How Do You Like It So Far?: Sarena Ulibarri and Ed Finn on Solarpunk (Part One)

Last time, I shared a transcript for an episode of our How Do You Like It So Far? podcast featuring James Paul Gee. We are slowly adding transcripts for all of our episodes. Here’s another one from one of this season’s episodes, focusing on the science fiction genre/movement, Solarpunk. It’s also part of a season long consideration of science, the environment, the imagination, and sustainable futures. If you would prefer to listen to the episode, follow this link.

Sarena Ulibarri: So, there are two ways to get people to do what you want them to do: you make it uncomfortable for them to be where they are, so that they want to move to a different, you know, place, or you make it really enticing to be where you want them to be. And you know, so all the negative messaging all the disaster narratives, this is, you know, this is the first one this is, you know, "If we continue along this path, here's how bad it's going to get." And so but you know, solarpunk and the more positive messaging, it takes the second approach of like, "If we change directions, look how cool it can be." And, you know, there's a lot of science fiction that has done this over the years, we're just doing it specifically with environmental issues.

Colin Maclay: Hello, and welcome to How do you like it so far, a podcast about popular culture and our changing world. I'm Colin Maclay. 

Henry Jenkins: And I'm Henry Jenkins.

HJ: Solarpunk is a hot, emerging new sub-genre of science fiction in the tradition of cyberpunk and steampunk, which is exploring sustainable environmental futures. We're going to be exploring what it is, why it's emerging, what some of its implications are, How it contributes to a global conversation about sustainability, with two really solid guests, Serena Ulibarri, who is an author and editor of among other things, Glass and Gardens, which is now a multi-part solarpunk anthology series, also Biketopia, and Adventures in Zookeeping. And she is joined by Ed Finn, who is the director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, a center that has a deep investment in solarpunk. So we'd like to start things off by having each of you tell us a little bit about what you're doing right now, in the area of science fiction, and how you got to this place, what your origin story was. Maybe Serena, you could start us off?

SU: Sure. So my name is Serena Ulibarri and I am a writer and an editor, I run a small press called World Weaver Press. And our most recent project is, it's an anthology of many different authors, most of whom are from the Asia Pacific area, or of Asian American ancestry. And it is called Multispecies Cities. The concept is science fiction stories about better futures, with a focus on more than human issues. So urban spaces that are centered around a balance of nature and humanity rather than just being human centric. So that's the that's the most recent project that we've been doing. It was co-funded by, let me see if I can get this right, the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan, and a couple of my coeditors are involved with interdisciplinary projects through that Institute. It was pretty cool to work with everybody from around the world on that. So my niche is solarpunk, which I suspect we'll talk more about in depth later, but it's essentially optimistic science fiction with an environmental focus. And I have published about 50 short stories, about half a dozen of which can be considered solarpunk. I have always been interested in environmental issues and trying to work them into my fiction

SU: But, it was when I went to the Clarion workshop in 2014. That was when I really sort of became more aware of climate fiction in general. One of my instructors was Jeff VanderMeer, who's definitely written some things that can be considered climate fiction, you know, Annihilation, and well, a lot of his stuff can be considered climate fiction. And one of my classmates was Marian Womack, who has since published a couple of climate fiction novels most recently called one called The Swimmers. And so they write climate fiction and both of them write climate fiction kind of from this like, Gothic, uncanny, weird angle. And that was different than what I'd been doing, which is sort of the more classic, just dystopian Mad Max wasteland sort of angle. So I was kind of considering if I could kind of go that direction, but then one of my other classmates was from Singapore. And one night he was telling us about these biodomes in Singapore and they have giant colorful solar collectors and I was just like, "What are you talking about? This is, I've never seen anything like this." And I pull up some images on my phone and show him to him like, "Is this what you're talking about?" He says, "Yeah, that's my hood, we live in the future." And it was just like this instant paradigm shift. For me, it was like, the future doesn't have to be, you know, a dystopian wasteland. And it also doesn't have to look like an Apple store. The future can look like, you know, plants and animals and colorful and you know, so I've definitely learned some things about Singapore since then to know that it is not, you know, solarpunk in the in the social aspect, for sure. But just the aesthetic of it was a sort of instant paradigm shift for me. And when I heard the term solarpunk about a year later, it was just like, that was it, though, that term and encapsulated everything that I was already trying to work toward.

HJ: OK, Ed?

