet really, which was so important in this debate. Well, I feel a little bit sort of discombobulated when I hear that it's sort of called to arms or a polemic or anything because actually it's really more a kind of introspection. I was trying to sort of ask myself, why is it that I in my own practice have found it so hard to write about climate events and the climate crisis and what is it about the form of the novel as such that really resists something like the climate crisis? So I point to various aspects of the form that make it very difficult to deal with matters like extremely improbable events. And as we know now, all of these events that are sort of coming at us so fast and furious, they're all extremely improbable. I mean, the scientists keep saying that there's a one in a thousand year chance of such a flood or such a hurricane or such a drought and so on. Two of the themes you mentioned is the ability of the novel to deal with the non-human and also the ability of the novel to deal with the uncanny with coincidence, which seems the events which seem beyond our imagination. Can you just explain those two things? Well, you know, the novel has a long tradition of dealing with the uncanny, you know, and the uncanny is very much the realm that we are in. I mean, so many of these events nowadays are profoundly uncanny, you know, they suddenly arrive in the middle of, you know, I was just a day before yesterday in Houston, Texas about to deliver a lecture on climate events and the uncanny and what should happen, but a hurricane exploded over us at just that time. I mean, these things are just constantly occurring. I mean, you know, there's a section in Dunn Island about a wildfire approaching a museum in Los Angeles and that did happen, the Getty Museum had a wildfire coming right at it, but I wrote that part six months before it happened, you know? So, I mean, one just constantly encounters these sort of weird and improbable events. And of course our fiction has historically been able to deal with many uncanny events of this kind. You know, there's, I don't know if you remember the work of Alganon Blackwood, a Canadian British writer who wrote wonderful stories of the uncanny and so on, but, you know, the problem is that, you know, that tradition of writing is really regarded as marginal, as a genre, as a kind of, you know, fantasy or horror or something. And we see now that it's not at all fantastical, it's not at all unlikely, it's just happening all around us all the time. So, yes. In a way, what you're talking about is a problem for the literary novelist because you make the point in the great arrangement that science fiction writers and fantasy writers and in mediums other than the novel have been dealing with this and with also with the non-human for decades. You know, we could talk about Terry Pratchett's disc world. We could talk about the universe. Yes, yes, that's absolutely true. You know, it is, I mean, the problem really is not so much about what writers do, but rather the literary ecosystem as a whole. You know, I mean, the writer who writes about those things, I mean, like Algernon Blackwood if you like or Richard Adams in writing Watership Down and so on. They're regarded as, you know, fantastical books. They're regarded as something completely extraneous to serious literature. When we talk about the climate crisis, when we talk about, you know, the so-called Anthropocene and so on, we tend to see it as a problem oriented towards the future. Whereas to me, it seems perfectly evident that it's in fact a problem of history. It's a problem completely rooted in history and especially in colonial history in the expropriation of resources and the expropriation and indeed extermination of, you know, many groups of people by European colonists going back to the 17th century. I think in so many ways we are really reliving the 17th century, which was also a time of enormous climatic disruption. Now, I want to just finish by asking you to read from Gunn Island, a particular passage which brings together two of the themes. One of the theme is about how we blame the little guys in the boat trying to get away from the places of maximum devastation. And the other is about this uncanny, these uncanny events that we're all seeing in our everyday life as told in a fictional form. I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of the derelict refugee boat. That tiny vessel represented the upending of a centuries old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known. In the service of commerce, they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents, they have always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe. This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made those massive demographic interventions possible, ranging from armaments to the control of information had now achieved escape velocity. They were no longer under anyone's control. This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat. Through the prism of this vessel, they could glimpse the unraveling of a centuries old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of their world. In their hearts, they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them. The world had changed too much, too fast. The systems that were in control now did not obey any human master. They followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons. So Amtav, it's a pleasure as always to talk to you. You've become one of my benchmarks in a whole area of thinking that I have to say has opened up since we met. I mean, it was post the great derangement we met at Hay-On-Wye and... Yes, that's right. I look forward to the next novel. I hope you're not going to forsake it entirely for nonfiction and fable. No, no, not at all. I love writing novels and thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye. Well, a couple of really important points there which I want to address to our panelists. One is we cannot separate the current environmental crisis from 400 years of colonial history. And the second one in terms of writing is the problem is not what writers do as the literary... So much what writers do as the literary ecosystem as a whole. We've dealt a little bit with that one, but Libia, give me your immediate thoughts about what Amitabh was saying. I know that I agree completely with him. I am from Mexico, which has been colonialized not only economically and military, but also ideologically Spain. And now we are just under the United States and the colonization in a cultural way. It's huge. Now, the system, the literary system, to me, it's too capitalist. And that is like there is a lot of problems. There is a lot of problems about how the books are commercialized. So what people understand for literature, high literature or not, what people understand for science fiction or fantasy, many times it doesn't have to do with what we write, but how it's commercialized, how it's labeled. And there is a whole system of ideology that marks that mimetic fiction, it's higher or superior than the genres of the imagination and science fiction and horror, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a lot of issues around that. And that happens mainly because of the way books are sold, because books are sold like yogurts. Books are sold like they have an expiring day. And if you don't sell a lot of books the first week, you are doomed. I don't know, I can talk about this for hours. I'm gonna try to be more focused because it's a topic very important to me. I have a project that is an editorial project here in Mexico that is independent and it's... We are not using copyright. We are using copyright left, which means we are liberating our content. And that is, for me, we have to deal with a lot of issues. And in science fiction, there is a lot of community. And I like that very much because I think science fiction writers, fantasy writers, horror writers, speculative and imaginative writers know how it is to be like the underdog in a way. But parallel to that, there is exactly the other phase that is because it's a literary genre that can be very, very commercialized, like very, very successful in economic terms. There is like a double standard. For one in one side is I want to publish these stories because they sell a lot. But the other side of the same coin is this fiction sell a lot, but it's not too good. So we are not going to take it so seriously. We're just going to produce in mass. So I don't know. I think that has to do also with how sometimes these genres are perceived. But I think a lot of people that reads and writes these such genres has a better understanding about how this literature, sorry, how this literature can be like seeing beyond the commercial labels and beyond the issues, the economical issues that are embedded in the literary commercial system. And that's why I think indie houses are very, very, very important. And it's very important that writers understand that for instance, copyright does not protect the writer, protect the people that sell books, which is very, very different. And I'm going to shut up now because it's a huge theme. Yeah, and projects like this one, it's imagination project that you're involved in really important as well, which support writers in there and without selling being the immediate aim. Now, before I move on to our next panelist, Hannah, I'm going to just reiterate that we'll be taking questions quite soon. And so please leave them in the form below the video. And we want to have lots of lovely, lively questions. Hannah, how did you, what did you get out of Amitav's? Well, just to follow up on what Libya said, you know, when we talked about literature from Africa earlier on, this is part of what, you know, the limiting factor of gatekeepers, you know, trying to dictate what they are interested in. So you have people, it's not like there's a dearth of ideas or themes or plots. You know, it's like saying, oh, from Africa, they want to, you have this, I don't know if you've heard the poverty point thing, that, oh, that's what you should be writing about. You have a whole lot of war. You have poverty. You have a lot of things that, what they feel that other people would like to, you know, read about. So I think that's a limiting thing on what people have to say, on what authors and writers have to say. So the ecosystem that he talked about, I totally agree with, because it kind of, there's no balance that you have from this side of the world. This is what we want because we're in charge with the ones, you know, publishing and with the ones that can make you a success, you know. So it puts a limit on what people and what writers from these parts would really want to put out there. But of course, like we're saying, there are a whole lot of spaces opening up for writers to just write what they want to write and the message, whatever message they want to put in their work. The other thing about colonization, we are Nigeria too, we have colonized and we're still suffering all that. Not only in the sense of the ideologies like Libya also mentioned, but you know, when you're trying to, in Nigeria for instance, we're a very diverse country and you have, you put some people together and you kind of give some kind of prescription as to who should be in charge and who is supposed to benefit and how things should be run. Believe me, even with the colonial is gone in quotes, those so-called prescriptions are still holding sway. You know, it's like saying, oh, this part of Nigeria, we are supposed to be in power because, you know, the British, no offense, the British when they were here, this is what