Come on a weekend retreat to experiment with writing about climate change

Incredible as it may seem it's still possible for children to go through school and come out the other end and hardly be aware of the existence of climate change, because it is barely touched upon in the curriculum.

It seems like a pretty vital topic, then, for writers to choose to include in their stories – to bring the reality of this topic into a children's imaginations!

That's why, this March, I'm running a weekend retreat for writers at the Welsh writing centre Ty Newydd, set in the stunningly beautiful Lleyn Peninsula.

Helping me to do this will be the poet, dramatist, climate change campaigner and performer Emily Hinshelwood.

We will be challenging writers to think about ways to expose and write about the often hidden connection between our profligate use of fossil fuels and the loss of habitat, life and lifestyle – that many in the world are already experiencing.

In our everyday lives we often don't have the opportunity or space to consider the emotions that arise in us as a response to such a nebulous and all encompassing threat as catastrophic climate change.

This threat seems both remote and near, far away in time, and yet touching the every day weather and the behaviour of plants and wildlife around us even now – as if they are early warning sensors.

We don't know how to interpret these portents and the very uncertainty around climate change and the sheer size of the fact makes us feel powerless and afraid.

Some of us go into denial, some of us are paralysed with shock and some of us are galvanised into action.

In writing for children, they mustn't be made to feel frightened or scared into shock and powerlessness, they must be helped to feel that the future does contain hope and that it is possible to do something. But there is so much to know. Where can writers start?

There is already no shortage of novels for children with the theme of climate change. Three years ago I took part in a session at the Hay-on-Wye Literature Festival where, with the author of the Carbon Diaries, Saci Lloyd, we touched on some of them.

For our pains we were accused of poisoning children's minds by the right-wing press and online trolls!

I've written something about the history of writing and climate change here.

In another project I've been involved with, Weatherfronts, an anthology of writing about climate change, some writers have addressed the question with a story set at a domestic scale rather than apocalyptic science-fiction.

Darragh Martin wrote a hilarious story for young children about fighting off a nasty polluter called 'Thumbelina Jellyfizz and the Elephant in the Bathroom'.

And what about picturing a bright future where we have solved the problems of climate change but maybe we have other problems instead?

To build a bright future we first have to envision it. Children, with their unfettered imaginations, unconstrained by preconceptions, are well able to contribute their own ideas. Writers can stimulate them to do this.

So our weekend course will discuss the many facets of climate change and the ways in which its impact is felt both by participants on the course and people throughout the world.

We will experiment with a variety of different approaches and investigate ways of tapping our emotional reactions, of using research, imagining possible scenarios, and generating meaningful stories.

We will also be using the cycle of recovery from shock and grief because we think it is directly relevant here.

We have seen people move through these psychological stages:

1. shock & denial when they first hear about climate change; 
2. pain & guilt about the suffering that humanity has caused and is causing by the use of fossil fuels; 
3. anger and blame-laying; 
4. depression, powerlessness, reflection; 
5. an upward turn as one realises that life could still continue; 
6. reconstruction of one's life in a new way that is more sustainable, perhaps making connections with like-minded people; 
7. and finally acceptance and hope as they learn to deal with the new situation.

This almost sounds like a 'voyage and return' scenario or perhaps a 'conquering the monster' type of story, doesn't it?

It's going to be exciting to see what people come up with. Emily and I can't wait to see you there!

Find out more here: http://www.tynewydd.wales/course/writing-climate-change/

[I am the writer of Marvel's Captain Britain, the sci-fi YA novels Hybrids, Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect and the cli-fi fantasy Stormteller. I also run a regular writing course, called 'Making Readers Care' that can be taken online. Contact me if interested.]

For the Greater Good

I wrote a short story for the Weatherfronts commission. The brief was to respond to the themes and the discussions arising from a two day Weatherfronts event that took place at the Free Word Centre earlier this year.

This event brought 50 writers/artists and 50 climate change scientists together to discuss creative ways to respond to climate change.