Ed Finn: So I run the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. And our mission is to inspire collective imagination for better futures. And that means that we have lots of different plates spinning all the time, and different really cool projects. So we, I feel like we are part of this solarpunk movement and engage with a lot of writers who do solarpunk stuff. And we do lots of other things, too. And I'm really delighted to be hanging out with you all and to meet you, Sarena. You know, it's great to find our fellow travelers out there in the world. So, you know, there are a few things that we're doing now that are new directions for us. And the big category that we're starting to fill up that I see as a sprawling, multi-year project with lots of different things is to really drill down on this word imagination. And that's something that I think you and I have in common Henry. Yeah, well, maybe we'll talk more about that. So we have a project right now, where we had originally wanted to do a big, like a big conference, you know, a big get together, invite lots of people to Phoenix to hang out and talk about imagination that that plan was quickly scrapped in the year of the pandemic. And instead, we're doing a series of virtual workshops, where we're trying to do some of the same thing and connect to people who think about imagination in different communities and different areas of practice, with a goal of not just hanging out with all the people we already know, but starting to meet new people who traffic in this idea, and play with imagination, and start to wrestle with the notion of what does applied imagination mean, we just launched a new fellowship, the call is open now until I think April 5, for people who want to propose projects around applied imagination. And the project description is incredibly short. Because it's really open, we're really open to all sorts of different ideas about what we want to see what people come up with, as we're in this exploratory phase of thinking about what imagination means. So if anyone listening to this is interested, if the I don't know what the timing of this will be, when that comes out, but you know, that's a chance to get $10,000 to do something really cool that you wanted to do. 

EF: I also am the Academic Director of Future Tense, which is this partnership, ASU has with Slate Magazine, and with the New America Foundation, and we publish an original piece of science fiction, every month, quite a few of those, I think, connect to - they all have that same fundamental optimism, many of them engage with environmental issues. And I think you could, you know, connect to solarpunk or tag as solarpunk. And we publish each of those stories with a nonfiction response essay by some kind of technical expert, and we have original artwork that goes with each of those stories. And I really love that part of the job and, you know, engaging with all of these different writers. And I think it's a nice microcosm of what CSI does in general, which is use science fiction as a kind of method, a tool, an invitation to talk to all sorts of people in the, you know, genre, and community who are big science fiction readers, but also people who don't really think about science fiction or don't think of themselves as science fiction fans, and use that as this invitation to think about the future. And to start to question well, what do I want, you know, what is the world that I want to work towards? A couple of other things. We've got cooking, we have this new anthology that's in its final edits right now called Cities of Light. This is a follow up to a collection we released maybe two years ago called the Weight of Light. And these are near future, technically-grounded stories about solar energy and it's very solarpunk, a set of explorations around what it's going to be like to live in a more, you know, ecologically thoughtful future, and really approaching that from a sort of systems engineering and urban culture point of view. Recognizing that it's the social problems that are going to be the big problems we have to solve, you know, we can wave our hands and imagine all of the, you know, all the solar panels you want, but then what is it? What is it gonna be like to live in that world, right? And what are the new problems you're gonna have, because waving your magic wand to solve the technical problem isn't going to actually fix all of the other things we have to talk about. So I love those collections. And those are partnerships, we work with policy researchers and technical experts at ASU and this second anthology was done in partnership with NREL, the National Renewable Energy Lab, in Colorado. And so it's really great to, again, bridge these different fields and modes of thinking about the future.

EF: And, you know, another piece of this for me, and another new direction that I'm working on right now is starting to think more about world building as a related practice, another kind of imagination. So I'm teaching a class that I'm making up, as I teach it, sometimes to the chagrin of my students, around worldbuilding. And that's been really fun. And, you know, thinking about how worldbuilding might be one of the toolkits or a set of methods for communities to start to imagine their own futures, and be more grounded, because imagination itself is, can be such a fluffy, abstract concept. Sometimes it's hard for people to really latch on to it. But you say, "Well, you know, look, we're going to make a world we're going to make this future," I think that can be a more grounded way to do it. So it's tremendous fun. There are so many awesome things going on that I rarely can remember even a third of them. And I'm very happy that way. I'm very happy to be part of this sort of collective of awesome people at CSI. And I think the origin story is a good one. And it sort of explains maybe why we're in this interesting place that we are. So in 10 years ago, 2011, Neil Stephenson, the science fiction writer wrote this essay called "Innovation Starvation," about how we seem to have lost our ambitions for the future. We're not thinking big anymore. We're not doing big stuff. We're doing little stuff. And our feelings about the future are no longer fundamentally optimistic. They're pretty dystopian, or disaffected. And it's a sort of a, you know, thought piece polemic. And he was at an event at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, this is also at the very beginning of that whole Future Tense partnership. And Michael Crow, who's the president of ASU was there, too. And Neil, talked about this idea. And Crow in a very Michael Crow way said, Well, maybe this is actually your fault, Neil, you know, instead of blaming, like the scientists, the engineers, you know, all these other people for not thinking big about the future, maybe what we need are better stories, we need the stories that are optimistic visions of the future that inspire people to work towards those different visions. And so that conversation struck a spark. And here at ASU, we started thinking about, well, what if we, what if we actually took that seriously? What would it look like to try to move the needle on that, try to change our collective relationship with the future, and I really liked the way you put it Sarena, before, you know, we can't just expect some people in lab coats or some people in Silicon Valley to, you know, make the future better for us. And if you do, if you do let those people do it, it's probably not going to turn out very well. You know, we have to all be involved. And I think the biggest problem we face right now, is that not enough people are empowered and invited to talk about the future, and to feel like they are participating in that. And that is what we need to change. And science fiction is a fundamental piece of that toolkit. 

