Shining Moon Episode 22: Environmental Fiction, Cli-Fi, and Solarpunk

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon Episode 22. Today we’ll be talking about environmental science fiction, cli-fi, solarpunk, and maybe even hopepunk. My guests today are Renan Bernado, Cecile Cristofari, and Susan Kaye Quinn.

Stories featured in this episode:

Renan Berando:
"A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity," Escape Pod #863, https://escapepod.org/2022/11/17/escape-pod-863-a-shoreline-of-oil-and-infinity/

"Eight Steps to Steal a Yacht and Build a Hospital: Solarpunk Magazine issue #8.

Cecile Cristofari:
'Que la grenade est touchante' (Lackington's, Issue 24 (Fall 2021)) https://lackingtons.com/2022/08/03/que-la-grenade-est-touchante-by-cecile-cristofari/

"The Fishery," (Interzone Digital). https://interzone.digital/the-fishery/

Susan Kaye Quinn:
“Seven Sisters” (Grist, Imagine 2200, Oct 04, 2022)  https://grist.org/fix/climate-fiction/imagine-2200-seven-sisters/

Rewilding Indiana (Little Blue Marble,  May 26, 2023 ) https://littlebluemarble.ca/2023/05/26/rewilding-indiana/

 T.K. Rex :
A Holdout in the Northern California Designated Wildcraft Zone  (Grist, Oct 04, 2022)  https://grist.org/fix/climate-fiction/imagine-2200-holdout-in-the-northern-california-designated-wildcraft-zone 

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:01.801)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon episode 22. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we'll be talking about environmental science fiction, cli-fi, solar punk, and maybe even some hope punk on the side. My guests today are Renan Bernardo, Cecile Cristofari, and Susan Kaye Quinn. Let's start with some introductions. Renan Bernardo is a science fiction and fantasy writer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

His writing has appeared or is forthcoming on Tor.com, Apex magazines, Escape Pod, Solar Punk magazine, and others. His writing scope is broad from secondary world fantasy to dark science fiction, but he enjoys the intersection of climate narratives with science, technology, and the human relations inherent to it. His Solarpunk/Clifi short fiction collection, Different Kinds of Defiance is upcoming in 2024. Welcome, Renan, and thank you for being here today.

Renan Bernardo (00:55.99)
Hello everyone, thank you for inviting me.

Deborah L. Davitt (00:59.269)
It's a pleasure to have you on. 

Cecile Cristofari lives in South France where she teaches literature and writes stories when her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared in Interzone, Daily Science Fiction, Reckoning and others, and has been long-listed for the BSFA award. Her short story collection, Elephants in Bloom, love that title, is forthcoming from Newcom Press. Hello Cecile and welcome back to the podcast.

Cécile (01:24.466)
Hello, it was great to be here again. Thank you for inviting me.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:29.061)
Oh, again, it's a pleasure to have each of you here. It's wonderful to have each voice. I love having many voices on a podcast. 

So Susan Kaye Quinn is an environmental engineer/rocket scientist. How often do I get to say that? Turned speculative fiction author who now uses her PhD to invent cool stuff in books. Her works range from hopepunk and climate fiction to gritty cyberpunk. Her short fiction can be found in Dreamforge, Grist, Little Blue Planet, and forthcoming in Solar Punk Magazine.

All her novels and short fiction can be found on her website, which is www.susankayequnin.com. Hi Susan, it's nice to meet you in person at last.

Susan Kaye Quinn (02:08.734)
Nice to meet you and be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:13.329)
We've got a chock full episode today, so we will get started. Let's first of all talk definitions. What is Clifi and what is Solarpunk and what is environmental fiction and do they differ in any way?

Deborah L. Davitt (02:32.921)
and I'll start with Susan because she has an essay on this. And so it's probably best to start with somebody who's talked about definitions.

Susan Kaye Quinn (02:43.874)
I have many thoughts. You shared with us before a definition and I was prepared to say that I strongly disagree with that. So we're not going to even, we're just going to go right past that moving on. I feel like solar punk is a relatively new sort of subgenre of climate fiction or environmental fiction, high-five.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:54.994)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:11.101)
We're going to pause for a second while the noise in the background is going to be edited out and we're going to try this again.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:30.053)
Let's try this again. You disagreed with the definition that I had sent around, and I'm interested to know why you disagreed and how you would define each of these things.

Susan Kaye Quinn (03:41.226)
And I think, first of all, I kind of have this, despite my writing an entire essay on HopePunk, I have a reaction against trying to corner things into a definition because I feel like we, first of all, we're co-creating these stories. These are new stories. We've been trying to tell climate stories for decades and it has fallen down into this trap of being doomerist, apocalyptic,

Deborah L. Davitt (03:52.948)
Mm-hmm.


Susan Kaye Quinn (04:10.702)
the lone hero survives and solves every problem, or at least the worthy few have survived. And there's a little bit of revenge fantasy built into that, to some extent, like all you humans will die except for the few. And so I reject the-

Deborah L. Davitt (04:11.278)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:28.573)
which is why I have tended not to read these things because I've assumed that it's going to be like this. And then when I sat down to read stuff for this episode, I'm like, oh, this is so much better than I assumed it was going to be. It's literature of hope as opposed to of doom. It's literature of communalism as opposed to the Lone Ranger. And I really found I enjoyed what I was reading, which was a pleasant surprise.

Susan Kaye Quinn (04:51.702)
And I love that reaction, because I think we do carry a lot of, we being readers, writers, editors, carry a lot of assumptions about what these stories are, what they should be, what they have been in the past. And those are reasonable because it's informed by what it has been. But there is an entirely new take on this that is challenging a lot of those old narratives. This says,

Deborah L. Davitt (05:02.281)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (05:18.87)
We need communal storytelling. I have a quote from Rebecca Solnit from her essay, "'When the Hero is the Problem'." We are not very good at telling stories about a hundred people doing things. Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them from coordinated rather than solo action.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:21.674)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (05:43.438)
And as my friend PJ Mani, who developed a new mythos group that I've been a part of for many years, says, you can't have a revolution with one person, which is beautifully succinct. I love that. And so I see a lot of challenge to Western storytelling styles, to active protagonists, having to be the one who's the heroine solves the problem, as opposed to being part of a collective.

and finding your place. And I feel like the reality is we live in a world of climate change, no one of us is gonna solve the problem. And that leads a lot of people to doomerism rather than, okay, but what's my part? And helping people envision that part, that is what I see, Clyfy, solar punk, hope punk, all of it is trying to come at this from maybe slightly different perspectives, but we're all kind of trying to do the same thing. We're trying to navigate the Anthropocene through fiction.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:12.559)
Mm-hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (06:42.024)
Mm-hmm.

Right? Cecile, would you like to add something to that or would you like to gently disagree with any of it? It's up to you and I'm just interested in each person's opinion. 

Cécile (06:59.261)
I'm sorry. I was saying I very much agree with the part about post-apocalyptic fiction and lone heroes in a Mad Max style world. Well, for me, well, first, there is this idea that I feel almost a kind of glee in that kind of fiction, in the idea that the world has been destroyed and only the worthy have survived. And also what strikes me is the...

inability that authors and readers for a long time had to imagine nature and to imagine humans living with nature. It's easier to imagine that the world has been completely destroyed and there is nothing left but you know very large deserts all over the planet. It's easier to imagine that than to imagine solving our problems.

and I think that's where climate fiction, environmental fiction come in. Let's try to actually imagine what it would look like to, well, fix things, find solutions. And it's also, I think it's a bit of a departure from much of traditional science fiction in the sense that it's not about easy...

