A live, virtual conference celebrating climate fiction and providing networking and educational space for climate fiction authors, readers, editors, and publishers.
#CliFiCon23 | October 7-8, 2023
Registration is now available through the official CliFi Con website.
The 2022 Climate Fiction Conference
2022 Schedule
2022 Registration and Admission
Registration
Registration is $75 per person for full participant access to the conference and the awards ceremony.
Registration is $15 per person for the Utopia Awards Ceremony only without conference access.
The 2022 Utopia Awards
The Utopia Award Ceremony will take place on October 1, 2022, from 5:00 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. EST. Anyone who attends the conference is welcome and encouraged to also attend the award ceremony.
The Award Ceremony will kick off at 5:00 p.m. with an readings by author and poet Marisca Pichette, as well as genre and demographic based networking rooms where conference participants and award ceremony attendees can bounce around and hang out, relax, and network for the hour leading up to the award ceremony. The ceremony itself will begin at 6:00 p.m. EST and will be over by 7:00 p.m. EST at the latest.
Award Nominations
Nominations for the first annual Utopia Awards will be open to works published in 2021 that exemplify hopeful, utopian climate fiction.
Criteria
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Works nominated for a Utopia Award must have been published during 2021.
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Nominated works must have been published by traditional publishers, small independent publishers, or by semi-pro or professional climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy magazines, as defined by the SFWA. At this time, we do not have the capacity to consider self-published work.
In addition, nominated works will tend to have some if not all of the following focuses:
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Hopeful: uplifting, leaves the reader with a sense of inspiration, aspiration, and optimism
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Utopian: Climate fiction (fiction with a focus on climate change themes, setting, and plot elements), science fiction, or fantasy content and themes that don't end in apocalypse or dystopia, but rather envision worlds in which humanity, technology, and nature coexist in harmony rather than in conflict; and/or depict future communities that are actively struggling to build a just and equitable utopian world, even if they haven't yet fully reached that goal.
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Solutions: works with a focus in particular on solutions to climate change and the effects of climate change on the planet, ecosystems, and communities. But also works that focus on providing solutions to other global social problems and envision futures with new, democratic, participatory, and collaborative political and economic systems.
Conference Panelists, Moderators, and Facilitators
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Workshops
Personification and Nature as Character
Learn the tools to increase the richness and meaning of your story through place and setting. Place is best described as a character, defining and interacting with all other characters related to the theme. Learning to integrate setting and place with plot, theme, and character will provide story depth. It will also ground the reader in context and meaning. All too often settings are either too vague or not enmeshed in story. This workshop uses examples from great literature to demonstrate how place is used to draw readers into story through metaphor, sensual description, integration and interaction with character and plot.
The workshop includes time for a short writing exercise for key elements of place integration in
storytelling. The workshop cites and is based largely on Nina Munteanu's writing textbook, The Ecology of
Story: World as Character.
Solarpunk Futures: A Workshop
for Utopian Remembrance
This participatory session engages participants in a process of visionary social storytelling around the collective struggle required to win our utopia — utilizing the artist's tabletop game, Solarpunk Futures. The game employs backcasting in a “Festival of Remembrance”, whereby Assemblies for the Future (groups of 1-8 players) play for 40 minutes from the perspective of a future utopia in which they collectively “remember” how their Ancestors utilized Tools and Values to overcome a real-world Challenge. Assemblies will report back on the form of their utopian scenarios, insights gained along the way, and how their experiences might inform their present-day actions.
Through the game, players engage in the serious yet joyful play of dialogue on the nature of the Challenges we face (e.g. Hunger, Water Crisis, Police Violence), the role of individual Ancestors, the constraints and opportunities presented by different Tools, the forces of opposition the Ancestors had to face, the ways different Ancestor roles, Values, and Tools emergently interweave, and more. Players embody positions of historical consequence while — via Tool cards featuring quotes from figures such as Rosa Luxembourg, Fred Hampton, Murray Bookchin, and Ursula K. LeGuin among many others — engaging with contemporary and historical revolutionary concepts from our global legacy of freedom.
Solarpunk Poetry Workshop
In recent years, solarpunk, a new movement, has emerged that envisions a free and egalitarian world with a focus on craftsmanship, community, and technology powered by renewable energy. By looking toward a brighter future while deliberately subverting the systems that keep that brighter future from coming to fruition, solarpunk stands as both a reaction to the nihilism of mainstream sci-fi and a solution to a lot of the problems we face in the world.
As the poetry editor of Solarpunk Magazine, one of the preeminent outlets of the solarpunk movement, I would like to introduce the emerging subgenre of solarpunk poetry in my first workshop at CliFi Con 2022. In one hour, the workshop will explain what solarpunk is and how it is a separate genre from cli-fi, hopepunk, and the like, then proceed to dissect the content, themes, and aims of solarpunk poetry using poems published recently that exemplify the genre.
Our Sponsors
Our Producers
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Android Press |
Executive Producer
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Producer
Associate
Producer
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Associate
Producer
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If your organization, publishing house, or publication would like information on sponsoring the 2022 Utopia Awards & Climate Fiction Convention, please email info@android-press.com with the subject line "CliFiCon Sponsor Info."