By Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Renan Bernardo is a Nebula finalist author of science fiction and fantasy from Brazil. His fiction appeared in Reactor/Tor.com, Apex Magazine, Podcastle, Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Samovar, Solarpunk Magazine, 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. His fiction has also appeared in multiple languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. He can be found at Twitter (@RenanBernardo), BlueSky (@renanbernardo.bsky.social) and his website: www.renanbernardo.com
Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, BSFA Finalist), and editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of Worlds of IF magazine & the soon to be relaunched Galaxy magazine. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/
JPG – In many of your stories you juxtapose the past with the present, layering multiple times together, tell us about using this narrative device, and how you use it for emotional effect?
RB – Layering past and present together without necessarily resorting to flashbacks is an excellent device to make the reader flow along with the main character’s feelings without breaking the pace of the story. I believe the past has a lot of things to say. Our past shapes who we are, so it always adds an interesting layer to my stories. Many answers to the present and the future are in the past. I believe that you were thinking of “Soil of Our Home, Storm of Our Lives” when you thought about that question. In this story, there are three timelines layered separately: past, present, future, each with different things to say about the characters, different emotional cores to introduce that end up fusing in the end. The challenge is always to weave them all together, so they don’t feel detached from each other, but I like to believe that I achieved it in this particular story.
JPG – Your stories often present utopias, but as you mention in your forwards, one person’s utopia can be another person’s dystopia. Can you speak about this concept and why cultures have a difficult time envisioning positive futures that include everyone?
RB – There are two stories in the collection that introduce this concept: “Anticipation of Hollowness” and “To Remember the Poison.” In “Anticipation of Hollowness,” there’s a sustainable city where everything seems perfect but the city is extremely gentrified and no one from lower or middle class is able to live in it anymore. And “To Remember the Poison” is an extreme version of it: a society based on justice, sustainability, and equality that got so detached from the rest of the world that it became an exclusive haven closed to the world. And though its focus is on education and expanding their “green” world, its inhabitants tend to follow a line of thought not so different from what billionaires imagine with their projects of selective bunkers or space stations. And given the concentration of resources and knowledge of Verdoá (the city in the story), it becomes a colonizing power in the region.
Both stories are novelettes that show what happens when you create something good that doesn’t consider everyone. I think this is very common in the world, sadly. Humans are capable of building lots of great things and devising great solutions for crises, but it’s often hard to see the whole. Even if you take prejudice, hate, and conflicts out of the equation, it’s quite a challenge to devise a futuristic technology/city/idea and at the same time be aware of all its implications. But whenever you can’t consider the whole, or at least include everyone gradually in your solutions, then it’s incomplete.
JPG – Tell us about your take on the genre of solarpunk, and what drew you to writing it?
RB – When I write solarpunk, I want to introduce the point of view of the Global South, particularly Brazil. I believe writers from the Global South have a lot to say regarding solarpunk and the climate crisis because our point of view tends to be different from those from “developed” countries. We have a history of being excluded and that means our stories (all meanings of the word) are less seen throughout the world. Brazil has an important story with climate and we’re facing some harsh consequences of the climate crisis right now. Not only that, but Brazil is a pioneer of solarpunk with the anthology Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World (Worldweaver Press). And though this anthology has some outdated views about solarpunk, it was an important mark in the genre. Long story short, my intention with the genre is bringing a Brazilian view on solarpunk to a wider audience.
JPG – What role do you think fiction and art can play in preventing and repairing issues brought about by climate change?
RB – First, awareness and education. I believe that through fiction and art you can see things you wouldn’t see on your own. This is true for dystopias and this is true for solarpunk. Science fiction was always the realm of ideas. We had tons of stories in the past that inspired scientists and inventors, so it’s the right place to brew those kinds of solutions as well. Even if the story isn’t hard on science, if it gives someone hope and cheers someone up in a time of crisis, then it has already worked.
JPG – Many of your stories feature technological innovations in repairing nature, what role do you think tech will play in addressing the environmental issue we all face, and do you think it is safe to look to tech to repair the very issues it has caused us?
RB – I’m kind of skeptical. Looking at generative AIs, for instance, or social networking, we kind of see excellent innovations used for the bad. In our current economic system, everyone is worried about making a lot of money very fast, so that tends to bend innovative solutions to these purposes. There’s hope with some regulation and a shift in ways of thinking, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover so we can focus our tech in repairing part of the environmental crisis and trying to prevent the worst in the future. In my stories, I also like to show these shifts in the ways of thinking. People might still be worried about making money, but when a lot of people already have what to eat and where to live, it becomes easier to focus on better solutions for everyone.
JPG – Many of your stories feature elderly characters, and in your forward you mention this being important to you. Why do you think that the elderly are often excluded from fiction, and why do you find their inclusion important?
RB – The young, particularly young men, had always been considered the face of triumph. We see that a lot, perhaps even more in American fiction. And it influences the whole world. Particularly in science fiction, we can see that since the pulp magazines of the 20s, then when we move to modern movies, it’s the same. There’s almost always someone between 20 and 50 years old saving the world. So fiction always had a tendency of focusing on youth. It’s where the action and energy is. The elderly are excluded from society in a lot of different ways, and that is just one of them. So that’s one of the reasons why I think including elderly protagonists in my stories is important. I think they have stories to tell and it opens a lot of unexplored possibilities. How can a character with limited mobility save their community? How can a retired professor go on an adventure? In my collection, you’ll see them mainly in “When It’s Time to Harvest” and “The River That Passed Through My Life.”
JPG – As a Brazilian author, what challenges do you face when writing for English language markets?
RB – There’s the language, of course, since I’m not a native speaker. But there’s also some barriers that I think different kinds of minorities face in different forms. Perhaps my story isn’t American enough, or there’s a character doing something that the reader isn’t used to. Or my story’s structure or themes might not fall into the categories that are expected by English language markets. You have to make your story comprehensible on a narrative level without removing its roots. As the author Gunnar de Winter mentioned in a recent article he published at the SFWA blog: “we’re always worrying about having our voice misunderstood”. The thing that sometimes hurts is that to some readers it’s easier to understand an alien culture than a real culture in our own world.
JPG – Sometimes you write in English, and some of the stories in the collection are translated from Portuguese, do you find that any of the emotional effect is lost when translating from one language to another?
RB – There’s actually one story translated from Portuguese in the collection. The other ones were written in English. I don’t find anything is lost with translation. I think people see translations with a sort of prejudice, but a good translation can be as excellent as the original source. We’ve been consuming mostly translated fiction in Brazil, and I think this is a reality opposed to what happens in the US. Since our markets are flooded with American/English authors, Brazilians do read mostly translated works. My own Nebula-finalist story is a translation and I don’t think it has lost anything in it. I believe lots of people would agree. Of course, it helps that I’m both the author and translator. My take on it is that I think more people should read translations. There’s a whole world of wonderful stories out there. Rachel Cordasco does excellent work cataloguing and shouting about translated works, and I think everyone should be following her lead on that.
JPG – You are a Nebula finalist this year, what has that experience been like for you?
RB – It has been unbelievable and amazing at the same time. I didn’t expect it to happen. It’s a validation we all need sometimes, so it has been a very pleasant experience. I never imagined myself to figure besides the writers I read and admire so much like Naomi Kritzer, Ai Jiang, Wole Talabi, P.A. Cornell, and so on.
JPG – What are you currently working on, and what’s coming up next for you?
RB – I’m writing a new novella right now, but I have a dark SF novella coming from Dark Matter Ink next year called “Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle”. I also recently had stories out in Reactor/Tor.com, Worlds of If, Apex Magazine, and Diabolical Plots.
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