Deborah L. Davitt (07:58.965)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (08:26.833)
technological fixes. Very often it's about imagining structural changes, changes in the way communities work, changes in the way we see and interact with nature. And something I think I might like to add is that, well, I would make a parallel with feminist fiction.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:29.109)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (08:54.005)
So you can write feminist fiction by centering women's oppressions and struggles and writing a book, for example, about women fighting for the right to get a safe abortion or something like that. And or you can write feminist fiction just by writing about a woman's life in completely ordinary circumstances. I was thinking of booklets like Jane Eyre or...

Christine Lavoran's data, you know, they're not explicitly feminist, but by through the fact that they are engaged with the female perspective, 100%, they are de facto important to feminist literature. Right. Now we say the same thing of eco fiction and climate fiction, you can center the struggles to restore ecosystems to end the destruction.

of nature etc. Or you can also write fiction where nature is a protagonist and where the relationship between humans and nature is central even if it doesn't center the destruction of nature. And I think that's also a really important part of environmental fiction in the sense that, well, how else are we going to imagine interacting with nature?

Deborah L. Davitt (10:01.47)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (10:20.637)
and making it a part of our lives instead of just exploiting it and then forgetting about it.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:27.465)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:31.797)
All right, I'm gonna switch over to Renan and say, what do you think about when we sit down to define however loosely, solar punk and environmental fiction and cli-fi, how do you wind up defining it? How do you wind up writing it?

Renan Bernardo (10:52.948)
Yes, I agree with what Cecilia and Susan put it, and I was thinking about these definitions. I was thinking that maybe environmental fiction is a more generic way of talking about other climate narratives like climate fiction or solar punk. I think that maybe...

environmental fiction encompasses Clyphi and Clyphi encompasses Solar Pan. I'm not sure if I agree with it, but I was thinking in that terms. In the sense that I see Clyphi as a more general subgenre of environmental fiction in the sense that it might be pessimist, it might be a bleak dystopia.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:25.244)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:44.883)
Okay.

Renan Bernardo (11:49.924)
And I don't see Solar Point that way, for example. And environmental fiction being the most broad of them all, in my way of thinking, and might encompass narratives that doesn't have to do with climate change at all. Might be some narratives about pollution, about deforestation, or about other things that doesn't have to be with the catastrophe that we are facing.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:54.238)
Mm-hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (12:08.978)
Mm-hmm.

Renan Bernardo (12:18.288)
the crisis that the world is facing today. And I think it's kind of a spectrum maybe that Clifi is on the middle and the negative side and maybe SolarPlanet is on the positive side.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:34.565)
Okay, interesting.

I'm going to go off on a little tiny bit of a tangent here. I'm going to do this because it's my podcast and I'm allowed to. I have a novella coming out in 2025 with Luna Press. It's going to be announced before this podcast goes live so I can totally talk about this. It's called The Carrying Capacity of Paradise. And when I was talking with a friend about this, she said, Deborah, this is Clifi. You need to talk about this on the podcast and one of the environmental episodes that's coming up. And I'm like...

You're right, I didn't realize I had written something that was fly-fied, but apparently I have. But it is a murder mystery, and it also talks about how to change and remap our relationship to each other as opposed to, and also remap how we deal with the environment because it's set in a nature preserve in the asteroid belt. And it's...

It has to do with people who are withdrawing from social media and the constant sense of population that oppresses us when we are dealing with social media. And it talks about the rat paradises of the experiments of the 1950s and 1960s in which the overpopulation and the ennui of existence just made the rats just withdraw from each other.

and not be able to live productive lives as normal rats did. And that maps very nicely onto where we are at with our population pressure and the constant pressure of social media making you feel like you're constantly surrounded by people. And so it's a densely interwoven narrative, which has a lot of different things to think about in it. And I guess it's...

Deborah L. Davitt (14:31.161)
I don't know whether I would call it solar punk or cli-fi, but it's going to be interesting to see how people react to this one. But now that I've gone off on my tangent, we will get back on topic with all of your wonderful stuff. And we, I'm gonna skip my first question, which was, which of these sub-genres goes beyond fiction and buys a call to action? Because they all do, it's just that it's gentler, it's not preachy.

is, I think, the point about cli-fi in the modern sense. It doesn't try to preach, it tries to show a different way of being. So I'm going to switch to, what do you hope that people will get out of reading your particular cli-fi solar punk stories? And I'm gonna start with Cecile, since she's first at the top of my screen, and we'll go with that. What do you hope that people will get out of reading them?

Cécile (15:31.761)
Thanks. Uh, well, I would say what I really want people to do is look around them and look at the world we have now and everything we haven't lost yet and think really carefully about whether this is worth destroying for the sake of what, you know...

Deborah L. Davitt (15:32.778)
There we go.

Cécile (16:01.533)
consumption, a general idea of growth, which, let's be honest, 90% of the population doesn't really understand what growth is and why it's so important. And yeah, look, because I think one of the problems we have now is that most people in Western societies, so people who are responsible for much of the...

Deborah L. Davitt (16:13.48)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (16:31.293)
over consumption of resources, live urban lifestyles, and don't have any kind of really deep, meaningful, strong relationship with nature. And... Sorry, can you hear a lot of noise in the background? Shall I maybe take them, tell them to try to...

Deborah L. Davitt (16:59.041)
No, you're fine. I hear children's voices in the background, but I don't think it will interfere with your voice.

Cécile (17:06.773)
Oh, okay, perfect. Sorry. Just because I can always tell them to try to make a little bit less noise, but yeah. Okay, cool. Okay. Yeah. So yeah. So we're saying I mean, for most people, you know, having a car, for example, is something meaningful, because it means stages, it means that you're grown up, it means that you've been successful in life. You know,

Deborah L. Davitt (17:13.885)
They are young and it happens and you're doing your best.

Cécile (17:34.829)
eating meat is comfort food, it's something you enjoy, maybe something that reminds you of meals that your grandmother cooked when you were a child. So it's something meaningful. Having a large house, buying new clothes, it has meaning. But let's be honest, for most people, nature doesn't have any kind of strong meaning. Recently I was rereading this quote by Woody Allen.

I like nature, I don't just want to get any on me. And oh my God, it's so funny, it's absolutely hilarious. And it's just, it explains so much about why we're in that situation. At large, I think most people actually hate nature. So why would they care that forests are being destroyed? You know, when you ask people to stop driving their car because it's causing climate change, then well, yes, forests are burning.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:07.555)
Ha ha!

Deborah L. Davitt (18:17.62)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (18:33.413)
but forests are full of mosquitoes and I don't really care all that much about forests. And my car though... Ah, it's nice to have a car. So, yeah, people can be convinced that we have to do something. But feeling it deeply, I think it's another matter. I realized at some point that the reason why I cared about the environment was actually very selfish.

And there was this moment when I was walking around in the countryside around Aix-en-Provence where I live. And I was thinking, there are no butterflies any longer. There used to be butterflies. I used to go with a net trying to catch butterflies when I was a child. And I told myself, don't be ridiculous. You're just idealizing your childhood. So I came back home and I went online. I thought, yeah, I'm going to check if butterflies...

populations have really decreased or increased or what, and they have been halved since the 90s. Like 50% of the butterflies in France have disappeared since the 90s. So it was not just me idealizing my childhood, it was me noticing that something was really happening and that was, you know, that was some time ago in 20 years of my life.

