Defying Futility: The Fairhaven Stories

The standalone companion volume to the award-winning Fairhaven: A Novel of Climate Optimism.

Is disaster inevitable?

Defying Futility – The Fairhaven Stories offers thirteen stories by the authors of the award-winning climate fiction Fairhaven – A Novel of Climate Optimism that offer a definitive answer to this question, with a range of creative, heartwarming tales that showcase how real disasters in history might have gone differently. 

Instead of a “Black Mirror” future, the stories are a “Green Mirror” alternative. Defying Futility and Fairhaven are perfect for readers of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future and Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. 

How could the passengers on the Titanic be saved? Could the devastation of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake have been mitigated? What could have prevented the industrial disasters in Flixborough and Chernobyl – and how might that have changed our history?

Defying Futility covers an ambitious range of locations, situations, and cultures spanning nearly a century. They parallel the common disaster we face today: climate change. The various methods used to adapt to, prevent, or mitigate the impact of the disasters are designed to offer inspiration to readers who are eager to address the global climate crisis. These stories can help address climate anxiety both for adults and young adults.

The stories of Defying Futility are “counterfactual” or “alternate history”; in real life, these calamities actually happened, with tragic results. While we can’t change history, we can envision a situation where the impact of a disaster was reduced, or even prevented entirely – and we can envision a collective future where we have done the same.