they thought we could do it better. And you have all that going on, which affects the politics and affects what people, what's happening in the oil regions too. So you have like, for instance, as an example, the oil producing states in the South-South, which have been producing oil for quite some decades. You have a few, I think they found oil in the North, but you have these bills that come out in the House of Assembly and all that. And they say, oh, whatever is from the South should be shared among all the states. But those in those states, whatever goals they find or whatever oil they kind of extract and, you know, they don't, it just stays where they are. So there's no, that's the double standard we're also talking about. And it also affects how people see these messages and they say, oh, well, climate is not for us. We have a way of doing things that works. It works because they're benefiting from it and they're making a lot of money from it. Not necessarily that marginalized people are, you know, getting any improvement in their way of life or livelihood. Really, that's how it is here. Thank you very much. And Vandana, Hannah raised a couple of things, which is one is, you know, people dismiss it as poverty porn. And I think that there is, you know, this touches on the whole issue of why we look at these stories of really huge distress and also what effect it has on us as readers. So do we get compassion fatigue? And then leading on from that, I have a bit of a thing going on in my head about dystopian fiction and how dystopian fiction in a way has become a sort of cosy crime. It's like cosy crime, which as we call it in England, where, you know, the thrill of safe fear, the thrill of something bad happening to other people. Do you think that these are potential risks? That's for Vandana. Definitely. I think I do have a problem with not dystopian fiction per se as part of an ecosystem, perhaps, as, you know, where you're warning people or where, you know, the cautionary tales, they have their place. But unfortunately, what we are seeing is we're seeing a lot more dystopian fiction about the climate and, you know, various other disasters. Then we are seeing the kinds of fictions we need to shift our perspectives, to free our imaginations, to help us work through the hell on earth that has been created by the super powerful at our expense. So that is really a problem with dystopia. And I think one of the other things that it misses, which is something that I've learned from partly from scholarly work and a lot from activists working with grassroots marginalized communities, is that it's not just that marginalized communities have a disproportionate share of having to deal with climate impacts and also with essentially destructive so-called development. And that which is one of the enduring legacies of colonialism, speaking as another person who comes from, you know, as an Indian writer of science fiction and speculative fiction, you know, it's my family stories, generational stories have to do with British rule as well. So it's what they miss when people write those kinds of dystopian fiction that you might call, you know, kind of poverty porn or whatever is that people in these marginalized communities because they live outside the paradigm of modern industrial civilization have had to use their creativity to survive the ongoing apocalypse that they have always suffered for generations. And actually have some of the most brilliant perspectives and creative ideas and spirit that can actually inform and inspire what we do. So when we take a more complex lens to this issue, then I think there's a lot that we can learn from marginalized communities. And therefore that changes story. That changes story where we are not sitting apart at a distance and, you know, suffering compassion fatigue but instead are being inspired, humbled and de-centred from all ways of thinking about the climate crisis. Yeah, that whole thing of being de-centred, I think that is absolutely crucial whether one is writing from perspectives, other people's perspectives or even from perspectives outside the human. Oh, yes. How do we do this? Now, I just want to remind people one more time to leave your questions. We're about to come to question time but I would like to bring Ed back in. Ed, if you wouldn't mind to, because you're coming from inside the academy about this. What do you see as the exciting developments? So I think it's been wonderful hearing everybody's contributions. I think there are a few things. First, the business as usual people are having a harder and harder time pretending that it's business as usual. And if you're a writer of literary fiction today, a literary realist, what is literary realism? How do you have to write about climate? This is just the world we live in. The future is pouring into the basement. The future is raining down on us. It's happening all around us and it's getting harder and harder to ignore. And we've been working on climate related projects for years now, almost a decade at Center for Science and Imagination and the conversation has shifted. It's no longer so important to convince people to pay attention to climate. People everywhere are paying attention to climate now. The question becomes, what are we going to do? People feel helpless, people feel frustrated, disempowered, or they feel stuck in a normative, some sort of inertia that has been carrying us this far to say, well, I can do some recycling. And so how do we give people pathways forward to do exactly what Vandana was saying to build these imaginative bridges and to learn from different perspectives? So that is what I think is really exciting about this project. And this does feel like a moment when the world is finally starting to grapple with this question in a more profound way. And