Rewriting the World: Climate Fiction, Black Future-Space Making, and the Speculative Project of Justice

Abstract

In the current moment of parallel queer, environmental, and racial crises, geographers have begun to tackle how fiction has become a way to envision and enact change that addresses these crises simultaneously and works toward creating just futures. This chapter explores how Black queer works of speculative fiction, specifically in the climate fiction genre, present imaginative possibilities for confronting climate change by exhibiting three key elements: envisioning resistance, creating community, and fostering empathy and accountability. Speculative fiction is a genre of possibility and can be seen as a process of future-making and space-making that reimagines our current and future world. The two novels, Tenea Johnson’s Smoketown and Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, are the primary examples of speculative fiction texts where I extract these three key themes. Considering speculative fiction as a practice of future space-making can enable geographers to work toward futures that privilege the experiences and imaginaries of queer people of color—the type of stories best positioned to address the combined projects of racial, climate, and queer justice.