I could see the changes and I could see things disappear and I just panicked completely. I thought, I don't want to live in a world without butterflies. Fuck no. Sorry. You know, just a very strong reaction. And no, there is no amount of modern comfort and consumption and whatever that can make up for the despair of going out and no longer seeing trees and no longer smelling when it is spring and no longer seeing flowers.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:59.92)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (20:27.205)
because of, you know, herbicides and no longer seeing butterflies and bees. And I don't want to live in a world like that. And I want people to reach that point when they look around and see, my God, what we have. It's so amazing. It's so beautiful. And what does, you know, the consumer society, what does urban life give us?

Deborah L. Davitt (20:37.692)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:46.65)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (20:57.009)
that is good enough to be worth destroying all this.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:04.138)
Okay. Renan, do you yourself live in an area that will be subject to catastrophic climate change in the future? Because one of your stories was very deeply and very intimately connected to an area that is I believe near you in Brazil, that dealt with or will be dealing with pollution on

Renan Bernardo (21:25.199)
Thanks for watching!

Deborah L. Davitt (21:30.461)
or it's a vision of what would happen with incredible pollution from a tanker spill. Do you live in an area that will be subject to massive climate change if things don't get better?

Renan Bernardo (21:43.984)
Yes, actually that story is set in Saquarema and there is not any risk there as far as I know, so that part is entirely speculative. But we are right now facing a lot of problems here in Rio de Janeiro city, the capital of the Rio de Janeiro state, and we are facing lots of problems regarding climate change.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:57.65)
Okay.

Renan Bernardo (22:13.78)
because we are having heat waves with apparent temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius. Yes, it has been very, very bad. Rainstorms have become more frequent and more catastrophic as well. There is an imperial city near Rio that was completely destroyed by a rainstorm a few years ago.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:14.034)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:20.611)
Oh my god.

Renan Bernardo (22:42.208)
and it was almost level to the ground. And Rio itself is prone to suffer from the rising levels of water as well. It's not happening as far as I know, but I remember reading an article on The Guardian that showed maps of Shanghai, Miami, Alexandria, and other cities in the world, and there was Rio as well.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:42.218)
Hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (22:52.095)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:07.962)
Mm-hmm.

Renan Bernardo (23:10.756)
and it showed how the seat would look like with the water levels above normal. It really moved me in a way that it helped me to write more stories about it. Yes, and that's it. And that reflects in this story that you mentioned and in the other stories as well.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:11.23)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:20.67)
Oh wow.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:37.189)
Yeah. Yeah, I each of the stories that you sent sounded just so deeply personal and so deeply visceral that I just had to bring that up as a question that I wanted you to address. Susan, in your essay, you talk about hope, which is an endorphin hack into the human psyche, as you called it, which I loved as a phrase.

How do you inject that into a climate narrative without sounding twee or Pollyanna-ish? How do you wind up creating hope in something that looks fairly hopeless without making it sound yay and it was all okay?

Susan Kaye Quinn (24:19.67)
Well, what I find, I get asked that question a lot. And what I find is that, well, in a podcast earlier than the week, I had a similar question and I'm like, where are these Haleanish stories? I want to read them because I think they're mostly mythological. They don't actually get published. The only ones that actually get published are the ones that are the opposite of that, the dark.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:24.661)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:32.379)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:39.615)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:43.826)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:49.353)
The Grimdark.

Susan Kaye Quinn (24:49.866)
destruction, all of that. So I think the question is a bit actually, it's a reflective question, because what's built into the assumptions of that question, first of all, is that all hope must be this ridiculous, you know, looking away from the problem and pretending everything was fine. And of course, the reality is, is that people are looking away from the problem

Deborah L. Davitt (24:52.169)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:01.833)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:10.775)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (25:18.966)
because it's too hard to look at, that they're ignoring what's happening because they can't figure out what they could possibly do about it. And so there's this disconnect. And I almost feel like the diminishment of a hopeful story as twee, as you say, which is such a great term, twee, it is a great word, that is actually a bit of a defense mechanism that says,

Deborah L. Davitt (25:21.455)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:29.074)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:39.061)
That's a great word.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:47.679)
Okay.

Susan Kaye Quinn (25:48.874)
I don't even have to look at it. I know that this is ridiculous. I can stay safely in my little cocoon where I just ignore everything. And the other, I can indulge in the dark grittiness because that is, you know, exciting and fun and a little bit of revenge. So I think the reality is...

Deborah L. Davitt (25:52.955)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:58.159)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:04.677)
It's more yeah. Another part of your essay said something of Ursula Le Guin quote, and it was it's much easier to talk about the hunter than it is to talk about the gatherer. And it's always more exciting to write about the hunter than about the gatherer. So yeah.

Susan Kaye Quinn (26:17.686)
Yes.

Susan Kaye Quinn (26:23.074)
That is from her Carrier Bag of Fiction essay, which is very short. And I read it like a mantra every once in a while, because it is just so affirming to the kinds of stories that I write where I want someone to read a story that I write about the climate and re-engage and be like, oh, I can actually read these, the exact reaction that you had, oh, this is actually helpful and useful in like...

Deborah L. Davitt (26:32.403)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:36.571)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:43.869)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:48.101)
Exactly.

Susan Kaye Quinn (26:51.242)
It connects me to nature like Cecile's trying to do with her fiction, which is a wonderful piece of it. Um, or it will connect me to other people because we're all in the struggle together. And if we work together, we actually can do things. We can actually make change. And so I hope they will come out of it. Where like in America at least, and I don't know what the worldwide stats on this are, but in America, most people like as in 70%.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:55.254)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:03.134)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (27:21.178)
understand that climate change is a problem. It's that they don't know what to do about that. And so there's this passivity going on that I want to shift, I want to be part of shifting people from passive to active, empowering them. And part of that, because what I do is write stories, is imagining a world where people are active. They are doing something, they're part of something larger that is

Deborah L. Davitt (27:27.023)
Exactly.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:35.765)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (27:48.966)
literally saving the world. So like, you know, we got big stakes here and we've got very passionate. I mean, I don't know if you could hear the passion in Cecile's voice, but I was like, yes, that when you make that connection in your mind that this is something much bigger than me and I'm going to engage in it and fight for it because it's worth fighting for it, it's worth saving. Moving people to that position.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:59.189)
Oh yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:10.71)
Mm-hmm, absolutely.

Susan Kaye Quinn (28:16.238)
that empowerment in their lives not only is good for the planet, it is good for them. It is good for them to feel like that instead of feeling.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:21.425)
Yes it is.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:26.557)
Something I do can matter as opposed to sitting in our individual silos going, but there's nothing I can do. Yeah.

Susan Kaye Quinn (28:35.018)
nothing I can do, everything I can do. Yeah. And if there's a problem that we have, you're in new way of the rats is that they are, you were speaking in terms of overwhelmed from society, but I think also just overwhelmed from the world of all the things that are happening. And so we tend to shut down and be like, that's too much. I can't do anything about that. And

Deborah L. Davitt (28:48.381)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:54.705)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:59.481)
Yeah, we sit in our corner and we rock a little bit gently. Yeah.

Susan Kaye Quinn (29:02.878)
Yes, and a completely understandable reaction because humans need to be engaged in something they can feel, you know, effective in and that they have connections. These are very deep human things that we are completely failing as a society to provide people with.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:12.222)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:19.865)
Yeah, we have a lot of superficial connection through social media, but we don't have the deep, the deep intimate connection that is. Yeah.

Susan Kaye Quinn (29:27.146)
And even that dichotomy, I would question because I have some of my best friends through social media. But it does have a different type of connection and we do need in-person connections also. But it's more that we just like are here, watch some ads and buy some things and be a consumer because that's your greatest goal in life or your status has to do with consumption and not with like...