just the energy and enthusiasm that we've had around this project, partners not just the British Library, delighted to be here, the UN high level climate champions, Vandana is gonna be speaking at TED's with Project Countdown, which is a climate event they're holding later this year, the Hay Festival, journals and academic audiences and communities all around the world who are reaching out and getting in touch with us because they're excited about this. People really need hope. They're searching for these positive futures. We have this very disaffected relationship with the future. And that is what we're trying to change. It's so important in the context of climate. And that's been what people have always responded to in our work is, oh, you mean I can actually have a positive relationship with the future? I can be hopeful about this. It's okay to take some of these creative risks and actually think about what we might want instead of just wringing our hands and worrying about all the bad things that might happen. People desperately need that. So that I think is the moment we're at is to then say, how do we catalyze that into real action? How do we tell these stories and then inspire change today? I was talking the other day with the Turkish writer, Elis Şafak, who was talking about making the distinction between passive hope and active hope. And passive hope can be complacency. And we don't have any time for complacency. So how do we commute that into active hope where we're actually putting up the building blocks that will enable us to take one step further along that pathway? Yeah, okay, brilliant. So now I think the questions are beginning to come in. So I'm going to start posing them to the panel. The first one from Mai or May, thank you very much for your question, is in the dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin carefully navigates the limits and fallacies of the idea of utopia. How do you approach utopia, dystopia in the politics of your speculative fiction? Now, we have touched a little bit on this in the bit that was just gone before. But I was wondering, Libya, if you'd like to say anything about this. Well, I think those are two labels that are kind of old fashioned right now because we are building new ways of telling stories and to separate literature in dystopia and utopia. It's like reduced it a little bit. I think Ursula Le Guin made a fantastic job in the dispossessed. And it is, I don't remember exactly if it is an imperfect utopia or ambiguous utopia. But the thing is, I think a friend of mine also cites China Mabel that said, there is no dystopia without hope. And in every utopia, there is rage. You cannot have hope if you're not enraged with the bad things right now. And we need hope, but that doesn't mean complacency, as you said. We need to fight. But not in a, I'm sorry, English is my second language and sometimes my brain kind of like shut down. So the thing is that we need hope but we need to engage with things. We need to engage. If we are writing stories, we need to engage. We need to be responsible of how can we really engage to make some changes even if it is recycling or writing stories or voting for the right people and whatever it is. So dystopia and utopia are just labels but are not exclusions. There are not like, if I say I am making something towards a hope, it doesn't mean automatically that I am writing a utopia in an absolute term. I think right now science fiction, it's mixing hope with pain and despair because life is like that. So it's not just utopia versus dystopia. It's more like building new ways of writing stories and I think Ursula K. Le Guin pointed that even in the 60s, I am writing a utopia but it's not perfect and it's not deterministic. It's just one way of doing things. It's a laboratory. And in the book, you see how things are not perfect and that is okay. And I just, very quickly, I recommend that you read a short story that she wrote 10 years later that is called, The Day Before the Revolution in which Odo herself is the protagonist as an old woman and that is a brilliant short story that completely turns around the whole, the dispossessed ideology in the better way. So yeah, there's that. Yeah, excellent, excellent. And somebody, you really know you're Le Guin, don't you? I love her. I love her. She's my same major. She is a goddess. It has to be absolutely said, yes. Hannah, I'm going to turn to you from this question from Sarah, which is can you say more about how capitalist ideologies limit the imagination as well as our response to the climate crisis? Now this is absolutely germane to the problem of oil in Nigeria, isn't it? As well as to the colonial, the wider colonial history. It is. Well, the thing is, when we're talking about money and money and how to make a living or how to, because like what I'd also talked about in some earlier panel is, without the oil, where would we be? And even for years, it's gonna run out some day. You have to think about that. You have to focus a lot on agriculture. And even before colonialism, we had brownout farming in the North, there was cocoa in the West. But when the oil just came in, it kind of just ground to a standstill. We have industry and steel industries. Well, steel is one of those things. But a lot of these manufacturing things, things that we could hold on to as a country or say outlets where we're manufacturing, we're doing this just kind of ground to a halt. And we have to now look at are we, when we're talking about what success has become, especially in the West and those ideologies that have been passed down to us, what are we going to take? Is it going to be just making the money and then at the detriment of us? And we're not going to be here forever or our children or the land, like I said, you have a lot of land is just lying