My 8000 word story was called For the Greater Good and I've just had feedback for it from the editors:

"We really enjoyed reading it! This was a great read. The human relationships here were very believable and there were some strong emotions conjured quickly, to pull the reader in to this new, alternate world. This was a great unpicking of the moral and societal dimensions that were raised at Weatherfronts, and it broached pertinent moral questions in a plausible and non-didactic way."

That's a relief!

The story will be published next month and there will be a launch event at the Free Word Centre on January 19. Maybe see you there?

When YA Books Tackle Heavy Stuff

This month I was lucky enough to take part in the first panel discussion session to be held on climate fiction at the Hay Festival (or perhaps at any litfest?). Also on the panel were YA writer Saci Lloyd (third from left), and an expert in communication on climate change, George Marshall (right). The panel was convened by Jane Davidson (second from left), who's responsible for sustainability at one of the main Welsh universities, Trinity St. David's.

Saci is the author of The Carbon Diaries 2015 (written in 2007) and 2017 (written the following year). She discussed how she felt about writing about the year she is now living through... Which although not exactly as described in her book, is prescient in some ways.

In front of an audience of about a hundred, she related how she's been talking in schools and to other gaggles of teens for 10 years about climate change. "Compared to superheroes or music it looks to them at first as a pretty dull subject, but I've learned that the best way to get my message across is to be passionate, completely committed. Gradually they move from being apathetic to – 'What? Why didn't we know any of this!'"

We discussed why we feel the need to write about climate change in fiction for teens – basically, because it's hardly taught in schools. "If you do geography or science, then you might touch on it," said Saci. "But it's not a core subject, so it's quite possible to go through school and come out the other end not knowing anything about climate change."

There's nothing wrong with using fiction to talk about heavy subjects. Children's writers have been doing this since Charles Kingsley wrote The Water Babies about child chimney sweeps in 1862 (which I was given to read as a children's book when I was about six!). Yet when I said as much to the audience, my words got picked up by a young Daily Telegraph journalist sitting on the front row and turned into a headline in the following day's printed version of the paper: "Climate activists: 'We must infect children's minds'".

That headline was deliberately a come-on. To start with that first noun should have been singular! But the article itself is ok, although obviously a lot more was said. They quote me as saying that I like writing for teens because:

"They are asking all sorts of questions about how the world is working. Their minds haven't been tainted by ideological bias, they are still open minded about it.

"You can try to be seriously subversive and try to infect their minds with these viral ideas that they can explore on their own to make it exciting. When I was that age I loved having my mind boggled."

I stand by what I said, although I was speaking playfully – tongue-in-cheek – but naturally I also said a lot more (and so did the other three), and when talking about ideological bias I was referring to what George Marshall had said previously about the research he had done showing that adults generally only give credence to arguments put forward by others with whom they share the same ideological bias.  Usually children's minds are a lot more open and enquiring.

Perhaps the Telegraph is not used to the fact that writers for young adults often deal with heavy subjects, and we do so for a number of reasons, and not just because they are not covered adequately at school. We also write about them because children need to read about things that are bothering them, especially when nobody else is talking about it with them, because they're asking all kinds of questions about what they see around them, and because we want them to continue to enquire, to take nothing for granted, and to seek out answers of their own. At the same time hopefully we're telling a good yarn ("boggling their minds" as I put it).

With the predictable inevitability of the Internet, the deliberately sensationalistic bias of the headline was soon picked up by the nutters and climate sceptics who lurk as trolls on the 'net. The next thing I knew I was being accused on Twitter and certain websites of corruption of minors, child molestation and even, in one tweet from fundamentalist Jewish organisation, of being Hitler. All over the course of three days, which just goes to show the truth of Godwin's Law, written as long ago as 1990, which says that any Internet argument will inevitably lead to somebody being accused of being a Nazi.
It was up to the Telegraph's environment editor, Geoffrey Lean, to put things right three days later with a more balanced article, suggesting that in fact there is a lot of common ground between those who believe in climate change and think something ought to be done about it, and those who don't. This, however, does not justify the paper itself deliberately stirring things up and giving plenty of space to a certain climate sceptic well known for his deliberate misrepresentation of science. No wonder people are confused.

And no wonder we need to write stories which attempt to tackle this heavy stuff from a different angle.