Deborah L. Davitt (29:33.542)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:36.899)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:40.496)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:50.513)
Pfft. Hehehehehehe.

Susan Kaye Quinn (29:54.878)
your deeper purpose in the world. And I think we are just hungry.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:56.865)
Mm hmm. Having a purpose is a big thing in my novella is it's that's how you become a well contented rat is having a purpose and knowing what you what you're for.

Susan Kaye Quinn (30:07.906)
Exactly.

Yes. So I actually have a lot of hope. I have a couple of deep wells of hope that I draw from. And one of them is that people like you are writing stories like that. And we are rediscovering or reaffirming in our fiction that these are deeply important human things that we got to have. And the reason why we're out of sync with the world and destroying it and just kind of going, oh, well, is because we don't we're kind of broken. We as a people are kind of broken and we need to heal.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:27.899)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:36.265)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (30:39.838)
in order to heal the world. So I see that as very intimately connected.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:41.779)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:45.113)
Alright, this is where since we've had a really good conversation so far, this is where we're going to switch gears a little bit. We're going to talk about each of your stories in turn. And I'm going to go basically in alphabetical order and then I'm going to bop between you because you each gave me two or three stories. So I'm going to start with Renan and I'm going to apologize upfront because I do not speak Portuguese and I am going to butcher some of the locations and I deeply apologize for this. I will do my best.

Renan Bernardo (31:10.695)
No problem. No problem.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:13.429)
All right, your first story is a shoreline of oil in infinity, which appeared in escape pod number 863. I will provide a link to that in the description. Victoria is an automation expert who lives in the Sacrima region of Brazil, noted for its biodiversity in the present and in the story of the future, it's been devastated by a supertanker's rupture. Her crab-like little bots called Tatuites.

do their best to clean the beaches, but are overwhelmed by the constantly, eternally leaking wreckage of the supertanker that no government has the will to move away or clean up. She's lost everything to the wreck. Her family and the figure of her stepbrother, Andre the fisherman, has fled the region. Families and children have fled, though the children left behind statues of gods and saints and orishas in the wreck to try to bring light to a dark place. But still she finds reasons for hope, for bringing good to evil places.

This is a lovely, bittersweet story. I particularly liked the moment when she found a living crab in the lagoon, another tattoo, a moment where it seemed like nature might even recover from the tragedy inflicted on it. How did you decide on this balance of hope versus hopelessness in the story? You gave this a single moment of it is in the face of her fight against this monolith of pollution.

and it was very effective, but how did you come to decide on this balancing point?

Renan Bernardo (32:40.644)
First of all I have to say that you nailed the words in Portuguese, so well done. Yeah, it was all very correct. So thank you for reading this story. And I understand that there is a lot of hopelessness in this one, with the oil blotches, the ghost town, and even the protagonist herself, because she doesn't have her brother with her anymore.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:02.127)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:08.346)
Mm-hmm.

Renan Bernardo (33:08.376)
She's clearly lonely in some ways, but I decided I want to show there was hope in unexpected things. In the secret rooms of the supertanker, where the kids had set up her temples, in the ways that Vitoria always asked the Grave Digger for news about her brother, and finally in the...

Deborah L. Davitt (33:21.769)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:33.178)
Mm-hmm.

Renan Bernardo (33:36.8)
end of the story, the way that the real Tatui appears in the sense. Because the presence of this species is strongly related with the quality of the environment. It's a fact that this species doesn't survive if the beach is polluted. So if there is a Tatui there, it means that place is healing and that lagoon is healing.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:45.129)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:50.677)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:59.588)
Mm-hmm.

Renan Bernardo (34:05.544)
that seat maybe is healing. So I wanted to end the story with that touch of hope.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:11.934)
Mm-hmm.

It was extremely effective and it gave me the feeling that all of her work, all of her just her daily labor of love for this area was having an effect. And I really, really loved this story. So I just, I want people to read it and or listen to it since it's an escape pod story. So I'm sure that a narrator probably did a really good job with this one as well. Cecile, I don't speak French. Could you tell me how to say?

Que la granada es tu chante? 

Deborah L. Davitt (34:55.529)
Hehehe

Cécile (34:55.673)
Que la grenade est touchante. Yeah, it's a quote from Apollinaire, by the way, about a poem he wrote about World War I, because the word grenade, it's both, in French, it's both grenade, like a hand grenade, and a pomegranate, the fruit. So it's, so yeah, so the original poem hinges on that.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:58.974)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:14.825)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:21.305)
Oh, interesting. This appeared in Lackington, issue 24, fall 2021. Again, I will link this. Jeanne, the protagonist, is a young girl growing up in the wake of an alternate World War I, and a time after the Spanish flu has passed through the world. Her father died in the war and her little brother, Amadei, was lost in childbirth due to the flu. She and her mother are trying to make their way in a post-war Provence, but a Provence in which everything is flowering.

Cécile (35:32.049)
What is it?

Deborah L. Davitt (35:49.065)
People are growing plants in their mouths and bodies. Mushrooms that are edible or not grow out of the sink. Things that you collect in the hen house might very well grow roots in the table that you put them down on. This is the wake of the war and perhaps even the legacy of her father who tried to make peace between the trenches with a German botanist, according to two French Canadian former soldiers who knew her father during the war.

Jian sees her little brother everywhere and is confident that he's real until she realizes that the adults can't really see him. Then suddenly Jian is telling her brother that it's all a story, a story that will live on after they're gone and will be told by a descendant of theirs. This is a lovely piece of purely surrealistic fiction bordering in places on slipstream. I found it mind-bending. How do you wind up calling this climate fiction or solar punk?

Deborah L. Davitt (36:44.118)
It deals with things differently than we were previously discussing. It doesn't talk overtly about climate change. It doesn't talk overtly about connections to other people, things like that. Why did you choose this one to send me for this particular episode?

Cécile (37:02.281)
So this one, well for a little bit of context, World War I, when we think of World War I today, we think of course of human consequences, destruction, the first large-scale modern war, etc. But environmental destruction was also massive.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:14.495)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:21.946)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:26.388)
Yes.

Cécile (37:27.733)
on such a scale that at the time people believed that where the battle of Verdun took place, nothing would ever grow again because there had been so many chemicals dumped. And today, if you go to Verdun in France, in the area of Lorraine, there's a forest growing where the battlefield used to be.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:39.649)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (37:56.665)
So it's actually healed completely, defying the predictions of the time. And it just started me thinking of how after a disaster, well, it's something that happens all the time on Earth, right? We can think of mass extinctions or we can just think of what happens if you cut all the trees in an area. Things will start growing.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:57.265)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:13.64)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (38:22.849)
anything and if you throw seeds there, they will grow whatever they are and it's going to be chaos for a time and then nature is going to heal and probably adjust to new conditions and probably change but there is going to be some healing. So this was meant to be a story about the healing power of the world and...

Deborah L. Davitt (38:30.211)
Mm-hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (38:37.982)
Okay.

Cécile (38:50.161)
One thing that always impresses me when I walk around cities is I look at the cracks in walls and in pavements and there are things growing there all the time. If you walk around X, you will see fig trees growing at the bottom of walls and all sorts of species that have just adjusted to these conditions. And periodically, of course, people will come and rip them out and they will grow again. And...

