No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save our Planet

No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save our Planet is an anthology of 24 cli-fi stories, with contributions from a number of prominent authors. The cli-fi stories span genres including sci-fi, family drama, romance, comedy, and tragedy. Baden writes in the introduction that the purpose of the anthology is, “to inspire readers with positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like and how we might get there.”There have been several cli-fi anthologies released in the past, but I believe this ranks as one of the best. The stories are largely grounded in the present. They feature a range of solutions. They steer away from dystopian narratives which can alienate people. And they leave the reader feeling optimistic about how we can get out of this mess we’re in. Some of the solutions seem so logical and helpful, that one wonders how they haven’t been implemented already.Cli-fi has a big role to play in changing minds and attitudes and bringing about climate action. I believe No More Fairy Tales shows how short stories and anthologies can do just that.

No More Fairy Tales is anthology of short stories authored by talented writers and activists, with each story proposing an inventive solution to the climate crisis. The collection provides a ‘soft start’ introduction to some of the more exciting scientific ideas currently being mooted to ‘Save the Planet’, from giving nation status to the oceans, to farming kelp or mangrove to capture carbon, to refreezing the Arctic. Communicating science through fiction is novel, but it works because the that’s-crazy-but-it-might-just-work quality of the science comes across without drowning the reader in technicalities. The stories are engaging and the reader is left with the feeling that there are plenty of exciting ideas that could be deployed to avert the crisis, if only we could only all take responsibility and do our bit.

No More Fairy Tales by D.A. (Denise) Baden.One of the advantages of a book of short stories is that you can dip in and out of it without losing the continuity of a novel. Furthermore, these stories are written by lots of different authors. So even if I wasn’t getting on with one story I tried another, and often found that one a lot better. I’ve enjoyed many of the No More Fairy Tales stories, which is as much as any writer/editor can hope for. No work of fiction appeals to every reader.I really like the story by Jenni Clarke. I could see some of the cleaning women I have known in her main character, Marion. She’s so conscientious, so lacking in self-confidence. And I always love a romantic happy ending, while it also raises serious environmental issues. It also reminds me of points made in The economics of arrival (Trebeck and Williams) about the vital, and very much under-valued, role played by cleaners and other people in what they call the foundation economy.I also like The award ceremony, by Denise herself. Among other attributes it raises the issue of striving for what I term excess ecopurity, at the expense of engaging more people. As does Suck it up, a lovely American Christmas story by Brian Adams, with the Santa figure as the ecopurist! That also brings in the natural vs technological solutions debate, while the romance in the air helps keep the reader interested. Blue nation by Rasha Barrage is another intriguing story, combining the political with the very human. I feel for Neve. Whereas Project slowdown is too technical for me. Two or three others I started to read but gave up on. However the important point is that I as a reader enjoyed quite a few, and I’ll continue to dip in over the next few months when I have a spare few hours.The crème de crème for me is The assassin, also by Denise Baden. Citizen Juries are being set up, with power to enact legislation. The proviso is that the citizens, a representative cross section of the population, are able to reach consensus on measures to enact. Sarah is the group facilitator who worked so hard to get these juries set up that she lost her lover in the process. The members arrive on day one, ranging from a wealthy, very macho farmer, to an unemployed young man with mental health problems, from an 85 year old grandmother who knits all the time, to a marketing executive who’s just split up with her husband. Various experts are wheeled in to talk about issues like carbon offsetting, personal carbon allowances, repair cafes, on-demand buses. The group debate them, sometimes quite furiously. I particularly liked the library of things discussion, and how it got everybody really engaged. Particularly the very harassed and hard up young father, as he realised he could hire or borrow so much of the expensive stuff that was now cluttering up his house.As they debated the issues we learned so much about the lives of the different members. While a sense of mystery is maintained by a series of isolated sentences in italics, likeYou all think I don’t count.All is revealed in a dramatic ending. The clue is in the chapter title …Criticisms? Sarah might have been given more facilitation skills training to handle the inevitable ensuing conflict, given the critical existential questions they’re addressing. At what point in the future are these juries being set up? What kind of government is in power? How will the verdicts of different juries mesh together? Maybe such questions could be answered in a longer story, which I understand Denise intends to write. (In my positive future scenario on handling the climate crisis Unlikely Alliances, I have a benevolent coalition government in power in 2029, and popular energy being harnessed practically at the local level – food growing, repair and maintenance, product and building renovation, etc, with the human dramas playing out over a longer time frame.)More generally I wonder about the book title. Isn’t there a ‘fairy’ element, i.e. a suspension of reality, in every good story? Isn’t one of the aims to the Southampton University ecostory programme to use fiction to bring the climate and sustainability messages to people who normally wouldn’t read ‘any of that green stuff’? I’d also have left the end of story scientific references for an end chapter.But overall I’m continuing to enjoy this collection of stories. And isn’t learning more effective when it’s spread out over a longer period of time? Another advantage of a collection of short stories.