David Thorpe is the author of cli-fi YA fantasy Stormteller and the YA SF Hybrids.

I'm at Hay-on-Wye Literature Festival this Month - Come See Me

I'm very excited because this month I am to achieve a long-time ambition of being on stage at a literary festival. Not just any literary festival, but Hay, and not just once but twice! I'm not at all nervous, no.

Both events are part of the festival's 'green' strand.

The first will be about my new non-fiction book The One Planet Life where I will be in conversation with Jane Davidson, director of INSPIRE and a fellow patron of the One Planet Council.

The second will be to do with children's writing and climate fiction, where I will be joined by Saci Lloyd, Jane, and climate change campaigner George Marshall. I hope other members of the Facebook group of cli-fi authors will be there, too.

Saci, plus other cli-fi authors, took part in a week of activity on the Guardian's children's books website last month about writing about ecological and environmental matters for children, culminating in a Twitter chat [#GdnEcoChat] on the evening of World Book Night with Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Kate Kelly, Sarah Holding, Tony Bradman and others.  The Guardian's record of it is here.

One of the questions that was asked was: is cli-fi just a passing fad? My answer, which was favourited a few times, was: 'NO! We've only just begun! One day all books will contain an element of cli-fi. They'll have to.'

It's now recognised by almost everybody that climate change is real and happening and caused by human beings burning fossil fuels. Any story that is set in the future which paints a picture of a world that hasn't been affected by climate change in one way or another will just look daft, especially if read in a few years' time.

It doesn't have to have disasters in it, it doesn't have to be a dystopia and it doesn't have to be science fiction. The lives of any characters, whether living 10, 50 or 200 years in the future, will have been affected in one way or another, whether it is how they get about, what the technology is like, what their home is like, or where they live.

I usually write about the near future. Stormteller and Hybrids both take current trends and extrapolate them, but the former is almost exclusively cli-fi and the latter only contains one tiny nod to it: a description of a swollen River Thames in London.

The novel I'm writing now is set in 2089-2104 and, while it is not about climate change at all, I still have to describe the ways that people get about (in their self-driving electric cars, rapid transit buses, or high-speed trains), the buildings that people live and work in (where attempts have been made, successfully or not, to retrofit them to save and/or generate electricity and to bring nature back into cities), the food they eat and where it comes from, the energy they use (all kinds of renewables), where the coastline happens to be (usually not where it is now) and what has happened to former seafronts.

This is a radical reimagining of life. It's neither dystopic nor utopian, just looking at how life and society might have to adapt in one way or another.

In this election there has been little talk of climate change, but all of the main parties (even UKIP, but with the striking exception of the DUP) recognise the huge contribution the low carbon or clean technology sector already makes to the UK economy, employing as it does close to one million people. Inevitably this contribution will continue to rise. Some parties (LibDems, Greens) attach more importance to the way that green jobs can make life better and improve the economy generally. It's a win-win-win scenario.

Yes, predicting the future is notoriously difficult, but the predictions about climate change have, ever since 1993, been consistent in saying that a certain list of impacts is likely to happen; exactly when is less certain.

We also know that human nature tends to leave everything to the last minute, only responding to disasters when they are imminent or actually happening.

Put the two together and you begin to get an idea of the way things might go; except that climate change is not one disaster but a whole succession of transformations with all sorts of ramifications that will continue for the next few centuries.

In the past, quite a few writers who have tried to predict the future have found life imitating art, such as Ray Bradbury's description of “little seashells… thimble radios” that brought an “electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk” in Farenheit 451; John Brunner’s description of electric cars powered by fuel cells and Detroit as an abandoned wasteland in Stand on Zanzibar; tablet computers in Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Oddysey; Google Glass type goggles in Willliam Gibson's Neuromancer; not to mention ubiquitous people watching (CCTV) in Orwell's 1984.

Not written for kids? Actually, almost all of these books I read as a teenager.

I will leave you with two thoughts: encouragement to contemporary writers not to ignore developments that are consistent with a world predicted by climate science, and the infographic below that I discovered, which records many predictions made by writers that have come to pass.