Deborah L. Davitt (38:57.251)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:02.765)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:14.501)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (39:19.525)
You can't just destroy nature for long, it will grow back. So the story is largely about that. And about, and I wanted to expand it to mean, in a land that has been stripped bare, almost entirely destroyed when people have died, cultures have died, nature has died, everything has died. Well, you have loss, you have death.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:19.758)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (39:47.653)
But you also have possibilities, you have children who will grow and you have areas that will regrow in a number of ways, maybe some of them utterly surprising and new, but it's going to happen. And I've always thought that the myth of a nuclear war destroying life on Earth was, you know, complete nonsense. How can we destroy?

Deborah L. Davitt (39:51.451)
Interesting.

Cécile (40:17.429)
all life on earth, we just underestimate life very much, there will be life even if we destroy all life on the land, there will be life in the sea etc. So yeah, so that was what I wanted this story to be about. And this is also why I obliquely wrote myself into the story actually, because yeah, it mentions a family in this little village in

Deborah L. Davitt (40:44.401)
Yes, I was going to ask you about that.

Cécile (40:46.181)
Oh, okay, right. Well, so it's set in this village in northern Provence. And it's a real place. And it's the place where my grandmother and my great aunt were born in rather unlikely circumstances because their father was a Jewish doctor and their mother was a Russian princess who had immigrated after the Russian Revolution and converted to Judaism. I have no idea how they met.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:58.928)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:10.169)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (41:12.369)
but anyway, they landed in that village in France. So he was from Tunisia and she was from Russia. They landed in France and had two little girls. And so these little girls are the ones that the protagonist of the story meets at some point. And yeah, so what I wanted to say with that, I mean, if you, shh, shh. My purse, my purse.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:31.77)
I was wondering.

Cécile (41:42.009)
What I wanted to say with that is that we have recovered from World War I and to a greater extent than people thought we would recover. My grandfather was a member of the last generation, not in the sense of the generation who didn't know what to do with their lives, but literally the generation that was...

Deborah L. Davitt (41:51.019)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (42:07.121)
destroyed before it existed because their fathers were at war and being killed. And if you look at the demography of France there were very few people born at that time. My grandfather was one of them nonetheless. So yeah, if we recovered once we can probably recover one more time, hopefully.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:10.527)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:26.516)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:35.021)
Yes, thank you very much. My next question is for Susan, which is about her story Seven Sisters, which appeared in Grist. Grist's imagined 2200 rather. I got started on a date much closer to us and that's not right at all. It appeared on October 4th, 2022.

Latoya is part of an extended family called the Seven Sisters, none of whom are related and there's more like 13 of them, who have taken marriage-like vows to one another in the year 2200 in a Mississippi where the climate is almost perfect for tea production. But a polar vortex has devastated their first flush crop this year and their robots and their keeper are down for the count from a virus at the moment, so they have to pick the crop themselves by hand in the old way.

And to top it all off, their wandering sister, Pushti, wants to bring home a new Brazilian stray, saying only that this woman could be part of the family and nothing more. Context is everything. This story is about hard times and hard choices in found family and we'll delight the right audience with its warm-hearted notes. And I really feel like I'm writing tasting notes for this story, like I'm sipping a cup of tea. You talked about...

collective storytelling, communal protagonists, and the myth of the active protagonist. So my first question was about, going to talk about the myth of the active protagonist. The only real decision of the story is taken over away from the protagonist character, the narrator character, by the character of mama, who says that the only decision they can make is to allow this refugee woman and her child to stay with them. And it's.

presented as a moment of triumph, but most modern readers being accustomed to an active protagonist will be concerned about the lack of agency on the part of the point of view narrator. How do you respond to that?

Susan Kaye Quinn (44:39.81)
I think it's very interesting your word choice there. It was taken away. No, I think it's very illuminating because I don't obviously view it that way. I view it as she was not having to be responsible for all of the decision-making because she is actually part of the collective and her job in the collective and everyone.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:42.917)
I was trying to be careful. I was trying to be very careful.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:59.63)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:03.363)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (45:05.778)
in their, and this is true for like any family, which is the foundation. Like right now we define family as people who have like sex with one another and their children. And my story kind of expand that to found family is a very common trope, but you know, when you have a found family, you're going to have often very different roles that people will take on. They will not slot into those traditional roles. And in

Deborah L. Davitt (45:09.493)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:15.957)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:19.422)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:33.3)
Yes.

Susan Kaye Quinn (45:34.286)
My story, and this story in particular, so her job within the collective is to do the money, and she's got to track the money and make sure the bots get paid for and all this repair stuff. And so she's concerned about that. That is her job, is to make sure that the family continues to be financially solvent in their business. Mama, who actually is her mama, but is sort of like the spiritual guide for the collective and the person.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:41.393)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:59.465)
Mm-hmm.

For the younger people, yeah.

Susan Kaye Quinn (46:03.67)
founded it. Her job in the collective is the moral compass, is to provide that spiritual leadership to remind them of what they're about, to sort of, this is also a very human thing where we like to have someone who is not so much an authority figure, but like an inspirational guide. And so when she comes and she's like, this is economically,

Deborah L. Davitt (46:11.011)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (46:33.798)
a problem and I need moral guidance. I need the moral side of this. And they've, you know, sort of compartmentalized that within the collective. And so mama is like, well, the clear moral choice here is to bring this other person into the family. That's the clear moral choice. And then it is a collective decision. So there's nobody is disagreeing and not even her, even

Deborah L. Davitt (46:36.285)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:49.222)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:53.04)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:59.625)
Mm-hmm. Yes, I noticed that.

Susan Kaye Quinn (47:03.51)
this is my thing, but like I did my job. I told you that there's gonna be a financial cost to this, but you're saying that the moral side trumps that and I'm not even gonna disagree. And so that's how that operates.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:07.795)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:17.013)
Okay, what's lovely about this, what's lovely about the end of the story is that then you take the shell off of the last reveal, and the last reveal is that this person who's being brought into the family for moral reasons actually can contribute enormously because she's a bot keeper. She can help them fabulously. And so the economic component becomes a non-issue as well.

So it has a really lovely ending, and I thought it ended on a perfect note.

Susan Kaye Quinn (47:52.91)
Well, and that's me making my little statement of, hey, immigrants are amazing contributors to the economy. Let's not lock the door, because we're just stupid if we do that. And so, yes, I get there from a moral standpoint, but surprise, it's actually economically viable as well. So I don't want that to be an easy out. I want it to be more like, let's not let our assumptions get in the way.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:59.869)
Yes they are.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:06.345)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:22.281)
Mm-hmm, absolutely, yes.

Susan Kaye Quinn (48:22.81)
And it's okay to be driven by morals. Like it's okay to do the right thing, which astoundingly is somehow, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:26.797)
Mm-hmm. And sometimes you can be rewarded for it, which is the lovely part about the story, is that they've already come to their decision and it's the right decision for the right reasons, and then they're rewarded for it. Because it's not going to be a burden. It's going to actually improve them. And it makes it, and so the easy out wasn't there. They made the right decision for the right reasons and the right time. And then, but it's OK.

they don't have to have a staggering, how are we going to be able to make this happen? So it ended on a beautiful note. So I just wanted to say thank you for that. We're going to move back to Renan and where his second story was eight steps to steal a yacht and build a hospital, which appeared in solar punk magazine issue number eight. This is a fascinating story. There's so much going on in this.

Hamilton is a nurse married to Monique, a doctor in post-climate change flooded Rio, and he's got a plant. Steal a yacht from a weapons industrials far-right influencer and turn it into a floating hospital that will serve people who like Monique, who once desperately needed a liver transplant, but couldn't get to a hospital in time. Unfortunately, the influencer finds them once they've already converted the yacht to a mobile clinic and kidnaps Monique threatening to kill her if he doesn't get his property back. And this is where I have a little bit of a problem with the story.

