The future of the ecological crisis in young people’s climate fiction

This article summarizes the ecocritical debate around the idea of the ecological crisis as a “crisis of the imagination”, emphasizing how certain literary forms struggle to adequately represent its scale and complexity. While genres like science fiction and works from peripheral traditions offer useful alternatives, much remains to be understood about how such narratives actively shape social imaginaries. The article also provides a brief introduction to the project “Addressing Climate Anxiety Using Flash Fiction in the Classroom”, which involves young people in writing climate fiction. The resulting stories often reflect dystopian tropes and a nostalgic view on the present, proving how challenging it still is to imagine real alternatives to our fossil-fueled reality.