Introduction
This article explores multispecies climate fiction (cli-fi) as a creative mode of inquiry that speculates-with other-than-humans. I propose that multispecies cli-fi is a branch of climate fiction that specifically addresses the relationality between human and other-than-human species against the backdrop of climate change and speculative climate futures (Heise, Reference Heise2016). In this article, I explore multispecies cli-fi through the writing of a multispecies cli-fi story based on the results of a recent research project. To explore cli-fi’s potential in research, I position multispecies cli-fi within research-creation, a transdisciplinary praxis that combines scholarly investigation with artistic expression (Manning, Reference Manning and Vannini2015, Reference Manning, Coling and Sachsenmaier2016; Truman, Reference Truman2022; Loveless, Reference Loveless2019).
De Freitas and Truman (Reference de Freitas and Truman2020) and Knight (Reference Knight2023), among others, have argued that speculative fiction as a mode of creative inquiry generates alternative epistemologies about climate change, allowing one to engage with its complexities while envisioning new possibilities. Engaging with or creating such speculative fictions can provide deeper emotional connections to climate realities, which are often missing in climate education. As McKenzie, Henderson, and Nxumalo (Reference McKenzie, Henderson and Nxumalo2023) argue, climate change education typically centres scientific narratives, sidelining issues of justice and the psychosocial dimensions of climate change. Yet, these aspects are crucial for grasping the full scope and impacts of climate change and for cultivating more affective and relational ways of understanding it. Speculative thinking and making practices make possible such affective and relational readings of climate, for instance, by prompting reflection on how we exist in relation to a climate-changing world and by questioning dominant values, assumptions and knowledge structures through the exploration of alternative possibilities (Donnelly Hall, Reference Donnelly Hall2015).
Building on these insights, I recently conducted a participatory research project titled the Multispecies City Lab in which speculative fiction was used to tell different kinds of stories of climate change in the city. The project sought to re-imagine urban geographies, which are generally depicted as densely populated environments that privilege productivity, consumption and human habitation (Houston et al., Reference Houston, Hillier, MacCallum, Steele and Byrne2018; Edwards & Pettersen, Reference Edwards and Pettersen2023). This human-centric organisation of cities has resulted in a range of challenges for other-than-human species inhabiting these spaces: from being haunted by newly introduced species and enduring extreme weather events linked to climate change, to being displaced due to new developments and pushed into hidden spaces as pests (Knight, Reference Knight2023; Van Dooren & Rose, Reference Van Dooren and Rose2012). Yet, other-than-human inhabitants have endured and adapted to these new environments; they have remained. The city is and has always been a multispecies space, even though anthropocentric discourses and understandings of the city suggest otherwise (Van Dooren & Rose, Reference Van Dooren and Rose2012). Ursula K. Le Guin proposes that “one way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as ‘natural resources’ is to class them as fellow beings — kinfolk” (M16). Building on Le Guin’s suggestion, the Multispecies City Lab project explored how to transcend dominant discourses of the city as strictly human. Through speculating-with other-than-humans, the project focused on re-imagining urban geographies as relational spaces where humans and other-than-humans exist as “fellow beings” in times of climate change. This shift in perspective invites new ways of thinking about the city as a multispecies ecology.
With this new perspective in mind, the Multispecies City Lab project reimagined three Australian cities — Magandjin/Brisbane, Narrm/Melbourne and Boorloo/Perth — as relational sites for multispecies living amid the challenges of climate change. The project involved three workshops, one in each city, in which participants were invited to re-imagine their respective urban environments. More specifically, participants envisioned human and other-than-human collaborations in times of climate change through the creation of visual artworks (i.e. drawings, paintings, collages, etc.) and fictional stories. These co-created artworks, both visual and textual, constitute multispecies cli-fi as they are situated in climate-changing cities and societies and foreground multispecies entanglements. The workshops encouraged participants to engage with climate change and related challenges differently, inviting them to imagine and narrate new ways of relating to other-than-humans. Van Dooren and Rose (Reference Van Dooren and Rose2012) emphasise the value of multispecies storying, and “its ability to provide new perspectives on the world, and in so doing to draw us into deeper and more demanding accountabilities for nonhuman others” (1–2). The multispecies-focused imaginaries created during the workshops generated emotional understandings of how other-than-humans are shaped and affected by climate disruptions, highlighting the complex relationalities between humans and other-than-humans.