there. And it's like, we've said, oh, goodbye to you land. And there's no hope. So is that kind of, where does the balance come in? And I think like Wanda and I said, a lot of those things that we were doing early on before all colonialism came or came on board and other kind of things we have to return to, maybe on some level, not like we're going to just give up and go back to the old ways and start living without some of these conveniences. But I think if we want to really make a mark in our little ways and make a difference, we have to get rid of this idea of success and what is the entrapment really of what it means and move forward because if we keep doing the same things and we're not making any, especially in this country, I know a lot of other places are making moves and steps. Sometimes there's a lot of rhetoric here. Oh, let's do something. We have this committee. We're going to set up a committee to look at the ecosystem. Like two months ago, the governor here, oh, a committee for the ecosystem, do something. And I was wondering how much of that is really going to translate to actual practice? What next, are we going to hear about it? Are people going to be brought on board? There's a ministry of environment here, but it's almost like they don't exist to some extent. And then you have people saying, they're encouraging Shell, calling an oil company, encouraging Shell to clean up the canal. And I'm like, should it be about persuasion or there should be a policy? This is our country and this is how, this is how business should be run. You have to do this, not like kind of cojoling you too. Please, can you clean up the canal because you're making money and we're both making money? You know, those are the questions that come out of this thing. So I think somehow along the line, it has to be what is more important to us, you know, and then to forget bridge, you know, money is important, but really, at a point, it's not going to take us anywhere alone. Thank you. So it's slightly linked to that, but also sort of touching on some of Ursula Le Guin's writing, actually, that particularly her carrier bag fiction, theory of fiction, which will make Libby a smile, I know. There's a question from Mary, which I want to put to Vandana, which is, especially in fantasy, the plot features a single hero and a single big bad, and a single big bad. Does the panel think our frequent consumptions of stories that use these tropes have contributed to the feeling of hopelessness surrounding climate action, because there is no one big bad and no one group of rebels or chosen or a chosen one that can affect change? That's a very smart question, isn't it? It's a bit of a carrier bag question. Vandana. Yes, that's a brilliant question. Thanks to Mary for asking it. Yes, indeed. I think that that lone hero narrative is really destructive to our sense of agency and our imagination, because we always are waiting for somebody to come and do the stuff for us. Like, for instance, when I start talking about climate change to my students, often in the early part of the class, the kind of responses I elicit include things like, well, technology is going to save us, so those guys are going to do this or whatever. So that lack of agency, especially collective agency, which is one of the problems with capitalism because it breaks relationships. That's how it works. It works by breaking relationships. I think that's a major issue. And that's one of the reasons why I try to write about multiple people in multiple places around the world as I did, for instance, in a project that Ed headed as well, which is a story called Entanglement, which is set in five different places around the world and they kind of link together in some way. And there's a line from that story, which I'm quoting myself without just from memory, but something to the effect that the age of the lone hero, the lone ranger hero is over and now we are entering the age of a million heroes and more than a million, really. So that's the exciting thing that we now, if we can de-center ourselves from the lone ranger narrative, and which is based on social hierarchy, if you think about that, it's a pyramidal way of thinking about the world rather than thinking about the world as a web. So if we can separate ourselves from that and then think about who we are and what we can do within our networks of influence and beyond. And especially through literature, then there's something to that. And I think Ursula Le Guin, her works really showcase what the individual spirit within a collective network can do to change things, to effect social change. And so I thank you for that question, it's brilliant. It was a great question. Libya, can I just knit back to you about this carrier bag theory of fiction? Do you think that holds up now? I was so struck by it when I first heard about it. I find it so touching, but I wonder whether we need to find a different metaphor now. I don't know if it is, there is a better metaphor because I think it carries now. And I don't know, I just remember in a sideways, a philologist that I knew that I used to know, she said that language eats like an old lady carrying a lot of like pots and spoons and stuff for living. And the naturally gets rid of what is not useful anymore because it's very economical. In that regard, I think there is like a connection because stories, as I was saying in the beginning, evolve. So that idea of stories kind of, evolving by themselves and adapting to the times, it's a testament that the carrier bag, it's still current because you don't carry things that you don't need, you just carry things. If you are walking, if you are migrating, you just carry things that are useful. So literature can be that also. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I think it's still current. Thank you very much. Thanks. We're obsessing a bit about, we're becoming fan girls, aren't we, Ursula Legrin fan club? So a question from Sophia, which I'd like to put to Hannah. What is your message for novice writers of those who don't see themselves as fiction or those who don't see themselves as fiction writers? How can we claim the narrative back from the multi-million dollar dystopia stories in Hollywood Netflix and all the best sellers? And there's a small plug at the end for a Clifi for Beginners during lockdown, which is called wwwwithmanyroots.com, Clifi Imaginarium, which sounds quite worth visiting. Hannah, what's your, novices? Well, I think like for any writer in any claim or whatever theme, not just for speculative fiction, it's to keep plugging at it, I think, and to read, like they say, as widely as possible. And I think there's the courage sometimes to go with your gut, sometimes when we forget about, oh, this is what's trending and all that. And if you have something, if you have a message you want to, you want it out there, then you go for it and write it. Every, it's just a journey. I think every way is just about keep going, you keep writing, and then try and tamp down. I think there's always fear somewhere about how would this be received? And would I have, would anybody be interested? You don't want to be laughed at. For me, I do a lot of short story writing, and sometimes you just have to close your eyes and send it out, it might be rejected, but the more you grow, the more courageous you are at these things, you just send it out and you get a rejection, it might feel bad for one hour, but send it out as soon as possible, even as you can listen to it. Here's a question for you. I don't know which one of you, for all of you, why are you writing fiction, which doesn't get huge audiences? Why are you not writing for Netflix? Why are you not writing film? Why are you not writing best selling pop songs on the subject? Maybe it might be in our future one day, who knows? Olivia, what do you think about that? I think if I wanted to be a success, I wouldn't be a writer or I wouldn't be a Mexican science fiction writer. I will try to be a script writer for Netflix, unemployed and sad, because nobody picked my stories. It's a very competitive and very capitalist world. And I wanted to tell stories and explore ideas, and sometimes there is no direct link between that and economical success. And I think to write pop songs requires a talent that I don't have. Basically. Vandana, how about you? Is there a little world breaking screenplay has somewhere in the back of your mind? Well, I think we all hope that our works will get out there to a wider public. And in fact, the science fiction community is a pretty large and enthusiastic bunch of people that really engage with their writers, unlike other kinds of literature. But having said that, I think when I'm compelled to write because I don't seem to be able to stop myself. And I'm compelled to write from within. And I have to write the kind of work I write. And if people, if it's not hugely popular, then that's too bad. But on the other hand, I've also been thinking about the importance of this sort of writing getting heard, because in a way, it is also trying to redress the imbalance in the literary ecosystem to use that term of Amitabh's. And so I think that we have to, at least I'm going to try to bring it out there into older forms. Like bring back the oral component and storytelling, which is what I grew up with. I grew up hearing stories from my mother and grandmother. So there's other ways to think about it. But certainly it's not part of my agenda to go to Netflix or Hollywood, because I don't think they would necessarily, at this stage, care for the kinds of things we're writing. And that's fine. Long may it all continue. Thank you very much for all your wonderful questions to you and the audience. And thanks very much as well to our Climate Imagination Fellows, Hannah Onugwui, Libya Brenda Bandana Singh, also to Amitabh Ghosh and Ed Finn, who made a heroic intervention there. I'm going to leave you with a quote, because since we're on a bit of a Nersula Le Guin wave here, I'm going to leave you with a quote from that to carry a bag essay, which I carry with me in my heart, which is a novel is a medicine bundle holding things in particular and powerful relation to each other and to us. And I think that that is something that we could, you can meditate. I meditate on it regularly, and I hope we all do. So goodbye, and many thanks for listening and for participating. Thank you, Claire. I think we need also to thank you for so expertly leading us and guiding us through this event. And certainly another thank from the British Library and from all our audience, Hannah and Libya and for Bandana. Thank you. I've been inspired and humbled and challenged by everything I've heard from you. And our thanks also to Amitabh for his video and for Ed and the colleagues from the University of State University of Arizona for bringing us to this place really. It was a very exciting journey. I'm just going to also remind our audience about maybe continuing this journey with us for a little while through the project on the postcard from the future. You may have been inspired to start creating your own section right now, and you can link through the link at the bottom of the website below the video onto the postcards from the future project, where you see some brilliant images by the Brazilian digital artist, Shao Queiros, and you can write your own positive climate fiction short one for us and post it publicly as well. Thank you so much. You can see other videos on the British Library website from this particular series of the natural world. And we thank you very much. And goodbye from all of us and the British Library. Goodbye.