I’m happy to chat with Susan Kaye Quinn, editor of Bright Green Futures: 2024. It’s a collection of short solarpunk stories from guests of the Bright Green Futures podcast, lifting up stories to build a better world. These hopeful stories include clicky space centipedes, sentient trees, a flooded future Rio de Janeiro, and characters trying to find their place in a climate-impacted world. Each story imagines a way for us to survive the future, together. The anthology contains six short stories and a prose-poem.
Mary: Tell us something about your life that not many people know about.
Susan: I applied to the astronaut program! (Spoiler alert: they did not accept me.) I also interned for NASA, designing supersonic combustors and analyzing satellite data as well as the impact of aircraft emissions on global warming. They funded my Master’s and then PhD research. I did a lot of science-y stuff before I stayed home with my kids, uncorked my creative side, and came back into the workforce as a sci-fi (now solarpunk) writer. Somehow, my background in science and engineering surprises people, even though there are lots of writers (especially in science fiction) who have a technical side too.
Mary: I never knew that about you! What led you to the creative outlet of writing and editing?
Susan: Despite being a writer as a kid (and even filmmaker with my janky 16mm films in the 70’s), I didn’t identify as a “writer” until well after I had my own kids. The endless hours of maths and engineering problems imprinted hard on my identity and wanting to be taken seriously as a woman in engineering meant (at the time) eschewing the “soft” creative arts. To be honest, it starved a part of my soul. I was 44 before I picked up the pen creatively again—once that happened, I was kind of a madwoman, very prolific. Creative work fills my soul, and I’m just not okay when I’m not writing.
Mary: Tell us about your new book and what inspired it, or was it accidental?
Susan: Last year, I set out to create a podcast that would lift up hopeful climate fiction—because I was writing it, and I knew it was out there, but it was very hard to find. I wanted a space to collect up the stories and the authors, talk to them about the work, lift up their stories, and create a growing list of recommended reads that I could point people to. That all went great, with the somewhat unexpected side effect of now being connected to all these amazing authors who were writing the kind of stories I felt we really needed—stories that imagine a better world—and the next logical step was to publish a collection of them. Happily, many were able to write something new just for this, and that’s how the Bright Green Futures: 2024 anthology was born. I have ambition to publish a collection every year, but it turns out, it’s a lot of work! So we’ll see if I can manage podcasting, publishing the collections, and still get my own writing done.
Mary: That’s amazing. You can always use this site’s database, which at last count had about 1,015 titles of eco-fiction, many of them with climate themes. How does the anthology align with nature and place?
Susan: I gave very little direction to the authors, just the theme of hopeful climate fiction, which they already knew how to write. That was why I invited them to the pod in the first place. But they somehow, and I’m still a little surprised by this, wrote a beautiful range of stories that cover everything from the fury of nature (in climate disasters) to the difficulties of restoration vs. rewilding to a kind of mystical/speculative communion with nature. The story themes almost tell a meta story about the range of issues we need to grapple with in order to survive the climate crisis. I’m also very happy about the range in setting, from far-flung islands, to a future flooded Rio, to corn fields in America. I think the collection really gives readers a taste of what hopeful climate fiction can do.
Mary: Have you been on book tours or community events to promote the book?
Susan: The Earth Day publication of the anthology lines up well with a bunch of in-person events I have coming up, where I’ll be promoting the anthology, everything from a low-tech book launch for a friend to Pittsburgh’s 3rd annual Solarpunk Future! expo to my local SFF conference, Confluence. I also have some free downloadable zines that talk about what solarpunk is and why we write these stories that I’ll be handing out wherever I go. Little Free Libraries are my new favorite place to drop them!
Mary: I read the book around Earth Day and posted about it here, and I’ve worked with a few of the authors. Apologies for not having this up by Earth Day, but for some reason I had about half a dozen Indie Corners around that time and just went in line. I really enjoyed reading this anthology, though. What’s next for you?
Susan: Once the anthology is launched, I sincerely hope I can get back to writing. The novel I’m working on is about how we need to renegotiate our relationship with plants and families, and the summer is the perfect time to sit with my native plant garden and absorb the sun. How does the saying go? Humans need sun, water, nutrients, and rest: we’re basically houseplants with complex feelings. I need to go commune with the plants for a while and create.
