In 2023 I spent almost half the year living in Northern Sweden, working on a project at Luleå University of Technology. The project involved a series of narrative hack-a-thons, which then inspired four climate fiction stories about the future of energy in the region. Soon there will be a full book, which will include nonfiction companion pieces, but as of now you can read them (and see the lovely illustrations by Daniel Bjerneholt) on the Luleå University of Technology (LTU) website here.
Here’s a quick breakdown of each story, with the corresponding illustration and a short excerpt:
Windy City
“Windy City” is set in a bustling and prosperous far north metropolis, where wooden skyscrapers look out on giant wind turbines that are also significant tourist attractions. The story is a summertime caper about two moms trying to game a highly financialized energy system — and getting caught up with a rowdy separatist movement as a result!
Way the Bothnians figured, they’d built the huge wind parks and the next gen hydroelectric plants, not to mention the green steel used in the construction. Why should Stockholm suddenly get to claim the fruits of their labor—especially when (and this was a popular grumble) the same politicians now calling for an emergency transmission blitz had spent years blocking a high speed rail connection between Skelluleå and the south? Why countenance a fresh round of extraction, when they could instead join forces and cultures with their comrades across the water, who had worked with them to pull the continent—indeed, the world—out of the climate death spiral? Didn’t the more robust grid connections laterally to Norway and Finland mean something? A shared destiny perhaps?
The Wild Tour
“The Wild Tour” has the north returning to its traditional role as a landscape of extraction to benefit Stockholm and the rest of southern Sweden — while also returning land to the long-marginalized indigenous Sami people. Fall-winter is setting in, and a bloody animal encounter beneath cable-tethered turbine balloons leaves a loner in the debt of some itinerate turbine workers who want to see the real, post-rewilding north.
It always took Anders a minute to adjust his forest eyes to the scale and weirdness of a tetherpark, and so he noticed too late the round, mottled forms rapidly closing on him. They came out from behind one of the anchor blocks, four of them, and rushed with surprising loping speed for his legs, sharp teeth eagerly bared, faces a picture of kawaii cuteness. They only came up to his knee, but after the long summer feeding season they had packed on fat. Each one would easily bowl him over, crush him under its soft, cuddly belly.
The Stillout
“The Stillout” features a small, wind-powered village trying to maintain its energy reserves through an extended windless calm in deep winter. It’s a story of community tensions, resilience, and solidarity during a different kind of ‘climate event.’
Astrid thought about that for a while, the fog of her breath hanging in the still air. “I don’t think so,” she said eventually. “The way my aunt put it, there’s sky energy and earth energy. Sky energy—wind and sun—can be fickle and inconsistent, but it’s clean and lasts forever, if we’re willing to work with it, to adjust ourselves a bit to the rhythms and moods of the world. Earth energy, on the other hand—those fuels we dig out of the ground—it bends to our will, making itself terribly convenient, and then bends us to its will. It comes with a terrible cost, one that must be paid for generations. I think I can take a couple weeks of inconvenience, if it means not leaving a mess for my grandchildren.”
Spring Fires Day
“Spring Fires Day” explores a beautiful, greenhouse-covered city celebrating the coming of spring with the traditional moving of solar panels back onto roofs. However, political and familial tensions complicate this community ritual, as future generations start to have their own ideas about the environment and the energy transition.
There was a moment then, when Hugo’s grip slipped, perhaps still a bit soapy, and Max, who was standing well back, envisioned the panel crashing to the ground. In that moment, Max thought of the whole life cycle of a panel, the materials from the mines, the manufacturing process, the supply chain, the vast dumps in China and America where mountains of broken and obsolete panels were discarded, which his teacher had shown them in class. And yet, despite all that, the panels produced more energy than they consumed, powering Max’s school tablet, his reading lamp, their oven and fridge, flowing into the city’s grid to charge buses and bicycles and everything, all things they needed. In that moment, it seemed too impossible and overwhelming that this should be how the world worked. Not just for solar panels but for shoes and coats and electronics and batteries and toys and everything. Everything made and thrown away, and no matter how much they reused and recycled still the mines would get deeper. How could the world live with this? And what other way to live could there possibly be?
These stories grew out of a series of “narrative hack-a-thons” about the future of the energy transition in northern Sweden. Northern cities like Luleå and Skellefteå have been embracing green industry and anticipating significant energy system and social changes as a result. People there are thoughtfully considering how to navigate those changes, including the influx of people they may bring. It’s a chance to reimagine what communities in the north look like and what the region’s relationship should be to the rest of Sweden.
These narrative hack-a-thons brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines, utility and municipal policymakers, students, and me. The explicit goal was to brainstorm possible future scenarios for the energy system and science fiction stories that could illuminate and complicate those scenarios. Many thanks to our partners and funders from the Arctic Center for Energy, Research Institutes of Sweden, Vinnova (the Swedish innovation agency), and of course LTU.
This is a methodology we largely based on similar projects I worked with the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, which used such narrative hack-a-thons to produce the excellent solar futures books The Weight of Light and Cities of Light. The dimensions we used to guide our scenarios were the same ones used for the Weight of Light project: size of energy system units (big or small) and setting (urban or rural). However, our Sweden project did work slightly differently. Instead of having one workshop with four teams (each with a sci-fi writer that would write their own story), we had four workshops, each one with a unique set of participants. The only constants were myself and my LTU colleague/project mastermind Anna Krook-Riekkola, a brilliant energy systems modeler who made this whole thing happen.
We hoped that by having a single author (me) as a tentpole, we could make the stories more connected and comparative than the ones in the CSI books, which, while all pretty brilliant, don’t feel that much like diverging scenarios. We were shooting for a middle ground between those books and the highly comparative and connected scenarios stories in my book Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures.
I think we somewhat succeeded in this, though we are still triangulating the perfect sweet spot. While the workshops were very generative, spreading them out over time and changing up the participants made it hard to do something as ambitious as create shared characters across the scenarios, the way I did in Storm. And the ideas that came out of the workshops had their own momentum that didn’t always fit nicely into a comparative framework. Also, for my own part, I found it hard to redo what I had done in my book, and instead looked for new creative and intellectual hooks to focus my attention on.
These four stories are all, to some extent, “predicting the traffic jam” stories. They look at the onrushing energy transition and imagine some possible complications in how we might feel once it’s through. There’s a certain melancholy to them. This was partly how I was feeling last year, coming out of the pandemic, moving across the planet to a new country, which wasn’t easy. It was also partly, I think, something I picked up on in Swedish culture and politics. I mean, check out this wild report from Kairos Futures, a consulting and research company I had the pleasure to visit with while in Stockholm: “Swedes, Daily Life, and the Darkness of Meaninglessness.” Oof!
Despite this, I personally think these stories are quite optimistic. In all of them, the energy transition is successfully accomplished, an enormous achievement. Their point is not that the energy transition is bad or should be avoided, a car that we would be better off never inventing. Their point is that we should remember that no transition is the end of history, that there will be new debates to argue over, always, in the decades and centuries to come, and that future generations will make up their own minds about the world they inherit.
Andrew Dana Hudson 