Hello there. There are a lot of new faces in the Story Voyager community and I thought it would be a good time to reintroduce this newsletter and give you 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, 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 has been a Substack featured publication 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 give 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 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
There’s also a blog version of this newsletter 👇
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.
Climate fiction
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
Story 4 → The Cooperative
Story 5 → There Is Hope
I aim to write and publish There Is Hope until the end on 2024.
Short cli-fi stories
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.
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 talks
I’m currently writing 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 Q4 2024.
Climate essays
A series of essays on the different aspects of climate change, modern society, as well as the challenges and opportunities that the future holds.
Food
Energy
Society
Allow me to get rich and I will save the world
This story was published in Volume I of the Elysian by Elle Griffin.
Cli-fi book club
Join our cli-fi book club where we read, discuss and analyze the future through the lens of climate fiction.
Some of the fiction books will be accompanied by non-fiction reading shedding light on the science behind the worldbuilding.
Cli-fi reading lists
At the beginning of every year I publish my climate fiction and non-fiction reading list. Make your pick from a total of 35 book titles.
‘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 ‘Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley
The next book we’ll read together is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. We will start in May.
I’m open to collaboration proposals for this book.
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. Currently, I work as a product manager in a climate tech start-up trying to turn energy into a currency. In my free time, I write climate fiction and practice tea ceremony. I live with my husband in Vienna, Austria. Born at 340 ppm.
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
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! 🌿