EF: So we started to, we came up with this idea for the Center for Science and the Imagination. And imagined bringing together people in academia but also out in the science fiction community, other kinds of storytellers and creators and artists, and different communities of practice, right, whether that's a neighborhood or a group of people doing policy around AI, and trying to reach them and connect them to these broader publics so that everybody can talk together. And that's one of the great things about a science fiction story is that it can put everybody on the same page. And you can have an interesting and compelling debate about a set, a bundle of technical and social and political issues in the safe space because it's fiction, you know, it's not real. So you don't have to like put on all of your battle armor. You can take some risks and speculate. And everybody can do it the technical expert, who might say, "Oh, well, I know all about, you know, this technical problem, but I'm not an ethicist. You know, I can't talk about that." And the member of the general public says, "Well, I don't know about the technical issues, but this doesn't feel right to me." And the ethicist who might say, "I can't talk about any of the technical stuff." So you know, getting everybody into the room together to have that conversation is really, really powerful. And thinking about those stories, not as prophecies or predictions, but just as invitations to possible futures, to start to have that debate about, well, what - there are lots of possibilities we've been focusing on, only a few of them but are missing these other ones - and then what do we actually want, instead of just spending all of our time worrying about the stuff that we don't want. That's what science fiction is really good for. So it's tremendous fun, and I can't wait to see what the next 10 years of this crazy ride are going to be like.

SU: I love the way that you describe is like a convergence of thought experiments, from different angles. That's really cool.

CM: I mean, I really appreciate both what you offered. And I and there's also like an interesting place between them, right, and thinking about your current work Sarena, and just sort of how the cultural context - so whether it's Asian or Asian American sort of different communities, whether by ethnicity, origin, or other ways we might define it, or engineering, are going to have different views on these things, right, and bring a different kind of valence and different qualities of imagination, to the futures that they envision. So that feels like visiting these different lenses on futures does free us up and offer us things that we didn't think about? Right, like whole new ways to see the world?

SU: Absolutely. When I think especially when you're dealing with climate change, like there's no one solution, you know, it's like hyper localization is really important for dealing with climate change solutions. And so yeah, what works for one group of people or one location, or one, you know, climate, or whatever, is not going to work for everything. So you have to look at it from various angles.

EF: Yeah, and it's not even really... there's going to be lots of things that don't work, right, they're just going to keep changing and evolving. And stories can be helpful with that your one little epiphany I had a few years ago is that I think stories are a really useful and important way to talk about climate change. Because climate change is so big, it's slow, relatively, you know, it's slow, except for the times when it's happening way too fast. And it's kind of abstract. And so, we're not good at that kind of storytelling, we're not good at that kind of risk assessment, you know, this thing that might happen probably will happen 30 years from now, you know, that's tough. Humans are not well set up for that kind of foresight as individuals. But stories are really good at encapsulating complex systems and having a foreground and a background and representing ambiguity and complexity. And so you can create a narrative about climate change with characters and you can control you know, you can leap around the time and space, and so you can make it more meaningful. And that I think, is the thing we struggle with right now is to make meaning out of the abstract crisis of climate change. And a lot of that is about dealing with change, right? Margaret Atwood called it everything change when she came to visit us several years ago, 2014 maybe. And I thought that was a really good way of talking about it, right? That it's not that we're going to solve a lot of these problems. But it's also not that we have to just give up or feel like the problem, you know, that things are hopeless. It's just that we have to recognize that there's a lot of change coming, and we have to figure out how to navigate that change and try to steer the things that we can.

