In all of its forms and genres, fiction imagines and depicts the human – and, sometimes, the nonhuman – experience. Future-oriented fiction tasks us to conceive of and anticipate life being lived in circumstances different from our own. This isn’t (just) about new gadgets or dystopic disasters; it’s about the challenges of living in a world that, at present, we can only imagine.

But all lives are lived differently, and every perspective is unique: there is no “The Future”, but many imagined futures, plural and unevenly distributed in space and time alike. Each story told can help us learn a lot about how we might live with climate change. To collect more such stories, and encourage their writing, the AnthropoScenes competition was launched as part of the Climaginaries research project in 2019.

We received 44 submissions, most of them short stories. Five winners were selected in each of the following categories: urban, rural, travel, making and ecosystems.

Here you find the e-book with the stories of the five winners. On the webpage of the AnthropoScenes competition you find more stories and more information on the competition.