David Thorpe is the author of cli-fi YA fantasy Stormteller and the YA SF Hybrids.

New Cli-Fi Book Portrays a Rough Eight Decades Ahead

The Vandervelde Documents by Richard Turner is an ambitious novel that attempts to envisage how the rest of the century will pan out for planet Earth as it suffers from the increasingly severe impacts of climate change, followed by the response of fragmented governments to the ensuing cataclysms.

It collects three e-books into one printed novel. The separate books cover in chronological order: in Book 1, The Carbon Brief, the period 2020-2044; in Book 2, The Phoenix Nation, from then up to 2078; and in Book 3, The Warden, 2084-2092 with a prologue from 2120.

This is a work of climate fiction, or cli-fi, particularly the first book. Since it is written by someone with a knowledge of engineering and technology the proposed technological solutions to meeting the challenges of climate change make some sense.

Predicting what will happen in the future is a thankless game and there will be readers who disagree with Richard's prognostications. One can always argue about details. The point of the book is to provoke discussion.

It is not a novel in a conventional sense. Instead it is a collection of documents or archive records, including blogs and diaries from the main protagonists.

It also sits securely within the realms of fantasy or science fiction, since it proposes a small group of people called the Elders – also known as "Sapients" – who have extended lifespans and manipulate events through some unknown means behind the scenes. They work on behalf of Gaia – the spirit of the Earth in its biosphere – from whose perspective humanity is a destructive virus.

It also, unusually, views world events from a Welsh perspective. The author is not Welsh but has lived there most of his life. This leads him to speculate about how small nations might, following the disruption of a cataclysmic event in 2044 which upturns the old world order, enter diplomatic dialogue with each other regarding alliances, with the intention of attempting to avoid in their new forms of governance the mistakes made by the former large global players that led us into this mess. It comes as no surprise to find that the author, in a previous life, for several years organised a Small Nations Music Festival in Wales.

This is a thought-provoking and enthralling novel that will captivate anyone interested in how climate change will affect the power plays of the future. It is also, frustratingly, one of the most poorly proofread novels I have ever read, but don't let that deter you.

Birds of a Feather are Gathering

Since my post last month on cli-fi (climate fiction) there have been a couple of very nice developments involving authors crawling out of their garretts to coalesce around shared interests.

Climate Fiction Facebook group

This last post caused a flutter on Twitter which resulted in several climate fiction authors deciding to get together. There's safety in numbers.

The best platform we could find was to set up a Facebook group. Not ideal since not everyone is on Facebook: apologies to Nick Green!

Nevertheless anyone who either considers themselves be writing fiction connected with climate change, or who even touches upon it in some of their work, is welcome to join.

The aim of the group is to share experience, marketing, information, etc. the members so far include, besides yours truly:

Teara Kuhn	Emily Diamand	Moira Mcpartlin
Sarah Chaplin	Katharine Kelly	Ali Young
Saci Lloyd	Piers Torday	L Deborah Sword
Lisa Devaney

One of our first achievements has been to be offered an event at next May's Hay Festival debating Cli-Fi. The discussion will be chaired by Jane Davidson, former Welsh Environment Minister, and will include two other panellists besides myself:

1. Saci Lloyd author of The Carbon Diaries
2. George Marshall, author of Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.

This is very exciting because I have always wanted to be on a panel at the Hay Festival! The discussion will take place on May 22 at 5.30 p.m. We hope to see you there.

Welsh Branch of SCBWI

The second exciting development is a new incarnation of the Welsh branch of the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. 

As many of you will know this fantastic organisation has been going for about a decade in the UK and has some very dynamic regional groups. I was a member of about 6 to 8 years ago at which time I tried to start a Welsh branch, but it fell apart because members were too far apart.

(As an aside, it gave rise to the Dragontongue blog, which eventually merged with this one).

With the advent of some new Welsh writers joining SCBWI there has recently been a new impetus to start a group. At the moment it is only seeming to reach a saturation point (this is the point of geographical density at which writers will deign to venture out of their studios and coalesce together in a mutually agreed venue) in the south of Wales. Writers and illustrators up north in gog-land will have to wait.

