A lovely story: “Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics”
I’m reading a Year’s Best anthology, and just read and loved a 12,000-word story called “Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics,” by Jess Barber and Sara Saab, published in Clarkesworld in 2017.
I found it a gorgeous depiction of a complicated relationship, and a gorgeous depiction of people working on healing an environmentally broken world. It made me cry, in a good way.
I’ve been liking quite a bit of the solarpunk that I’ve read in the past couple of years. As with a lot of other solarpunk, this story doesn’t try to address all of the world’s problems; its focus is on environmental issues, and it portrays a future world that’s implausibly unified in its general agreement about what the world should be and how to get there. As with a lot of other solarpunk, it’s aspirational and hopeful, which may not be what a lot of you are looking for right now; and of course everyone has different tastes. So I’m not saying everyone would like this.
But I tend to feel that we need both aspirational fiction that shows how the world could be, and realistic fiction that shows how the world is. And at this particular moment, this particular story worked really well for me.
