Prologue: The beginning of the beginnings

We resonate with the idea that dreaming is important, and Climate Fiction is a way of dreaming with environmental educators. It is a gruelling task to read, teach or investigate climate change while unsuccessfully resisting complicity given the magnitude of power and norms of globalisation. In provoking an acknowledgement and celebration of complexity and ambiguity, i.e., unleashing tricksters, we can create moments of healing with soft jokes which do not leave scars, but offer relief from the relentless demands of the neoliberal. It is in these times of joy and laughter where we naturally breathe deeply thereby engaging our full bodies, allowing us to feel safer with others whose ways of thinking may otherwise scare us. It is an act of resistance to dream and reach for the magic of creation. A well of resistance lives in multiple art collaborations around the world to harness the power of the collective to face terrible realities and transform, twist, bend, and dance them into alternative and hopeful pasts, presents and futures. Engaging with other people and other more-than-human lives, through various creative collaborations have led us to understand complex and unfamiliar perspectives in ways that are unreachable alone, regardless of how much academic study we do.

Our group writing of climate fiction is a model of tuning to one another, as we follow practices of radical listening to climate and re-cognising the principal character/narrator/artist/ancestor/dancer to be Ocean. This vision draws on the Ocean as our loving ancestor and elder, the Ocean, whose moods (her climate) humans experience, the Ocean as Earth’s lungs breathing. We begin from a place where salt moves water, where the Black Sea meets the Mediterranean and the Aegean, a place where, around the 15^th Century, the flow of the Bosphorus inspired the birth of oceanography as an area of study. We release ourselves from the bondages of academic disciplines, however.

This story emerged from a series of short online meetings that crossed time zones and oceans. Five human creatures heard various calls - from the ocean, from the sky, from the internet—and drawing from the approaches of slow scholarship (Mountz et al., Reference Mountz, Bonds, Mansfield, Loyd, Hyndman, Walton-Roberts, Basu, Whitson, Hawkins, Hamilton and Curran2015) and radical listening (cf. Joe Kincheloe, Reference hayes, Steinberg and Tobin2011), told a story together. This was the first time these five had formed this specific group, but we had previously collaborated in other art/science collaborations. For example, some of us have been members of the Ocean ArtScience Community of Practice and have participated in various exquisite corpse projects and storytelling clinics. Some have been part of Watering Words, which offers collective online practice Encounters for exploring how our own bodies interact with the watery-essence of other-than-human bodies. Water has been the connecting element for all our collaborations.

Our climate fiction surfaced from improvised, spontaneous story creation. We learned about Cassandra’s dilemma when Dwight began telling the story. We took turns filling in the rest: one telling a small part until the muse moved (swam?) to the next teller. It was as if the story was waiting for us to find her, if we acted with care and love while facing directly our own dark shadows and fears about climate catastrophe. We were surprised by Cassandra’s sassy, irreverent final words, but these called us to step back from the act of fiction co-creation and reflect on the impact of the story. We reread aloud each part of the transcription and spoke of our kindled emotions and ideas, some referenced to academic text. We present this climate fiction alongside our interpretations of its emergence, inviting the reader to draw from any evoked confusion or other feelings as well as their own learnings to reflect on burdens of knowledge not acted upon. Leaning into the confusion is a way of opening up to the power of uncertainty for environmental education. While we can make educated guesses, we will never truly know the future, for better or worse, and our suggested form of transdisciplinary reading by engaging with our story provides an avenue for engaging with this uncertainty (Knupsky & Caballero, Reference Knupsky, Caballero and Manarin2022).