A review of Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures

Reviewed by Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn has 23 chapters with a preface, introduction, and afterword. The book started its life as a part of The Climate Action Almanac. “The book grew out of the Climate Imagination Fellowship, started at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination in 2021” (2026:ix). In its preface, the book announces that it foregrounds hopeful stories about climate imagination. The dominant climate narrative, it argues, is full of doom stories, which leave people feeling ‘hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned’ (Eschrich and Finn 2025: ix). This stand echoes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:Is There No Alternative?(2014). For Fisher, fear and cynicism do not inspire bold thinking; they form a bedrock of conformity and conservatism that hampers action and change. For Fisher, hopefulness changes the situation from one in which nothing can happen to one that allows for the actualisation of possibilities. Fisher’s stand can be traced to a theorist such as Fredric Jameson (2005), and further back, to Thomas More, the first known utopian novelist.

However, the word ‘utopia’ was hardly mentioned in the introduction or the preface framing Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Future, and it appears sparingly throughout the collection. This may be intended or unintended. However, there could be a good reason why the book was framed this way. Utopia has a bad reputation. An early criticism of it could be seen from Karl Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party published in 1848. Marx accuses utopia of lacking materialism. More recently, Karl Popper (1945) links the concept of utopia to totalitarianism. As Julien Kloeg notes, ‘Utopianism’s bad reputation is partly due to its association with the attempt to realize communism in the Soviet’ as such it is considered ‘politically dangerous’ (2016: 451). Current criticism on Utopia is such that were directed to hopeful climate narrative such as carbon removal technology. Matt Simon (2023:online) argues that “carbon removal might even encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels, if countries can say they’re sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to offset their emissions” they could end up burning more fossil fuels instead of looking for clean energy. This, in turn, sustains the capitalist structure that privileges fossil fuel consumption. Perhaps these criticisms have led the collection to shy away from exploring the book’s connection to utopian unconsciousness, even though the book draws heavily from this tradition. Unconscious here “consists of those repressed impulses, desires, drives, wishes… that the conscious mind does not care to acknowledge” (Mark Bould 2021:15). Utopian unconsciousness is defined here as those hidden utopian ideological impulses of a text.

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures is a mixed bag of memoirs, interviews, scholarly articles, and fiction. This disparity in the creative expressions employed by the authors in the book, luckily, does not result in a disjointed book. I think there is something symbolic about it, reflected in both the form and the content of the collection, namely: that the book champions diversity. Diversity in its form allows it to incorporate different styles of artistic expression under the umbrella of a single edited volume. This, in a way, is a stand it takes outside the totalitarian accusation levelled against the utopian unconscious in which plurality of forms, ambitions and aspirations is suppressed under the so-called singularity of purpose termed the ‘common good.’ A character in “City of Choice” by Gu Shi, translated by Ken Liu, a story within this anthology being reviewed here shares this sentiment thus ‘Should I really go forward? All choices come with costs. If the cost is the lives of those who are powerless, is it right to sacrifice them in the name of some greater “good”? (113). “City of Choice” is a type of story you read and reread, and it makes you angry and happy and angry again because life is messy and every decision comes with a cost, including the decision to freedom.

It is not only the style of the book that is diverse; the contributors come from different localities of the globe: “China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, the United States, and more” (Eschrich and Finn 2025:ix) to articulate different climate challenges of what is being done, what could be done, and the potential ‘becomings’ of climatic futures. A lot of the climatic ‘becomings’ shared by a good number of the authors in the collection are akin to what Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Jade Taylor call ‘co-futurism.’ Taylor defines it as a future that is interconnected and overlaps, also recognising “ethnic specific and regional specific futurisms” (2024: 1). Taylor’s definition is not specific to climate futurism; the collection, which focuses on climate, is part of futurism in general.