CM: I mean, it seems like it sort of normalizes both change and response. Not, and part of me feels like there's a there's a parallel to science generally. And this idea that science is a straight line in which we you know, we get it right that we get more right more, right, as opposed to like, a very meandering path in which we got we thought it was this and then we realized it was that, and in the way that you're describing it, to me is similar, it's to recognize change is the constant in some sense, although the rate of change is not a constant. And we continue to respond to it. And it sort of gives license to making mistakes and to the trials and tribulations that are part of what it is to be human. But it doesn't mean you give up hope. And I feel like this is - I can't quite put my finger on it. And maybe you both have thoughts - but this to me feels like a fundamental divergence from like, how journalism treats it, right? And journalism feels really challenged to me in figuring out how to convey the change that Margaret Atwood spoke about, whether it's just climate change or everything change, is like it's trying to give graphs or it's trying to do "he said, she said," but it seems like it's fundamentally, traditional journalism feels fundamentally overmatched by this challenge. And I feel like where it does a little bit better is where it does some kind of storytelling and humanizes. But it feels to me like, the work that y'all are doing is way more, has a lot more potential. And maybe there's stuff that journalists can learn from it?

EF: Well, I think that there are some, I think journalism getting is getting better at that. And I think it's, you see people doing more data and analytics and making them more interesting, you know, looking like maps and graphs and connecting the local to the global. But I also think there's interesting things happening around speculative journalism. And that's an area where I want to sort of see if we can incubate some more cool things where you can combine that storytelling and the grounded, you know, the grounded reality of today. But I think some of it is that that one of the challenges is that journalists feel like a primary job is to be the voice of critique, right? And that sort of the truth-bringer and to, and to say, well, we have to talk about all the things that are wrong now. And that's a really important job. And, you know, that's a role that the Fourth Estate has to play. But we also need those narratives of hope. And, you know, I think that maybe I would love to hear what you think about this Sarena, you know, is it that hope doesn't sell, right? And people like news of fresh disasters, that's what people want out of their newspapers, and I can think of certain TV networks that have made a big business out of fear, fear and despair. You know, but I don't know, I think that, at least in our experience, there are a lot of people who were like, it's like they found water in the desert, you know, when they see "Oh, optimistic science fiction, optimistic futures, it's so great that you're doing that." What do you think?

SU: Well, it's just so much easier to imagine what goes wrong than what goes right. You know, it's just, it's easier. And it, you know, and you're right, it is sensationalized by the, by the news, certainly. And there's a sort of catharsis to it, I think, from the audience's point of view. And I think that can happen with the hopeful narratives, too. You know, sometimes people talk about the danger of optimism being like, "Well, everything's fixed rate. So now I can just go on with my life."

CM: Do you think do you think humans are sort of, are we hardwired, in some sense to respond more to fear and, you know, kind of gloom and the negative as a survival strategy? Is the argument that, and then, you look at Hollywood, or the news, or any of these other sources, where we hear stories, and there's way more of, you know, there's way more Mad Max, than there is, you know, whatever the alternatives are, which none, of course, come to mind at the moment. And I think it seems like also we sort of, optimism or hope can be belittled as like a fairy tales, right? Like, what you're talking about here is, is to say being optimistic doesn't mean that all things, all problems go away, it just means that we have the capacity to take on these challenges, and will continue to grapple with them, but it is possible, right? That there's some hope. But I feel like in that sense, for climate, which feels so overwhelming to most of us, it feels especially important that y'all are engaging the space to say, you know, you have licensed to imagine, and that's healthy. And that's part of perhaps what's going to feed our solutions and feed the way that we either, you know, make it through the day when the change happens. Or that gives us the tools to imagine the changes that we want to, we need to make to be able to make it through the day.

SU: Yeah, so like, there are two ways to get people to do what you want them to do. You make it uncomfortable for them to be where they are, so that they want to move to a different, you know, place, or you make it really enticing to be where you want them to be. And you know, so all the negative messaging all the disaster narratives, this is, you know, this is the first one this is you know, "If we continue along this path, here's how bad it's going to get." And so but you know, solarpunk, and the more positive messaging, it takes this the second approach of like, "If we change directions, look how cool it can be." And, there's a lot of science fiction that has done this over the years, we're just doing it specifically with environmental issues. And so, you know, you make it look pretty, and you make it look cool, and you know, show that there's a different trajectory, you just got to change a little bit, you know, maybe a lot but, but oftentimes, you know, like a lot of the technology that exists in solarpunk narratives, it already exists, it's just an issue of accessibility mostly. So, you know, to make it more attractive, you take away, you know this... reframe it. You know, are wind turbines ugly or are they beautiful, they're just wind turbines. It's just the messaging around it that makes people decide that they're beautiful or ugly. So, yeah.

