The science fiction of near-future resistance goes by many names, with terms like “cli-fi,” “solar punk,” and “hope punk” in ascendance in recent years. But one of the most important considerations in this range of speculative writing isn’t categorical: it’s geopolitical.
How well does this vein of fiction expand our sense of the world around us? When trying to depict plausible solutions to the gravest problems faced by our species, such prose needs to reflect the fact that we belong to a global ecosystem where “the future” always arrives unequally, and where the stuff of dystopian whimsy in one region might simultaneously exist as an everyday menace in others. How, then, should we strive to speak of eco-social transformation?
There’s been a vast range of recent speculative work trying to “bring in the world” when reflecting on resistance. In Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea (2022), corporate, technological, and interspecies systems-thinking all come to bear on a near-future where we’re haunted by past environmental transgressions. In E. G. Condé’s Sordidez (2023), which draws on island and Indigenous communities deeply impacted by climate change and hegemonic in-fighting, competing visions of resilience operate in complex dialogue, to varying levels of success.
And every year since 2021, Grist has sponsored Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a contest that invites writers to depict the struggle for climate-change solutions from now until 2200. In that first batch of winners, taken from entrants to a free-to-enter competition with global reach, was a story by Renan Bernardo. “When It’s Time to Harvest” follows an older couple with a thriving vertical farm project in Brazil, where they’ve contributed to regional resilience with the aid of tech drones and methodologies that one of the pair is now hoping to preserve in writing before retirement. What made this story a strong candidate for the competition wasn’t simply that it ruminated on a future of green tech, but also that it imagined a world where survival isn’t reduced to the usual Western pockets.
The work, like many tech-driven visions of climate mitigation, also hearkens back to some of the earliest commercial science fiction. As with Hugo Gernsback’s initial dream for the genre, “When It’s Time to Harvest” focuses significantly on explaining the shape and processes of future-tech. The presence of a tender relationship at the heart of this story offsets the directness of a few worldbuilding descriptions, but it also shrouds some of the deeper social questions that might be raised by a single couple with a successful vertical farm waiting until so late in life to think about transition plans for such an important project.
Then again, why should one vision of the future be expected to advance every possible conversation about the sociopolitical dimensions of a better world ahead? Now that this piece has been republished in Different Kinds of Defiance (2024), a collection of ten stories that explore the challenges of future tech and climate change, Bernardo’s more individualist and tech-forward tale for Imagine 2200 is balanced by a wider range of stories in which characters repurpose, replant, reform, and otherwise recover using whatever agency they might have.
Some of these pieces, including the titular “Different Kinds of Defiance,” are slender and serve to illustrate a general longing for resilience in difficult scenarios. Others, like “To Remember the Poison,” are long enough to outline not only the shape of greener societies, but also the conflicts that such “ideal” societies can create by failing to include everyone in them.
Tender romances and wistful memories feature significantly in this collection, where they do different work with the technical novum of each tale. In “A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity,” our protagonist has created machine-critters to assess the toxicity of waters in a region that native species, children, and a man she loved have all left. With patient oversight, she’s living long enough to see a return of nature, and her monitoring-tech offers a gentle companion in the wait.
Likewise, “Eight Steps to Steal a Yacht and Build a Hospital” relies on only a few technological tricks; the crux of this somewhat haphazard tale is much more personal. In a melodramatic set of turns—from fear of spousal anger and disappointment, to fear of spousal death (first from liver failure, then from mob violence)—this story’s core plot hangs on our protagonist’s decision to steal a yacht from a rich and dangerous man, and to repurpose it for medical ends.