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Bittersweet Utopias: An interview with Kellynn Wee

We were lucky enough to chat with Kellynn Wee, researcher and designer of tabletop roleplaying games, about solarpunk, utopia, memory, narrative and chance, the TTRPG scene in Singapore, and much more.

Hi Kellynn. Why don’t you start by introducing yourself?

Sure, my name is Kellynn Wee, and I’m currently a PhD candidate at UCL. I’ve been looking at play communities in Singapore, and how players relate to fantasy and speculative worldbuilding in tabletop roleplaying games. I have a background in anthropology, so I’m interested in the social relationships and meanings that emerge from these play communities – in how games can become sites to explore different relationships and identities, and how games allow us to deal with different forms of value, different approaches to uncertainty, or new ways of imagining the self. I’ve also been working on a climate futures game, Move Quietly and Tend Things, which I describe as a bittersweet utopia.

This research involves a lot of playing games, right?

Oh for sure. I’ve never played so many games in my life! I recently calculated and it was nearly 250 games in about twenty months of ethnography, which should kill my passion for games, but somehow hasn’t. And I think that’s a good sign.

Wow! Has the play sometimes felt like work?

It’s a good question. There are always interesting tensions between play and work, right? Have you read Play Money by Julian Dibbell? It’s about quitting his day job and becoming a full-time loot farmer …

No, but that sounds kind of up my street.

Well, there were definitely games that felt like drudgery. I think it’s because of the volume of games I played. Some games just didn’t spark. It might be the dynamics of the players at the table, the kind of energy people are bringing to it. Roleplaying games are so dependent on the particular constellation of individuals at that point in time.

Right.

But even when they don’t quite spark, it’s not exactly like work. I mean, I still had fun!

That’s good! I guess ‘work’ and ‘play’ is one wobbly binary, and then ‘work’ and ‘fun’ is another wobbly binary? There is some interesting writing by Bo Ruberg about the variety of emotions associated with play — fun is an important one, but it’s not the only one.

Sure.

You are researching the games and the players and the communities. But can I ask about games themselves as research tools? I’m wondering how games and play have been used in anthropological research historically, and whether you see potential for using them in new ways in the future.

Well, it’s pretty common for games to be pedagogical tools, right? They’re ways to place students into an anthropological frame of mind. I know that games have been successfully used to reframe research findings beyond textual outputs. For instance, I recently attended a talk by Andrea Pia, who designed a game for students to explore the topic of Chinese rural migration. They transformed their research into an interactive digital narrative where you’d make choices for a migrant character to proceed through the world, and it used photos, videos, quotes and characters that derived from Pia’s fieldwork.

That sounds interesting.

Yes, it was really interesting. Using games as research methodologies though? Maybe that’s something that hasn’t been explored all that much, or at least it’s something I’ve yet to fully grasp myself. I wonder why not though, right? Playing, especially role-playing, and ethnography share many principles. The first thing that comes to mind is the art of asking questions well. There’s this act of iteration, of only understanding whether a method works by doing it, and then coming back to ask what sort of tools or approaches you need to get to an understanding that you want. There’s the act of making the implicit explicit, of paying attention to what is unsaid as much as what is said. There’s the consideration of different relationships, different identities, how people are going to come together and interact in the same space. There’s this element of sharing sensorial or bodily space.

These are all aspects that anthropologists pay attention to. And so do tabletop roleplayers. A roleplaying game can also make aspects of relationships and elements of social currency visible. I also think games can act almost like a kind of meta-reality tool. While anthropologists and other social scientists often act on the principle of making the familiar strange when thinking about their work, I think games can often carry out the opposite act of making the strange familiar–exploring peculiar worlds and peculiar viewpoints by using everyday tools that help us frame our capacity for action regardless of the circumstances. So yes, many game practices resemble ethnographic practices and ethnographic thinking. It’s exciting to think what might be done with that, but it’s still a question I’m exploring.

Your answer is making me think of this interview as a very rules-lite roleplaying game.

Should I roll some dice?

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