Envisioning a Hopeful Future, Promptly
We asked members of our community to come up with hopeful climate fiction prompts. Take a look at what they wrote, and see if you get inspired.
Earlier this summer, we held a Prompt Generation Workshop as part of our summer workshop series. We asked members of the Flourish Fiction community to brainstorm intriguing prompts that could potentially inspire future climate fiction, with a hopeful bent. Here are a few examples:
A middle-class call center executive in Mumbai returns home to find a strange animal in his house. This animal looks like a cat but behaves like a human and claims it can capture carbon dioxide through its skin…
Centuries in the future, archaeology students stumble onto a pile of trash from the 21st century. They pick through the rubbish and speculate on what life must have been like…
Zoe hated swamp week. She’d learned the history in school, but she still couldn’t see how her community hadn’t come up with a better solution than sending students to tend the wetlands around their home…
A group of teenagers discovers a secret underground world that has coexisted with us for centuries. This community is self-sustaining and has the tech to beat climate change. But they imprison the kids before they can share this secret with the world above…
Coal workers at the last coal plant in Appalachia reflect wistfully as they shut it down to start new jobs in clean and renewable energy…
New Jersey is aghast that some nefarious group is sabotaging offshore wind turbines, which are now ubiquitous. Evidence emerges that the culprits might be extremists supporting the last remaining coal plants…
A South Asian woman arrives in the US to research climate tech solutions at an elite university. She invents a novel method to convert plastic waste into harmless liquid water and solid carbon dioxide. No one takes her seriously, so she takes it upon herself to take the solution to the streets…
Forest re-planting has become more successful than anyone ever dreamed, and suburban residents have found it lucrative to downsize to smaller accommodations and turn their McMansions into small forest plots. A family ventures out from the city to visit their old house, which is now part a vibrant woodland…
The consensus meeting at the community farm and compost hub was about to break down. So many families had joined this year that the long-term members were seeing their shares of fruits and vegetables decline. But Stef had an idea for how these new families might help increase production so that there would be more to go around…
A scientist develops technology to genetically modify humans to survive the impacts of climate change. But technology takes away one key feature of humanity: emotion…
An AI building manager tasked with maximizing energy efficiency gets a little overzealous in its task. When it starts logging people off their computers and forcing them to take a walk outside, you and your co-workers worry that it might be going too far…
Florida housing market seems at risk of collapse as lending agencies, insurance companies, and utilities desert en masse as sea level rises, but communities create resilient microgrids with solar, wind, and storage when formal institutions abandon them…
Aggressive climate action has limited sea level rise just enough so that the water comes up to your apartment building. You now have waterfront real estate that you never expected. You look out onto the flooded buildings, thankful that the water stopped where it did but wishing that action had happened sooner…
Someone DMs a Gen Z fashion influencer that they can solve climate change. But in return for the solution, they get to control the influencer’s Instagram feed…
Microbial science is revolutionizing how matter is transformed and circulating in society. It’s capturing carbon and delivering on the promise of a circular economy. However, Shirley Atkins at the Global Bureau of Incentive Investigation has spotted a strange trend, and she won’t stop till she uncovers what’s behind it…
A teacher talks to her class about gasoline-powered cars. Having only seen electric vehicles, they struggle to understand. “But where do you plug it in?” they ask…