By a miraculous coincidence, Jose, the industrialist chief enforcer, was once a liver donor himself and has mercy on the thieves, joining their commune of pills and lettuce and a happy ending for everyone except for the weapons industrialist. It has almost a fairy tale ending, but it works. So this was obviously published in Solar Punk magazine. So we were trying to talk about definitions. What makes this one Solar Punk?

uh, as opposed to Clif-Fi. And is the, is there a definitional difference in this one? Because there, again, there's just so much going on in the story. There's so many layers. There's, there's, there's some social justice stuff in there that I didn't get into in my description and there, there's a lot of, there's, there's just tons of stuff. So what makes it so.

Renan Bernardo (50:46.376)
Yes, I think this story is of course climate fiction as well, but I think it's more solar punk if you feel we are going to separate it by sub-generals. So because in this story people are fighting back, they are building something. They are not just...

Deborah L. Davitt (50:57.749)
Mm-hmm.

Renan Bernardo (51:05.988)
rolling around in the apocalypse, seeing what happens now, the walking dead kind of vibe, it's not that. In this story things are, people are building things, rebuilding from what's left. Things are, of course, things aren't good, but people are making everything they can to make it, make that Rio de Janeiro a living place. There's a call to action going on at many points.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:14.421)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:21.237)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:33.233)
Yes. Yes, indeed.

Renan Bernardo (51:34.384)
in the attempt to build a hospital inside the boat, in the way there's an integration of hospital, farm, in the way the communities are flocking to make some difference, in the way that Hamilton wants to improve the healthcare of a profoundly affected place, also in the way, perhaps mainly in the way that people...

Deborah L. Davitt (51:45.437)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:55.626)
Mm-hmm.

Renan Bernardo (52:00.916)
question the structure of power of these weapons, industrially as an outright influencer. Yes, that's the punk part of it. And that's what I think makes this story really solar punk with lots of elements of solar punk. And there is also that, the part of the organ donation and how they will make viable, in a state completely affected by the rising level.

Deborah L. Davitt (52:07.497)
That's the punk part.

Renan Bernardo (52:29.588)
rise levels of water. That's it.

Deborah L. Davitt (52:33.957)
Now, I particularly appreciated and enjoyed the vision of Rio as this almost like a Venice-like city in the future, where everybody's getting around by boat, where people have turned buildings into vertical gardens because they don't have the land at the ground level anymore. It was just well developed and just a fabulously imaginative response to disaster, which

I can see somebody totally doing, a group of people totally doing, because that's what people do is they solve problems. Let's see, what did I have as another question?

Deborah L. Davitt (53:18.117)
No, I'm going to skip that question because I think you already answered it. We're going to move back to Cecile with her second story, which is The Fishery, which appeared in Interzone Digital. In this intricately braided piece, we pass through multiple narrators and points of view in a world in which the cosmos itself is overfished. Emotions other than synthetics are in short supply. Music, light, fear, joy, all of it has been leached from the universe by great

fishing spaceships that can only at this point dredge up asteroids and starlight because they've been forbidden to go near protected worlds unless they haul up, say, all of the summer from the people who live there. We see through the eyes of an inspector, a fisher, a sorter and packer, a journalist out to save the cosmos by raising awareness, all of them as an intriguing metaphor for the actual overfishing of our oceans. This is a lovely moving piece that conveys a great deal without ever being preachy.

It definitely falls into the realm of environmental fiction, depicting society as a great maw, which every wonder is grounded and masticated by. But it also has room for hope, showing the journalist growing seeds of new fear and wonder inside of her among other things. Again, this is a deeply surrealistic piece, which seems to be a hallmark for you. How did you come up with and develop this extended metaphor in the story, which again, just delightful. It just it's wonderful.

Cécile (54:40.505)
Thank you. It's interesting that you should ask how I came up with the idea, because to me it was actually completely obvious, in the sense that if we overfish, if we kill the sea, if we kill the world around us, we don't exist separately from the world, we start deadening ourselves as well. If we lose...

Deborah L. Davitt (54:58.207)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:05.605)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (55:08.973)
everything that exists apart from us on this planet We lose parts of ourselves as well. We can't just hope to live in completely sterilized Artificialized environment and be okay to me that just won't happen and The thing is of course that when you start digging into how and why it

Deborah L. Davitt (55:25.16)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (55:38.333)
happens. You realize that, well, it's much more complex than anything you can imagine. In the sense that, of course, you don't want overfishing, but to the person who is on the fishing boat, well, this person is not responsible for overfishing, they are just fishing their corner of the ocean and making ends meet.

And yeah, the person, what about the person packing industrial meat or fish in the factory? Are they responsible for anything? I mean, they didn't do the harvesting, they are part of the system, but they are not directly responsible and they're also just trying to make ends meet. And the person's trying to change it all may have more complex motives, may be doing that. Well, as I said earlier, for purely selfish reasons, which are

Deborah L. Davitt (56:16.019)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:24.372)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Cécile (56:36.133)
which is not a bad thing in itself. Um, yeah. So I just wanted to try to find a way to write about all that, and, well, I'm glad that it didn't come across as preachy, because that's exactly the very thing that was, uh, great, because that was the... Oh.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:36.49)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:50.309)
Oh, absolutely not, absolutely not. It was delicately nuanced and every character had their own point of view and their own motivations and their own tightly fog of war, basically, where they could only see what they can see. And as they very gently interact around each other in the periphery, you can see

where the problem can't be solved by just one person as we've been talking about. There is that communalism, but they aren't able to reach out to each other yet because they're in that fog of war. So that's, it was really very fascinating to read.

Cécile (57:24.497)
Hmm. Exactly.

Cécile (57:36.005)
Yeah, that was exactly what I was going for. Yes, just trying to express what we talked about earlier. You learn to appreciate what we have because we're all being hurt here. I mean, there is no way around this. Climate change is hurting everyone. Environmental destruction at large is hurting everyone. And we don't necessarily see it, but it is.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:52.009)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:59.518)
everyone.

Cécile (58:06.161)
passing us. So yeah, and that's also why I wanted to end with that person hearing Whale song for the first time and deciding not to take the song, to leave it there because I think it's one of the things that most people need to learn or relearn. Just because you want something, just because it's beautiful and desirable doesn't mean you should have it and doesn't mean that having it is going to be good for you in the long run. So...

Deborah L. Davitt (58:13.077)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:17.897)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:27.219)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:34.884)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (58:35.317)
I hesitated about the order of the pieces, but in the end I just thought that would... that was the conclusion I wanted, the takeaway I wanted from this story. Listen to the song and leave it there and accept that maybe you're never going to hear it again. And that's just the way it is. There's an element of loss that we have to accept because otherwise there's just going to be...

Deborah L. Davitt (58:55.241)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:58.47)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (59:05.317)
the loss is just going to be so much greater.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:09.045)
Mm-hmm. Okay. We're gonna bop back over to Susan K. Quinn with a very small story, which is called Rewilding Indiana, which appeared in Little Blue Marble, with the editor of which we had on last week. This appeared on May 26, 2023. So it was this year.

This is a sort of prose poem or micro fiction piece envisioning a narrator who flies a solar powered kite dropping wild seeds and gathering rain to support those seeds as Indiana's cities and croplands are taken back to a dense green. First of all, this is a lovely story. It is emotionally evocative. The writing is sumptuous and I because I needed a question to ask about this and it's a very short piece I

turned to the internet, which we know is never wrong about anything. And I looked up what the primary habitat of Indiana was before colonization took place, which was dense, deciduous forest. How would you personally see people coming to live in balance with a rewilded, deciduous forest?