The workshops began with a city walk during which participants wandered through the urban environment, encouraged to become attuned to the material and environmental conditions of the urban space. During the walk, participants imagined how humans and other-than-humans could collaborate to address specific climate challenges. Through walking in the urban environment, we invited other-than-humans such as ibises, trees, rivers, bees, mangroves and others into the speculative process. The imaginaries that emerged during the city walk were then translated into visual artworks (i.e. drawings, collages, paintings and so on). As part of the art-making process, participants were prompted to deepen their speculative ideas by thinking through issues of justice and relationality (e.g. Who are the human and other-than-human stakeholders in this speculation? Who benefits? Who is disadvantaged? What are the relational dynamics between humans and other-than-humans?). Following the art-making process, participants wrote fiction stories about their speculation, which included thick descriptions of sounds, smells, emotions, shapes, textures and colours. We ended the workshops with a storytelling session in which each group read their story aloud. This process unfolded in Magandjin/Brisbane with a group of artists, Narrm/Melbourne with a group of people living in the city, and Boorloo/Perth with a group of scholars, bringing together a total of 55 (human) participants and resulting in the co-creation of 15 multispecies imaginaries.
This article presents a continuation of participants’ imaginaries created during the Multispecies City Lab workshops. To do so, I use speculative fiction as a methodological tool to further engage with and think through participants’ creative outputs, resulting in the multispecies cli-fi story Canopy of the Hidden Alley. Written in the aftermath of the project, the story was not a pre-determined outcome. Rather, the idea emerged organically during the research process as it became apparent that participants’ imaginaries across different urban contexts gravitated around shared themes and concerns, while involving a variety of other-than-humans and climate challenges. Bringing those imaginaries together in a fiction story enabled a different, more layered and entangled engagement with the research “data.” It allowed me to delve deeper into and internalise participants’ contributions, letting them resonate with my own imagination; become attuned to the underlying values and assumptions embedded in the imaginaries, which were not obvious at first; and weave imaginaries together to explore tensions and relationships, rather than reducing them to simplified categories of data.
In this context, the story Canopy of the Hidden Alley is not a representation of the project’s findings, but a creative continuation. It is a speculative exploration that embraces the multiplicity and complexity of the imaginative thinking and making process in the Multispecies City Labs. Nor does the story offer a definitive claim about what multispecies cli-fi should be. Instead, it gestures toward what multispecies cli-fi could encompass, and more importantly, how it can function as a methodological tool for speculating-with and theorising-with ideas and propositions that emerge in research. The creative process of writing the story both shaped and was shaped by my engagement with — or “analysis” of — the findings from the Multispecies City Labs. In this way, research and creation evolved together, continually informing one another (Chapman & Sawchuk, Reference Chapman and Sawchuk2012). The following section provides a methodological discussion of speculative fiction and research-creation, as well as a theoretical conceptualisation of what it means to speculate-with other-than-humans in climate fiction. These explorations provide context for the multispecies cli-fi story Canopy of the Hidden Alley, which is then presented and discussed. The article concludes by reflecting on the potentiality of multispecies cli-fi as a critical and creative mode of inquiry.
Speculative fiction as research-creation
In exploring multispecies cli-fi as a methodological tool in research, I build on the field of research-creation where artistic practice and scholarly inquiry are combined (Loveless, Reference Loveless2019; Truman, Reference Truman2022; Manning, Reference Manning and Vannini2015, Reference Manning, Coling and Sachsenmaier2016). As a process-oriented and experimental praxis, research-creation is concerned with examining present realities through artistic creation: “artist-scholars create the artefacts they want to think-with rather than analysing existing cultural productions” (Truman, Shannon & Yusoff Reference Truman, Shannon and Yusoff2023, 88). While exploring existing realities through creativity, research-creation remains open to emergent possibilities and unexpected developments (Manning, Reference Manning, Coling and Sachsenmaier2016). Knight (Reference Knight2021) underscores the epistemic significance of such creative experimentation, noting that it expands conventional understandings of knowledge and challenges assumptions about who has the rights to produce knowledge and what constitutes valuable knowledge. She further argues that creative practices “offer methodological possibilities to maintain a complex reading of the world” (123).