HJ: So I think one of the limits that journalists face is a temporal one, right. And we talked to two indigenous journalists about climate change a couple of weeks back on the show. And what we discovered is they feel felt a need for historical context, that is completely removed from news. And that the ability to project forward consequences may be outside of the realm of speculative journalism, which is a hard concept for most journalists to get, in my experience, but speculative journalism might free people to think longer views. But climate change really requires going backwards and forwards in time, which is the forte of science fiction, as a genre.

EF: And I think any, any, any serious conversation about the future needs to deal with the past, right, and recognize that the past is how you can think about the future in a more grounded way. And I think one of our big challenges as a society, especially those sort of Western European industrial, you know, capitalist society that we have right now, is that we're narrowing down more and more into this tiny sliver of the present, you know, forgetting about the past and forgetting about the future. And it's a kind of practice, it's a mental practice, you have to engage in to try to break out of that and think more broadly. And so I think that, you know, indigenous knowledge and indigenous peoples different cultures that in various ways say, "Well, no, we're not, we're really not into this, like, endless news cycle immediate, you know, sort of tyranny of the present, the tyranny of the contemporary," have to have to find ways to tell those stories and remind people that the history and the future are there, waiting for us to think about them.

CM: I like the history and the future being one way to do that. And I think that culture skipping or kind of contextual skipping can be another way to do that, right? Because that's not, that may be the same time, but people exist in very different, you know, sort of physical contexts with different practices, right. So that's another way to show to kind of normalize the difference and expand what we see as being possible. It feels like a lot of this is sort of a casting off the constraints that we imagine around us, which, as you say, Ed, are getting narrower and narrower, exactly at the time that they need to get broader, right. It's kind of classic innovation, when you're under stress, you kind of lock down and go back to what we know, as opposed to opening up and being willing to experiment and push our boundaries. So it feels like this work is well suited to say the least for this time, right? Like just what the doctor ordered.

EF: Yeah, getting back to what Serena was saying, I think people want to feel good. They don't want to feel bad, right? And you have to give people - but a lot of our structure and the stories that we tell are these stories about feeling bad. And so you need to give people a new vocabulary. Actually, a new grammar, I think is a better metaphor, for how to do that, how to feel good, how to be hopeful. And sure, because as you said, Sarena, it's easier to be a critic, right? It's easier to knock things down than it is to build them up. And so you have to be braver to advance a positive vision of the future. But I think that's something that we should try to celebrate.

SU: Yeah, I saw a quote recently, that was something like people love stories about people rising up in situations of disaster, and you know, the feel good story of helping others, but they scoff at the idea of building a society that is based on that very thing.

HJ: So I'm very cognizant of the fact that a lot of our listeners may be encountering solarpunk for the first time through this conversation, since it's an emerging movement. So could we try to get a definition on the table? I know, Serena, you started us down that path, with your opening comments, but could we elaborate on that definition, just a little bit more?

SU: Yeah. So let me just read off what my current working definition is. So that I get all the words right.

CM: So I love that you acknowledge that there's a current working definition that that too is evolving, right? Like that's right.

SU: Yeah. So it's been changing since ever since I heard the word. Okay, so here's the current definition that I like. Solarpunk is a movement of artists, writers and activists interested in changing the trajectory of our world for the better. As a genre of fiction, solarpunk is optimistic science fiction stories that engage with issues of climate change and social injustice. Solarpunk stories don't always show the specific solutions that led to a better world, but they do always strive to show that better futures are possible.

EF: I'm going to go with Serena's definition, as a working definition. But I will add that I think, to me, solarpunk is fundamentally a style or aesthetic, it's a relationship with the future. Or, to quote Kim Stanley Robinson, who is quoting Raymond Williams, it's a structure of feeling. And Robinson is one of I think, someone who's been doing solarpunk for decades, as a great example of this. But he had this wonderful essay in the New Yorker, last year, near the beginning of the pandemic, talking about imagination, and how this shows us, our response to COVID demonstrates that big shifts are possible, right, and it's that kind of big shift and thinking that we're going to need to contend with climate change. But I really like that idea that, you know, it's not technical solutions. And it's not even particular practices, or particular stories, but it's this structure of feeling, the set of relationships we have with the future that need to evolve. And solarpunk does that it's this idea that the future is not unchangeable, or hopeless, or out of your hands, it's something that you can make, you know, you can manipulate, and you can craft in an artistic way, or a technical or, you know, an engineering sort of way, but you can make it your own, and that all of the tools are there, right? And the spirit is there, you just have to find it. I really love that as a sort of, you know, kind of a philosophical or an aesthetic set of principles.

