
Once upon a future time...
I started writing cli-fi (climate fiction) fairy tales as a result of joining the online writing group Cli-fi for Beginners. Then I struck on the idea of future fairy tales, in which I could imagine our futures unfolding as we respond to technological and other societal changes, not only climate change.
I use more-or-less the tradional form of the fairy tale but with a future/urban setting and, in so far as I'm riffing on an existing fairytale, I move the parts around or invert them.
You can read many of them online:
- New Future Fairy Tales on Substack
- Thermoctopus: They were far from ordinary heating pipes: they were alive.
- The Girl who Touched the Moon: The people of the city made a moon, out of a fine spherical mesh of LED lights. But this moon proved to have a mind of its own.
- Jacqui and the Lift Shaft: Once upon a future time – and a hard but transformative time it will be...
I'm also writing stories in other short forms about the future of the climate emergency. "The Bracelet and the battery" appears in the anthology All Tomorrow's Futures (Cybersalon, March 2024).