In this article, I use speculative fiction to maintain a complex reading of the outcomes of the Multispecies City Labs, resulting in the story Canopy of the Hidden Alley. Although based on the outcomes, the story does not simply summarise the research findings of the project or creatively presents them in hindsight (St Piere, Reference St. Pierre2019). Rather, the project was structured around a participatory research-creation methodological design from the outset: participants examined the potentiality of multispecies entanglements in times of climate crisis through the creation of visual and textual artworks (Figure 1 demonstrates the material dimension of the creation process). As discussed by Truman et al. (Reference Truman, Shannon and Yusoff2023), “research-creation invites further speculation … Each finished piece of ‘art’ is processed into the work’s further articulation” (93). The story Canopy of the Hidden Alley, then, presents an evolving inquiry that continues participants’ contributions, offering a new speculation or articulation of/in the Multispecies City Lab project.
Figure 1. Photographs taken during the Multispecies City Lab workshops, illustrating the material dimensions of the speculative thinking and making process.
As a continuation of participants’ artworks, Canopy of the Hidden Alley builds upon their speculations of multispecies interaction, communication and sensory connectivity. Multispecies interaction and communication were often presented as a performative and sensory act of care and trust, deemed essential for addressing climate challenges. Participants’ speculations included, for instance, deep listening to mangroves and a redesign of the urban structure as a Rhizomium in Magandjin/Brisbane, acknowledging political agency and decision-making power to trees and birds, and urban greening in the hidden alleys of Narrm/Melbourne, learning the language of water through a water totem, embodying wetlands and designing gardens together with feral bees in Boorloo/Perth (Figure 2; Speculations by participants in the Multispecies City Lab project in Magandjin/Brisbane, June 22, 2024; Narrm/Melbourne, October 5, 2024; Boorloo/Perth, November 15, 2024). In engaging with these speculations, I regarded multispecies interaction and communication as an emergent proposition, carefully curated by participants throughout the various Multispecies City Lab workshops.
Figure 2. Visual artworks created by participants in the Multispecies City Lab project. Explanation from left to right: a mangrove’s listening path, urban greening in hidden alleys and recognising political agency of other-than-humans.
In research-creation, propositions are often used as a tool or prompt for creative and theoretical speculation, without asserting that what is speculated is true (Truman et al., Reference Truman, Shannon and Yusoff2023; Shannon, Reference Shannon2021). Instead of determining what is true or false, propositions open space for exploration and critical engagement. As Shannon (Reference Shannon2021) notes, “employing the proposition as a primary organising concept is what enables research-creation to be emergent, situated, feminist and responsive” (72). Here, propositions allow for the interrogation of truths and acknowledge the inherent variability within truth itself (Shannon, Reference Shannon2021). A proposition, therefore, is neither instructive nor pre-determined, but rather emerges through the relational exchanges that are part of the research-creation itself (Manning, Reference Manning, Coling and Sachsenmaier2016; Truman & Springgay, Reference Truman, Springgay, Lewis and Laverty2015; Truman, Reference Truman2022).
The relational exchanges in the Multispecies City Labs allowed a range of new propositions to emerge, including multispecies interaction, communication and sensory connectivity, which I further explored through the writing of Canopy of the Hidden Alley. While engaging with this proposition curated by participants, the story presented here is closely interwoven with my own imaginative thought, which is inevitably shaped by my positionality: I am a white, abled woman born and raised in Belgium; working within Western academia; visiting Australia as part of my research and, in this context, learning about its colonial history and settler-colonial present. My perspective is also shaped by interactions with project participants (i.e. residents, scholars, artists, both local and international) across multiple Australian cities. The story is entangled with these (and other) intersecting factors.
The writing of Canopy of the Hidden Alley provided an opportunity to reflect on these factors in relation to speculative fiction as a mode of inquiry. Engaging deeply with participants’ imaginaries and interweaving them with my own imaginative responses brought forth tensions that became embedded in the narrative. These tensions speak to themes such as relational and social hierarchies, identity and positionality and diverse multispecies temporalities. They reflect the multiplicity and complexity of imaginative thinking, while also representing challenges for speculative fiction as a mode of inquiry. The following section further unpacks these tensions through a discussion of multispecies climate fiction on one hand, and the presentation and reflection of Canopy of the Hidden Alley on the other.