Those joining up so far and signed up to the Facebook page include:

Natalie Lee	Jonathan Mayhew	Marie Basting the regional coordinator
Claire Fayers	Zoe Thomas	Ian Galbraith
Suz Williams	Karen Hart	Elaine Hillson

Our first South Wales meeting will be this Saturday at 11 AM in Calon Cafe and Interiors, 2 Mansel Street, SA31 1QX Carmarthen. Anyone is welcome to attend. I'm looking forward to it.

We will also be meeting at 2pm on Sunday 29 March at the Cardiff Children's Literature Festival, which any of you might also like to attend, and where we will be joining up with Malachy Doyle who has a session at 5 PM.

As they say here, Croeso i Bawb!

David Thorpe is the author of clifi YA fantasy Stormteller and the SF dystopia Hybrids. 

Cli-fi: envisaging the future of humanity under climate change

'Clifi' is a new genre dedicated to climate fiction, or fiction about climate change. Film-makers, novelists, graphic novelists and playwrights are using the science and predictions of climate scientists to construct human dramas around possible futures in an effort to stimulate us into action.

I myself am guilty of having written a clifi novel, Stormteller, which envisages rising sea levels causing a temporary breakdown in society in the UK around 2030.

A basic vulnerability here is the fact that if ports are incapacitated by storm surges, the 'just-in-time' logistics model upon which supermarkets and other shops depend breaks down, people stockpile food and fuel, and shortages quickly turn into riots and lawlessness.

This is one way in which our society is not resilient to a general, widespread climate event.

The story follows a group of teenagers whose lives are shattered by these developments.

IDP:2043 and New Atlantis are two other examples of clifi specifically relevant to cities. The former is a graphic novel published last August and the latter is a piece of eco-drama to be staged later this month at The Crystal, Royal Victoria Docks, London.

IDP:2043

IDP:2043 is set 29 years in the future. IDP stands for Internally Displaced People. The scenario is that rising sea level in the UK has caused internal migration. NWI or New Wanlockhead is a new city created as a result on high land.

It displays all the characteristics of social breakdown: a hinterland of shantytowns clustered around a gated community where the rich and powerful live. It hints that social breakdown caused by climate change will cause developed world cities to become more like those found in the developing world nowadays.

It follows the story of Cait, a woman from the shantytown initially favoured by the elite but then found to be too rebellious to be permitted to survive...

As in Stormteller, there is a problem feeding people. A solution has been found which benefits the rich: a type of indoor vertical farming, which only the rich are allowed to pursue while the poor are prevented from growing their own food.

This gripping and fascinating story is written and illustrated in different styles by a variety of artists and writers, who each explore different aspects of the theme. They include Irvine Welsh (author of Filth), Pat Mills (the creator of 2000AD comic and the anti-war series Charley's War), Hannah Berry (author of Britten and Brülightly) and Kate Charlesworth (responsible for the New Scientist's non-fiction graphic novel Life, the Universe and (Almost) Everything.



While one may quibble about the few technical details in this book, as a moral fable exploring the human reality it paints a very plausible picture of what may happen if we do not prepare sufficiently now for the ravages of climate change that may well come.

New Atlantis is a piece of multimedia theatre that explores the climate-change world of 2050, where people are being punished retrospectively for past climate crimes, cities like London are experiencing water austerity and Miami has been abandoned due to rising sea levels.



It follows the agents of something called New Atlantis, which the audience becomes part of, as it tries to come to terms with the new reality and what should be done. It aims to engage the audience in thinking about the issues by forcing them to participate in discussions about the options as part of the drama.



It is the brainchild of LAStheatre who have collaborated with scientists and engineers from UCL, Pennine Water Group and Rutherford Appleton Space Lab. to come up with their scenarios.

Dan Bloom, who came up with the clifi label, says that this is an inevitable imaginative response to climate change. "It's a genre term that can be regarded as part of the broader category of 'speculative fiction'. While the two genres share some features in common, they are separate genres," he says.

If we are going to inspire people and planners to create more sustainable ways of living, then it is vital to employ the arts. Clifi is here to stay.