Mary: Wonderful. Please keep in touch.
Editor bio
Susan Kaye Quinn is an environmental engineer/rocket scientist turned speculative fiction author who now uses her PhD to invent cool stuff in books. Her works range from hopepunk climate fiction to futuristic spec fic, with side trips into cyberpunk and steampunk romance. Her bestselling novels and short stories have been optioned for Virtual Reality, translated into German and French, and featured in several anthologies, including placing 3rd in Grist’s 2022, Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors contest. She grew up in California, got a bunch of engineering degrees (Aerospace, Mechanical, and Environmental), and worked everywhere from NASA to NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research). She has designed aircraft engines, studied global warming, and held elected office (as a school board member). She writes full-time, watching the birds and deer from her deck, trying to dream a better future into being. Susan is a full member of SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association). She’s also a graduate of the 2022 class of Viable Paradise, a member of PARSEC, and a Published Penn with PennWriters.
Author bios
- Renan Bernardo is a Nebula and Ignyte finalist author of solarpunk, science fiction and fantasy from Brazil. His fiction appeared in Reactor/Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Solarpunk Magazine, Imagine 2200 by Grist, and others. His writing scope is broad, from secondary world fantasy to dark science fiction, but he enjoys the intersection of climate narratives with science, technology, and the human relations inherent to it. His solarpunk/clifi short fiction collection, Different Kinds of Defiance, was published in 2024. He can be found at his website.
- Sarena Ulibarri is an author and editor from the American Southwest. Her solarpunk novella, Another Life, set in a Death Valley eco-village, was published in 2023 by Stelliform Press. Steel Tree, a science fiction retelling of The Nutcracker, was published by Android Press. Her short fiction can be found in magazines such as Tractor Beam and Baubles From Bones, and in anthologies such as Solar Flare: Solarpunk Stories, Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology, and Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories in Extreme Futures. As an editor, she curated the Glass and Gardens solarpunk anthologies, co-edited the anthologies Multispecies Cities and Solarpunk Creatures, and served as a story reviewer for Grist’s Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction contest. Find her on Bluesky or Mastodon, or visit her website.
- T. K. Rex (they/she) is a science fiction and fantasy author from the western states, whose short stories and poems can be read in roughly forty publications, including Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice, Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future, and their forthcoming climate fiction collection, The Wildcraft Drones (2026, Stelliform Press). They’re an alumni of the Clarion writers workshop, a twenty-year denizen of San Francisco, and a friendly acquaintance of spiders. T. K.’s stories, socials, and newsletter can be found here.
- Danielle Arostegui is a climate policy wonk with a passion for telling stories about how we can build a better world in the face of climate change. Danielle lives in the magical mountains of Appalachia with her husband and two black cats who have an unfortunate habit of chewing on her lampshades. When not writing, you can find her converting her one-acre property into a thriving food forest and wildlife refuge, hunting for vintage threads in one of Asheville’s many thrift stores, or agitating for the solarpunk revolution on Bluesky at @daniellearostegui.bsky.social. Find more by Danielle at her website.
- BrightFlame (she/they) writes, teaches, and makes magic towards a just, regenerative world. In her debut novel The Working, a modern coven must thwart a looming eco-cataclysm and find the key to the bright futures we need. Her climate fiction is featured in Solarpunk Creatures, Bioluminescent, and Solarpunk Magazine. She’s a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association and the Climate Fiction Writers League. Her globally acclaimed workshops for magical and mainstream audiences foster interconnection and resilience, and help us expand our notion of what is possible. She co-founded the Center for Sustainable Futures at Columbia University that features her workshops and nonfiction. She lives on Lenape territory (Turtle Island/U.S.) with a human, a forest, a labyrinth, the Fae, bees, turtles, fungi, rocks, and many other nonhumans. Visit her website for musings, doodles, workshops, and more.
- Ana Sun (pronounced “Soon”) writes from the edge of an ancient town in the south-east of England. She spent her childhood in Malaysian Borneo and grew up living on islands. Her solarpunk short fiction has earned her an inaugural Utopia Award nomination and has been selected for The Best of British Science Fiction. In 2024, her work placed second runner-up for The Mo Siewcharran Prize. In an alternate universe, she might have been a musician, an anthropologist—or a botanist obsessed with edible flowers. Visit her website.