Such tempered approaches to future-tech lie in strong contrast with the blending of technology and romance in “Look to the Sky, My Love.” Here, our protagonist attends a party months after the death of a loved one who believed in a body of research that has split the real-world solar punk set. As we learn while our protagonist follows a series of digital clues,
It would [have] be[en] her postdoctoral research had she lived. She’d promised herself to make that fire shine brighter for a lot of other communities. She had plans to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the efficiency and management of the generators. Once, during a peculiarly quiet evening around the Fogueirão, she’d told me how she wanted to turn the party into a living organism, something that could spread beyond its boundaries and supply energy and comfort throughout other parts of the country using a relay of underground networks. Joy and life bequeathing dignity and solace.
“It’s not machine learning,” she’d told me, chuckling with an afterthought, pressing her forehead against my shoulder. “It’s party learning. The party will learn and improve itself.”
The above reflects a common sleight of hand in such futurist writing. Solar punk collections and magazines often include stories that present elaborate tech solutions to our climate-stressed world as a de facto net good (despite the many challenges posed by the AI industry to a greener and more climate-resilient future), so long as they help a few characters to bond.
Different Kinds of Defiance lives up to its title, though, by keeping even such contentious possibilities in balance with other forms of “defiance.” In “Anticipation of Hollowness,” we enter a world where one person’s junk robot becomes its next owner’s dearest companion—and where the struggle to reduce waste requires characters to learn to let go of what they’ve loved. Humans are also the limiting agent for reforms in “Soil of Our Home, Storm of Our Lives,” where a technology that allows homes to be grown with ease is only useful if those in power are willing to allow their world to outgrow past rich-poor disparities.
But for cynical relationships with tech, “Even Though You’re No More” might take the cake in this collection. Here, in a slender and bleak read, Bernardo dives deep into the pathology of building machines to serve humanity’s dying sense of itself. What are our machines supposed to do with all their messily enhanced capacities, after we’ve killed ourselves off?
Bernardo leaves possibly his most ambitious story for last, however. If “To Remember the Poison” might be his most nuanced story, it is “The River That Passed through My Life” that goes furthest, in imagining a world of “haves” in space, and “have-nots” back on Earth. The story’s range derives from its character perspectives, neither of which belong fully to either of those camps: the piece weaves between a rich woman who sometimes dips back to Earth for “relics,” stealing more from those left behind, and an older woman who scraped her way into space, but who’s using a return trip as an opportunity to reconnect with her left-behind niece. This story relies on a slippery form of third-person—sometimes omniscient, sometimes strongly in one character’s point of view—to depict an Earth-side struggle to rectify a classist divide around investment in space-bound technology at cost to recovery on Earth.
Taken together, the stories in Bernardo’s collection offer an array of near-future visions of Brazil, especially, persevering in the coming waves of climate change—and despite the many forms of wealth disparity and violence that afflict the region even now. The stories here might include some forms of breathless tech-optimism, but they are well-matched by stories where technology is nowhere as important as the “human” factor, and where sometimes the only thing a person can do is wait out the damage already caused by environmental transgressions.
On a technical level, there are some quirks in syntax and word choice that should remind the reader of Bernardo’s native language, but none so great that it diminishes the overall reading experience. Only one language note really matters for the Anglo-Western reader: Spanish and Portuguese have a wider use-set for present-tense constructions. On occasion, then, a story here might slip between past and present forms in ways that aren’t as common in English. There is no error here, though; it’s simply a reflection of a more roving style common to other world canons. Gender-neutral possessives, the peskiness of prepositional variance, and the trickiness of English question formation (in the rare moments when they show up): all serve more as reminders of a writer imagining our global futures from another slice of it entirely.
Ultimately, this is Bernardo’s goal in Different Kinds of Defiance: to share visions of how individuals and their global communities might yet contribute to the crafting of a more resilient world, irrespective of the severity of climate crises and political instability before us. The tender, domestic nature of many character moments here sometimes bypasses opportunities for the author to engage more with the sociopolitical and ecological implications of his proposed tech solutions. But in the process, Bernardo’s speculative fiction also serves to remind us that our futures will only ever be as robust as the humans we can imagine still thriving in them.