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:00:21.742)
I think that's a very difficult question to answer. I think that reality is we're not going to go back to primitive times, nor probably should we. I wrote this piece as a little kiss of joy, and I feel like we need little drops of joy that can just be exuberant and evocative of the...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:24.882)
It is.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:31.082)
We're not.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:40.414)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:47.422)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:00:51.198)
an alternate way of being. And I think figuring out that alternate way of being is key to answering your question, which is how are we actually going to live in harmony with the world sustainably? We have so very, very far to go. We're gonna need to imagine a million ways to do that before we actually navigate the reality of being that.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:53.99)
I like that.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:59.892)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:08.446)
We do.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:01:16.874)
and it will be different in different places. So in Indiana, I took Indiana because Indiana is the Midwest and it's something that we associate very differently. And so there's a pretty big change there. So that's what I was going with.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:19.349)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:24.028)
Yes.

Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:31.857)
I've driven through Indiana on my way to other places and trying to picture it as something other than sort of gray and flat was very difficult. So trying to see it through your eyes as an exuberant place was a lovely thought experiment. So we're going to switch gears from our mutual admiration society and we're gonna talk about somebody else's work.

And the story that was recommended to me was titled a holdout in the Northern California designated Wildcraft Zone by TK Rex, which appeared in grist October 4 2022. Again, I will drop a link in the description. First of all, I loved this story. Whoever recommended it. Thank you of the three of you. I really that was you, Susan. Thank you. It was beautiful. Yeah.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:02:19.79)
That was me. She's an amazing writer, I love her.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:26.67)
I, if you know her personally, please get in touch with her. I'd love to speak with her directly on the podcast because this was an emotionally affecting story and it was beautiful. A lone human, an elderly woman named July lives in a Northern California rewilding zone. A rewilding drone tries to get her peacefully to get up and to give up and come into the city where she can live alone in a year under an underpass. Instead of in the house, she's peacefully tended to planting and native species and living off the land for years.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:02:31.885)
do that.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:55.269)
until the drone and its network, that there's that communalism again that we've been talking about, realize that humans can live as a net positive in nature and they decide to allow her to continue to live in her home doing her work to nurture the ecosystem around her just as they do. This was a lovely, peaceful story and I really enjoyed it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:22.501)
What did we all individually like about the story or what did we not like about the story? I'm going to start with Renan. Did you have a chance to read this one?

Renan Bernardo (01:03:32.158)
Yes, first of all I love the POV of this story, because I think it allows us to see humanity from the outside. And I think it's great to outline both the good and the bad that we can do to the environment.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:41.662)
Mm-hmm.

Renan Bernardo (01:03:47.46)
I also like how she showed that maybe we are the only solution. We as humans are the only solution. No matter how many technologies we can create and we can devise to ease the pain of the climate crisis, in the end we have to believe that we are also part of the solution. We have to solve this problem. It's not our technology that will solve it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:58.192)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:12.149)
Mm-hmm.

Renan Bernardo (01:04:16.144)
so I think her story shows that very well with this contrast between the old lady in the forest and the drone

Renan Bernardo (01:04:30.644)
I think that she nailed it very well.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:36.841)
Cecile, what did you like or dislike about this story? The hope against a realistic backdrop of climate change, cozy themes and cooperation. What did you like here?

Cécile (01:04:48.473)
Well, I don't know if that's something that the author intended, but I actually read this story as a metaphor for what is going on now with indigenous communities. I think actually July is supposed to be mixed race, but it's not mentioned wish. I personally read her as indigenous, or at least in part. But this is exactly, if you think about it, there have been so many issues with conservation.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:00.601)
Hmm.

Cécile (01:05:16.801)
in places where there are indigenous people living off the land and conflicts between a centralized version of conservation which completely excludes indigenous perspectives and well we hear that very often in France because it's a country that is no longer wild no part of the country can be considered really wild

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:22.462)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:32.291)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (01:05:44.213)
And so conservation, we have to discuss what it means, right? The place of humans, what we want to conserve. The place where I live, for example, is highly urbanized, artificialized, and also paradoxically, in part because of that, it's a biodiversity hotspot. Because there are so many different values in a very small space.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:49.481)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (01:06:12.601)
Right, so the place of humans in nature, the fact that we can affect nature and it's not necessarily wrong, it's actually a really big issue, including in conservation circles. And of course, then you have to think about the practical issue of, well, not kicking indigenous people off the land they have been inhabiting for generations, because, well, they didn't destroy it so far, they did a much better job at...

than Western societies have been doing with their nature. And so accepting that just because this is not the way we see conservation doesn't necessarily mean that it cannot work, which of course goes hand in hand with its own issues, with modernization, et cetera. But I think it's a really, really important issue in conservation right now.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:00.893)
Okay.

Cécile (01:07:11.837)
the fact that for a lot of people you can't just turn this bond with nature on or off, you just live in nature and that's it, it's where you live, it's where you were born, where you grew up, it's your livelihood and you're part of that, you're part of the ecosystem. Yeah, so that's what I found really interesting about the story, the fact that it's addressed this in...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:34.94)
Alright.

Cécile (01:07:41.637)
Yeah, maybe in an indirect way, I don't know what the author intended, but I really enjoyed that.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:49.461)
That's an interesting perspective. It's one I didn't have, and now I have to reread the story and see if I can read it with your eyes. Which is one of the fun things about literature is that we can, through discussion, find things out that we didn't see before. Susan, since you recommended this one, why was this one on your list? Why recommend this one?

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:08:11.818)
Well, I was just delighted by it. It's one of my favorite stories. I have it on top of my recommended list of people like if you want to know what you can do with solar punk, go read this story and be delighted and then hopefully that will draw you in. But knowing TK and I've actually had some pretty extensive discussions with her about this specific story. So I can answer Cecile's question. Yes, she absolutely intended.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:21.85)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:08:40.51)
that perspective to be in there. And in fact, going further with what Deborah said earlier about how are we going to live with rewilding the world and nature, TK actually had published an extraordinary, wonderful essay slash...

Cécile (01:08:41.989)
That was great.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:43.272)
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:55.836)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:09:06.574)
It's an essay, I'll just stick with that, but it's an Asimov's and it's about rewilding and this problem we have of, you know, we've ignored this indigenous perspective for so long. What does it mean to rewild? What is humanity's relationship with nature going to be because we have some deeply problematic past with that? And we need to move forward.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:10.121)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:31.957)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:09:34.67)
how are we going to do that? And she and I both, we actually had a very generative talk and I will definitely recommend her to come and say, because she will speak much more authoritatively.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:46.174)
I would love to have a conversation with her because there's so much in this story and I'm sure she's got other stuff that I could read and we could have a really fun conversation.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:09:54.014)
Yes, she does. She has a lot of great stuff. But just to give you the teaser for it, she and I both were attempting at about the same time to write a story or start a novel about rewilding and ran into some of the same problems of like, how will you tell this story? What do you want to say about this story? And we both kind of backed off.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:15.26)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:10:23.102)
from it in a very similar way. And her essay in Asimov's talks about that whole process of what the challenges were of writing that story. So I will highly recommend that to your readers as well to go look at that because I think we need to do some deep thinking about these stories. And I don't wanna like tell people not to tell stories, right, like we need a million stories with a million different perspectives. And we need to stumble around in the dark a bit.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:24.539)
Mm-hmm

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:29.973)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:39.356)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:49.071)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:10:52.194)
to figure this out collectively. And that's part of the process. That's how we're gonna get through this. So I'm excited. It was very exciting to me to see, oh, here's a fellow solar punk author person who is having these same thoughts. And that's part of it too, is that we can work together and learn from each other.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:56.649)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:12.389)
Mm-hmm. Yes, absolutely, yes. All right, so we start winding down now by me asking what's next for each of you? What do you have coming out soon or have out recently that you'd like people to read? And I'm going to bring this back around to Renan. And so what's up next or what's out recently?


