Could you explain a little about your work and the Climate Fiction Writers League, and how everything came about for you?
I write a lot of sci-fi. I tend to write romantic comedy things about space travel or ghosts or humans turning into robots – a whole mix of very silly things. I knew one day I was going to have to write a book about climate change because it's such a big issue. But I put it off for a while because it feels like something that's quite depressing to write about, and I tend to write very funny, silly books. I couldn't find a way into the topic that would make me want to write it for a year without just getting really depressed.
Then, I was really inspired by a lot of the school strike movements that were going on, where teenagers were literally willing to go to prison and get in huge trouble to protest the lack of climate action. They used the only power they had, which was to refuse going to school to make their voices heard. I thought it'd be really cool and very inspiring to write a book where I gave them some real power, because I thought that they would be willing to do anything to use that power if they had some.
So I ended up writing a novel called Green Rising and I gave them the power to grow plants with their hands. That makes them stronger than any adult because, if someone's attacking them, they can grow a whole tree around them. It was inspired a lot by The Power by Naomi Alderman, where women get the power to strike electricity, which makes them more powerful than men. [In Green Rising], they use this to rewild the planet and take hostage all the companies which are causing climate change, and they go up to the International Space Station and grow rainforests and all this kind of stuff. All of the things they do are inspired by real solutions about what we can do about climate change. This was something I could write where I really felt like I could be fun and exciting with it, but also do something useful that tells people what we need to do about the climate.
As I started writing it, I was reading loads and loads of non-fiction about climate change, and I wanted to read whatever fiction had already been written. I couldn't really find any databases beyond a few lists online. So I decided to set up my own. I was really inspired by a group called the Women Writers' Suffrage League, who were established in 1908. They were set up to encourage writers to write about the cause to get women the vote. They thought that if people were writing about this in their fiction, it would encourage everyone to see how important it was. That is where we're at in history right now with climate change. We need to be writing about it to get people to care about it. You need to be able to envision the future that we're trying to get to in order to do the work to get there.
We need to be writing stories showing what the world could look like if we made changes, and then having that in our collective human imagination is really what's going to drive that to become real in the same way that we managed to get to the moon. So I set up this group called the Climate Fiction Writers League and it started out just as me, collecting all of the different climate fiction I could find. I've got 250 members who are all traditionally published authors from all around the world. A big part of what I do is I showcase all their books on the website so people who are looking for climate fiction can go and find a resource for that. I also help them share essays and interview each other about their stories in a newsletter which has about 2,000 subscribers on Substack, so it's got a very invested readership who are also interested in this.
Wren James wrote Green Rising in an attempt to address the climate crisis through fictionYou’ve touched on a lot of the themes that I've kind of tried to tease out with this series as a whole, which is basically that the science now is kind of settled if you're a sane person. So now it's how do we get people to engage? And how do we get them to take action? Ultimately, art and creativity is what people engage with. If we can reach people in their leisure time, then that's a really important thing. So, as someone who writes about the climate, how do you get those themes into work in a way that people want to read them and don't feel like they're being preached at?
There's an amazing book by researcher Emily Coren called Storytelling to Accelerate Climate Solutions, which has this great example taking you through the process of making a story better in terms of helping climate activism. So it gives you this example, which is a story set in the future in LA in a time when there's a big heatwave, and it's about people trying to survive this heatwave. [Coren] says that this is a bad example of storytelling because it's set in the future, so it doesn't tell people in the present day what they should do about a heatwave. It also doesn't tell people how they should prepare for a heatwave if one happens now, or if one happens in the future. It's just a survival story that's going to make us feel more anxious, but not really give us any tips.
A better example of a story about a heatwave would be one set in the present day about an individual who does things to help prevent the heatwave causing a lot of harm. It shows in the moment what you need to do to make the heatwave less bad in your actual life. It's an action story about survival, but it's about how you frame it to get all of that information in there.
It's quite hard and my big thing that I've recently started thinking about is how to get it into stories that aren't sci-fi or fantasy, because most people don't read sci-fi or fantasy. It's very niche. The thing that sells in publishing and makes most of the money is romance novels and crime. That's the big ship of publishing and everything else is a tiny barnacle clinging onto the side. If we really want to educate readers about climate solutions and activism, we need to get it in those books – the stuff about people living their normal lives.
The best way to get climate fiction in is to show them talking to people in their lives about their experiences, how the world has already changed, and how they can make a difference. If we can train those kinds of writers, I think that's the really big thing that's going to make a difference and showcase climate solutions in the best possible way.
That’s a great way of looking at it. If people are reading this and want to access some of the great climate fiction, what are the really big works people should be seeking out?
One of my favourites is Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which is quite a short novella. It's set in a future world where robots have become sentient and left humanity and they've gone off into the wilderness. They've been living in isolation for 200 years and, in this world, we've given back 70% of the planet to nature. For the first time in 200 years, a robot comes to talk to a human. It's a really lovely, sweet story that isn't necessarily about climate change, but it shows what we want to aim for in terms of a better planet.
Another example that I just read and really loved was The Ministry of Time [by Kaliane Bradley]. It's set about 50 years in the future and it's about people using time travel technology to bring people back from the past and looking at how they can use time travel to fix climate change by going into the past and making changes. It's a really interesting look at all the different changes we're going to see over the next few decades really close up.