CM: I mean, that, to me is like that's what feels like what I connect with the punk part of it, right of the kind of DIY, you can do it, you don't have to follow past rules. And the way that you've both described movement, not as like being narrowly bounded by certain rules, but rather, you know, that the kind of orientation and mindset. Are there other elements of like punk ness that that you see in there? Or is that wrong?

SU: Yeah, I think you're right on with that. And it definitely, solarpunk definitely has aspects of like the crafters movement, and like the Do It Yourself ethos. It's not anti-technology, it's not primitivist solarpunks tend to embrace technology, but they try to reclaim it, you know, being able to fix the machine, rather than just upgrade to the newest model, I think is a very kind of solarpunk thing, and to older generations, that might not sound very revolutionary, but like to a millennial, where everything is proprietary and built with planned obsolescence, and nothing can ever be fixed, you just have to get the new one. You know, and I think that is kind of revolutionary. So, you know, just being able to break out of that complacency, that sort of bondage to like the corporate gods and be able to take back control of the products you consume, whether it's technology, or whether it's food, you know, gardening and, you know, or... Yeah, just being able to take back control of the products you consume. I think that's, that's a big part of the, the punk aspect of solarpunk.

CM: And I mean, and that seems like a real that's a provocation, right? Because that sort of flies in the face of so much of the world that we live in right now, which is precisely not that.

EF: I was just gonna say the other punk thing is it's performative. You know, you're showing people how to do it, and that there's an artistic engagement part of it, and that, you know, I think the best solarpunk is stuff that gets you to do it too, if that makes sense.

HJ: So I was gonna note that the solarpunk manifesto defines solarpunk as, quote, "at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living, and a set of achievable goal proposals to get there." And I was really taken with that definition, because it's sort of, it's a full action plan, right? It takes you from speculation to achievement, towards social change. And this is I think, many of science fiction genres do this. But this is a particularly powerful demonstration of how fiction could contribute to change.

SU: I think I see the, like, achievable proposals part as just meaning that the solution should be based on like science and policy and social reform, like there can be hand waving about precisely how we get there, because it's writing fiction. It's not an instruction manual, it doesn't have to be specific. It can just present ideas and then let those ideas inspire real world change, but I have seen like a lot of sort of magical solutions floating around in climate fiction. And I think that can be very problematic, because we need a way we need Be able to see a way forward, that doesn't depend on the sudden appearance of a supernatural being or, the earth, you know, the emergence of a new superpower or something like that. So I think achievable proposals is a way of kind of saying, it needs to be based in some kind of reality, even it is speculative. 

CM: I think that it also connects back to the worldbuilding aspect, right, where there's a sense of coherence of the story that you're assembling. And to me, that's, you know, that's something that I've been kind of experiment, dabbling with whatever, in recent years, and find that really compelling, both because then it shows not the perfect, the only world that we'll have, but at least the way these different things can fit together, which gives you some tools to understand the way a system works, and that, you know, whatever decisions we make, and actions we take are gonna have implications. So then some of them will be positive and others may not be right. But that it feels more authentic to make it a coherent whole, of imagined, even if it's just one possible future. But that, to me feels like a, you know, a valuable part of this kind of storytelling and imagination.

EF: Yeah, and to make it really concrete, right, the best worldbuilding has real stuff in it - physical objects that feel textured and banged up and that have their own histories that it's, you know, it's a future that has a past of its own, is another important part of worldbuilding. And there's coherence but maybe not too much, right? You still need conflict and tension. And you know, it's not a monolithic, magical, unicorn, rainbow happy lands, you know, there's still going to be problems, or there aren't going to be humans, because humans, you know, we need problems, I think, to survive. So, there's still challenges and we're never all going to agree on anything. But there's this idea that there are compelling, believable chunks of the future, some of which you can build, and make and use right now. Right? And that that's how you make the big future is you start with the little pieces of it. And you build outward from your own set of practices in your own community. And if enough people do that, we're going to change the world.