Renan Bernardo (01:11:40.164)
So I have a story upcoming in tor.com Which is not exactly climate fiction, but it has to do with climate It's called the plasticity of being I don't have a precise date yet, but It's early next year and I have my solar punk and climate fiction collection of short stories

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:01.08)
Ooh.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:06.217)
Okay.

Renan Bernardo (01:12:09.32)
called Different Kinds of Defiance, and it's coming next March by Android Press.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:18.137)
Okay, sounds great. Maybe when it comes out you'll come back on and we can talk about the stories in it.

Renan Bernardo (01:12:24.484)
Yes, of course. Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:27.685)
All right, thank you. Cecile, what's coming up soon for you and what's coming out or has recently come out that you'd like people to read?

Cécile (01:12:37.853)
Well, I'd love to mention my upcoming short story collection as well. So it's going to be released on the 17th of January, so in a little over a month. And it can already be pre-ordered, by the way, from Newcompress or Barnes & Noble and a couple of places, possibly Amazon as well, if we have sold our contract issues with them.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:47.822)
Oh wow, soon!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:06.399)
Hmm!

Cécile (01:13:06.405)
which I think we may have. That is, if you don't object to Amazon, obviously. And yeah, so most of these stories are actually what I would consider environmental fiction, although, yeah, they may not necessarily directly address the contemporary issue of climate change, but this question of...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:14.729)
Hmm hmm hmm.

Cécile (01:13:34.065)
relationship with the environment is something I just write a lot about and well in the present, in the past and the question of loss as well. Accepting loss, moving beyond loss because I think this is something we cannot avoid either there will be massive loss or just small individual losses.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:49.854)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:57.146)
Mm-hmm.

Cécile (01:14:02.425)
But they will be lost anyway, so I try to... I write a lot about that. And about whales as well. I would have to talk to a psychonavist about why approximately one third of all my stories have whales in them, but yeah, it's a thing that happens in my writing. Anyway, yes, so that would be it for me.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:02.556)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:20.357)
Haha

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:28.01)
And that story collection is called Elephants in Bloom, correct?

Cécile (01:14:31.177)
Yes, Elephants in Broom, and it's forthcoming from Yukon Press.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:32.798)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:37.221)
Okay, all right, Susan, what do you have coming up soon or out recently that you'd like to direct people's eyeballs to?

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:14:46.006)
All right, well, I am a hybrid author, so I self-publish as well as have short stories and science fiction zines. And so this year I finished my four book novel or novel series, which is Solar Punk. So if you'd like to see what some Solar Punk looks like in novel form and not just short stories, I would direct people there. I have a couple pieces, I have some other short fiction that's been published and I've got forthcoming pieces in Solar Punk.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:52.757)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:15:15.994)
and reckoning and I just finished writing a TV pilot, which absolutely no one's gonna be able to see probably until I write it into a novel. But that was a very big project this year. And right now I'm a little bit of sabbatical to try to figure out what I'm doing next because I've learned.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:21.263)
Mmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:15:38.122)
a lot in the process of writing the screenplay, kinda added to my toolkit with that. And I see a lot of storytelling happening in different forms of media. And so I'm kind of thinking about expanding a little bit where I go with my storytelling. But I think I will be doing some more self-publishing, partly because I just wanna get stories out there where people can read them. And I'm finding that's...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:49.982)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:02.236)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:05.733)
Waiting for waiting. I wrote my novella in 2019. It's not going to be out until 2025. Waiting for a story to get out there in traditional publishing is real. Sometimes it's just better and easier to get it out there and see if it finds its people in the by self publishing.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:16:14.391)
Right.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:16:26.007)
Thanks.

Right. And I feel like there's a particular urgency when we're talking about the climate. Like five years from now, the climate is going to be very different. The world is going to be very different. And some of the stories that I'm like, in particular, this one story that I want to self publish is about deep sea mining. And we are right now in the deep sea mining crisis where like...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:32.779)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:40.146)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:53.034)
Mm-hmm.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:16:53.41)
there's potentially some really terrible devastation that's going to happen unless we collectively make that illegal. And so the story is one way to elevate that issue to people's consciousness. And I kind of want to like, that's more important than me getting a credit in some magazine, right? It's like, I just want to get the story out there so people know about it. So, I have a sort of a larger

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:01.062)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:07.773)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:13.282)
Understood.

Yeah.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:17:22.466)
goal here of using the tools that I have, the skills that I have to get people engaged in climate and moving from passive to active and seeing what their part is in solving the biggest story of our time or telling the biggest story of our time. So we'll see where that goes.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:24.325)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:36.831)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:42.749)
like that perspective. I really do. My husband refers to me as his little Nevada greenie. So I have that background because when I was growing up, I was taken out into nature. We went, we went wood cutting in the, in the forests of Northern Nevada, and we would take down only the trees that were marked by the rangers as being diseased. And so we were part of the solution while we were still, you know, staying warm in the winter. And so

I miss that. When I drive any place in Texas, there is no nature. There is just little town after little town after little town after little town along the highway. When you drive around in Nevada, you drive outside of the town and you're in the desert. It's a very different experience. I don't think a lot of people have that experience. Giving them that through writing is a gift.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:18:37.322)
Yes, yes. That's a huge piece of like where I was just reading an article about what actually changes people's minds and gets them to, you know, get solar or whatever, and, you know, take more action in the climate fight. And it's hugely influenced by what they see their neighbors and friends do. So if you're doing it, everybody in your circle sees that and is influenced by it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:18:47.479)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:18:57.087)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:19:01.778)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:19:02.774)
But fiction does the same thing. Fiction is like our imaginary friends that we have and we seem doing other things. And like that imaginative space is extremely powerful.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:19:07.959)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:19:13.397)
When I used to teach rhetoric, there's the rhetorical triangle and this is a sidebar, but honestly there's a reason for it. The rhetorical triangle is logos, meaning the arguments that you can make that are rational. There is ethos, which are the emotional arguments, getting people emotionally involved and that's where a lot of advertising comes into play is because it plays on your emotions. And then the final one is...

ethos, which is what do you think about the person who's telling you what about this story or about this about this thing and The terrible horrible thing about being human is that you can have all the rational arguments in the world What you actually are going to be convinced by is what you think of the person telling it to you

Susan Kaye Quinn (01:20:03.15)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So we have more power than we think. And that's why I, again, deep wells of hope. We each locally have the power to change our neighbors, our friends, our local environment, our local government, act within your circles, act within your spaces, and you will change the world.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:16.551)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:19.732)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:26.833)
And that's a great note to leave that on. So we are going to leave that there. Thank you all for having been on the podcast. I really appreciate your time. Next week on Shining Moon, we're gonna change gears to talk about mythology, folklore and prehistoric fiction with Robin Duncan, Jelena Donato and Sam W. Pichata. See you all next time. And the time after that, which will be our last episode for the year, will be again about...

environmental fiction and we'll have a whole slate of people that are completely different and we'll have different exciting conversations and it'll be really a lot of fun. Other than that, see you all next time and we are out.

Cécile (01:21:06.929)
Thank you.