Then another one I really liked was The Overstory by Richard Powers which is, I think, a future classic of the climate fiction genre, looking at trees and how lots of different groups of people’s relationship with trees changes. Another recent one I've loved is The Mars House by Natasha Pulley, which is about if we set up a colony on Mars and people live there for hundreds of years, so their skeletons become more fragile because of the lower gravity. Then a group of climate refugees move from Earth and they suddenly are really strong and powerful, so it makes the Mars people really fragile. It's this culture shock as they try to adapt to living together.
Wren James recommended The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley as a great work of climate fiction It’s a tricky question to answer after recent news events, but do you think we're in a generally better place with the climate crisis than we were a decade ago?
Having done a lot of research into why we still haven't done anything about this, it all comes down to money. People make so much money off oil and gas that there's really a lot of incentive for them not to do anything about climate change and just to keep making that money as long as they can. They know it's going to run out one day, so their goal as companies is to delay that. We are reaching a turning point in that green energy is getting to the point where it’s cheaper to create than oil and gas and once things become cheaper, it doesn't really matter about the moral implications of it. Things are naturally going to turn in that direction anyway.
A big thing that seems like a really positive sign for me is this lawsuit called Juliana v. United States, where 21 teenagers in 2015 sued the government for violating their human rights. That's been going through the courts for the last nine years. Suddenly, there is a financial risk to governments and corporations that are causing climate change in that they can be sued by these class action lawsuits, and they will lose a lot of money. I know that sounds really dark, that they only care about the money, but it's true. If they cared about people dying, they would have done something 20 years ago. For me, the big, positive sign that we are going to get there eventually, even if it takes another few decades to really see big changes, is that the money is going to go in that direction anyway.
Away from your medium of books and publishing, is there any particular art about the climate that you find particularly inspiring?
I do a workshop about this and about which movies and TV shows are useful for teaching young people about climate change. There's a few big examples that they'll have heard of that are cultural landmarks. There’s Wall-E, which is about Earth getting completely ravaged by garbage and a lonely robot. Then you have The Last of Us, which is obviously a zombie survival one. But the reason the zombies appear is because the temperature rises enough that the fungi can live inside human bodies.
What really makes me happy is seeing stuff like a cheesy romance movie on Netflix called Falling Inn Love. It’s about a woman who gets a hotel inn and adapts it to add in solar panels and a heat pump and stuff. In the process, she falls in love with the builder who's doing some of the work for her. It's just a romance, but it shows you all this cool technology.
Down to Earth with Zac Efron, where he's just touring the planet and talking about the environment. That's just a silly travel show that gets some of those themes in there. I think those are the things that really help get it to normal people who wouldn't necessarily engage with a climate show. I also really enjoyed the recent Apple show Extrapolations. Each episode takes you further into the future across 30 years. There's short stories within the episodes, but they're going further and further into the future.
As a final question, what would be your one piece of advice for how you would like the arts as a whole to tackle the climate crisis going forward?
I am on a few advisory boards within the publishing industry. I work with the Climate Fiction Prize and one of the things they're doing is applying for grants they can give to writers who are working on climate novels to give them time to write and develop their ideas. We're looking at doing workshops where we can access people who wouldn't necessarily think to put climate fiction in their writing and give them the education they need.
Another thing is I work with the Society of Authors in their sustainability committee. That was really looking at how the books themselves can be made more sustainable through the printing process, how far away from the country it's being sold in they're being made, and how they're shipped to get there. We want to create a system where, on the copyright page of each book, it has a grade for how sustainable that book is. The reader in the shop can look at it and decide if that is something they want to take into account when they're buying the book. That’s a huge process and a big part of that was developing 10 questions that all creatives can ask their publisher.
Those are some of the big things that I think are really important: educating people who are already creating work on how they can include more climate themes in their storytelling, asking questions and questioning the traditional ways of doing things that maybe are just kind of status quo.
Then the big thing, which I'm sure you've already heard of, is sponsorship for book festivals like Edinburgh Book Festival. I'm part of an organisation called Fossil Free Books, which recently protested the fact that one of the big sponsors of all the book festivals in the UK is an investment company, Baillie Gifford, who have a lot of investments in not only fossil fuel companies, but also arms companies that are funding Israel. This protest led to that sponsorship being removed, and it is being replaced by companies like Bloomsbury, who are stepping forward to fill in some of the sponsorship gaps.
There’s a few different areas there: production, economics, and also the creative practice itself. They all tie together, and they're all equally important in different ways. It's such a huge thing to take on that all you can really do is start the wheels rolling on these conversations. I'm just an author who wrote a book about climate change and set up a website. We're so early in this process of making activism out of fiction that all you need to be an expert is to be engaged with it. Care about the issue and talk to people about it. That's the biggest thing we can do, anyway, for climate activism: talk to people in our lives and tell them why climate change is an issue that matters to us, and why it's going to affect our lives. There's so much still to do, and all I can try to do is get conversations started so that people go away and really look at what they're already doing, and think about how they can adjust it.
Find out more about Wren James via their official website and follow the work of the Climate Fiction Writers League too.
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