Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors


 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Contents
 Foreword by adrienne maree brown
 Editor’s Note
 Afterglow
 The Cloud Weaver’s Song
 Tidings
 A Worm to the Wise
 A Séance in the Anthropocene
 The Tree in the Back Yard
 When It’s Time to Harvest
 Broken From the Colony
 The Case of the Turned Tide
 El, The Plastotrophs, and Me
 Canvas–Wax–Moon
 The Secrets of the Last Greenland Shark
 Acknowledgments
 Contributor Biographies
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Contents
 Foreword by adrienne maree brown
 Afterglow
 Acknowledgments
 Copyright
 Start to Contents
 
 
 
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 AFTERGLOW
 CLIMATE FICTION FOR FUTURE ANCESTORS
 EDITED BY GRIST
 
 
 
 
 
 FOREWORD
 
 WRITING FICTION ALLOWS US TO DREAM ALOUD, TO DREAM ONTO pages that we hope others will read, and to craft worlds we hope others will visit.
 We are already dreaming beyond this current moment, these crises, these norms. Dreams are the foundation for what we attempt to turn into reality. Democracy was a dream (and some might argue it still is in most places, even for those who claim to be practicing it); the abolition of slavery was a dream (and some should argue it still is, while the prison industrial complex thrives); every garden we find nourishing was first a dream. The structures of our society emerged from someone dreaming it thus, for better and for worse—supremacy was dreamt up from insecure minds, racism was dreamt up from a fear of difference.
 When we know things need to change, dreaming together is one of the places we can start. I have been blessed to experience many kinds of collective dreaming, both as a movement worker and as a fiction writer. My movement work was primarily facilitation, holding space and process for groups of change-makers—people who see injustice in the world and take responsibility. I have facilitated rooms full of people committed to changing the world, listening as they dreamed together a future in which everyone has access to everything they need, a future where we care about the Earth and the children of our species in equal measure and as collective points of self-care. I have held rooms in which people debated over the priorities of the future—How can we sustain human life on earth? Eradicate racism and other systems of supremacy? Return land to Indigenous stewardship?
 As a fiction writer, I often return to my memories of those rooms. The heroes of my fiction are inspired by people who want to take responsibility for the future at a collective level, especially young people. I often write about communities who are experiencing at a small scale what is changing at the grandest scale in the world. I write both to uplift these stories and strategies, and to cast the spell into the world’s imagination. It could be like this. We could have reparations and regain our dignity. We could relinquish our reliance on technologies of illusion and embrace who and what we are, the beauty of our brief and miraculous lives.
 I am also, like many of the writers around me, obsessed with imagining futures in which humans are thriving in right relationship to the planet. I have written stories in which humans operate in much smaller units, interconnected but living in harmony with what the land can sustain. In an age of wildfires and political inflammation, I am writing a series of stories in which we find an ally in the water itself. I intentionally try to follow in the footsteps of writers who have tackled climate change head-on. Octavia E. Butler wrote us the Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents from directly inside the climate crisis, and then the incredible Xenogenesis/Lilith’s Brood collection about how humans continue two hundred years after a climate apocalypse. Butler was writing us warnings. Kim Stanley Robinson is another incredible writer of climate fiction, telling stories of how humans persist despite having made the Earth inhospitable. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Alex DiFrancesco, Rivers Solomon, Nalo Hopkinson, and others offer us visions and pathways forward with their fiction.
 But what do we do if our dream space is colonized, as I believe it is?
 To colonize a place and people is to settle among them and seize political control over their land, lives, labor, beliefs, and practices. Much of the world we now live in was colonized at some point, meaning the majority of humans live in a post-colonial architecture, both physical and ideological.