An anthology that's packed full of ideas for dealing with the climate crisis, from the small and personal (but still important) to systemic, sometimes even global changes. Refreezing the Arctic is one suggestion that may sound preposterous in abstract, but is made compelling and even aspirational in context. While the book includes excerpts from Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future and Andrew Dana Hudson's Our Shared Storm, it doesn't confine itself to SFF - writers from all sorts of genres show that climate solutions can be tied into just about any story. Read it for inspiration and for comfort - and if you're looking for ideas about where to start with your own climate work, you could do much worse than start here.

What a fantastic collection of stories, some hopeful, some shocking, all beautifully written. A book to share with everyone who cares about the world they live in. Or anyone who loves a good yarn!

A good book for Christmas as with 24 stories there really is something for everyone. My partner and I completely disagreed on which were the best. He loved the more scientific ones, especially the last one about how the Titanic could have been saved. I liked the romantic one and the whodunnit best. I’m passing onto my son next as he’d like the one about climate gamers – I’m sure he’d find a lot to relate! We also learned a lot. I wish there was an audiobook but there is a link to a website which has audio versions of some of the stories.

As a career scientist at the primary NASA center for climate research, I’ve had to discover with accumulating horror that science does not, in fact, speak for itself---even when the science is distilled into an urgent warning about the trajectory of our planet! Disinformation has triumphed over science, and it is up to the artists to save the world now.In climate science messaging, the scientists keep bringing a neocortex to a limbic fight. And keep losing. Well here in this collection we find our gladiators. These ‘stories to save our planet’ bring the missing emotional component, and they also parse the technical descriptions of potential mitigatory actions. They allow the reader to feel our predicament and understand what we can do to address these concerns that couldn’t be more important and couldn’t be more global. These stories provide hope.I can highly recommend these stories as an easy primer for students in classes covering climate science and mitigation technologies. (I wish the book had been available in the Climatology class I taught at an art college last spring.) Our monkey brains simply seem to absorb information better when told through story. In the story Climate Gamers (D.A. Baden, Martin Hastie, Steve Willis), for example, gamers compete to simulate a survivable future by experimenting with a wide variety of technologies. This is both a very clever story idea and a painless technical summary. To my mind, the idea that the hyper motivation of gamers might be enlisted in serious climate scenario studies is not even far-fetched.On the literary side, while this is not the best collection for my reading tastes which lean toward maximalist and experimental styles, it does include fine writing and prose. Ground Up (Elizabeth Kurucz), for example, is steeped in metaphor and beautifully unusual word sequences. Even if the world didn’t need saving, I can highly recommend this collection.

Printed by Amazon in Poland. Fine with me. Horrible paper quality though, Paper too white and its undulating.Happened often in last months!Gedruckt von Amazon on Polen. fein. Aber das papier! Zu weiß, Buch kommt wegen mangelnder Trocknung vermute ich komplett gewellt.Das kam jetzt öfter vor leider...