Multispecies climate fiction
In this section, I conceptualise multispecies climate fiction by exploring the praxis of speculating-with other-than-humans and examining how multispecies entanglements are presented in cli-fi narratives. As the climate emergency intensifies, the study of multispecies entanglements has gained increasing attention, offering new ways to think about the relationship between humans and other-than-human species. Fields such as multispecies studies and multispecies ethnography in particular have underscored the profound interconnection between human and other-than-human worlds (Kirksey et al., Reference Kirksey, Schuetze, Helmreich and Kirksey2014; Van Dooren, Kirksey & Münster Reference Van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016). In these fields, researchers have become attentive to multispecies entanglements in which beings, both human and other-than-human, co-exist, co-emerge and co-configure through relational processes (Van Dijk, Reference Van Dijk2021; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, Blaise, Taylor and Hughes2016; Kirksey, Reference Kirksey and Kirksey2014; Van Dooren et al., Reference Van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016). Such relational processes encompass not only organisms such as plants, fungi, bacteria, human and other-than-human animals, but extend to biophysical entities such as mountains, rivers, the sky, a lagoon, the soil and so on (de la Cadena, Reference de la Cadena2015; Ogden et al., Reference Ogden, Hall and Tanita2013). Taking multispecies entanglements as a starting point, multispecies ethnographic studies have ranged from examining flying foxes and penguins in urban environments (Van Dooren & Rose, Reference Van Dooren and Rose2012) and coyotes as urban dwellers (Van Patter, Reference Van Patter2023), to researching-with and storying-with maple forests (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2020; Manning, Reference Manning2023) or matsutake mushrooms (Tsing, Reference Tsing2015), among others.
Concepts such as other-than-human agency and multispecies entanglements are, however, not new. As highlighted by Todd (Reference Todd, Davis and Turpin2013, Reference Todd2016) and Watts (Reference Watts2013), among others, Euro-Western scholarship about other-than-human agency and multispecies entanglements often neglects Indigenous traditions and Indigenous contemporary scholarship that have long addressed these issues. Whereas Euro-Western knowledge traditions classified the world in isolated taxonomies and have only recently started to think beyond constructed binaries (e.g. in actor network theory, posthumanism, etc.), Indigenous peoples and scholars have a long history of foregrounding and understanding societal structures as multispecies entanglements. In this context, I am navigating the tensions between acknowledging Indigenous knowledges and avoiding appropriating them. Zoe Todd emphasises, “Indigenous stories are often employed without Indigenous peoples present to engage in the application of them in European work. However, there is a risk as well, to Indigenous thinking not being acknowledged at all. How do we hold these two issues in tension and apply them accountably in anthropology?” (Todd, Reference Todd2016, 9). My understanding of multispecies cli-fi is informed by multispecies studies and ethnography, and Indigenous contemporary scholarship on these issues, reading and citing them as I learn and write (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2017).
I propose that multispecies cli-fi speculates-with other-than-humans by envisioning how the world is co-constituted by human and other-than-human beings and their multispecies entanglements (Heise, Reference Heise2016). The process of speculating-with can be understood as a relational practice akin to what Haraway (Reference Haraway2016) calls “becoming-with,” where beings and entities are shaped in and through their entanglements: “Natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings” (13). Instead, their existence is shaped by the interactions and relationships between them. In multispecies cli-fi, to speculate-with the other-than-human is not simply to tell stories about them, but to co-evolve with other-than-humans through the story. As Bahng (Reference Bahng, Cipolla, Gupta, Rubin and Willey2017) notes in her discussion of Octavia Butler’s speculative engagement with slime moulds, “one ethical way to reach across to that speculative reality might be to wonder with it, rather than marvel at it from a distance.” Similarly, Jacobs et al. (Reference Jacobs, Devleminck and Hannes2023) discuss how in bio art, artists change their practices and approaches to the needs of the other-than-human: “the organism and artist engage in a co-creative process of becoming-with and making-with one another” to create a shared work of art (61).
These notions of becoming-with (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016) are central to multispecies cli-fi, where the other-than-human being, the human speculator, and the act of speculation emerge together, producing new tensions, materialities and possibilities. Such multispecies speculations foreground various relational configurations between the human and other-than-human, including other-than-human agency, where ecosystems, landscapes or organisms are sentient and responsive; hybrid beings, where human and other-than-human bodies merge (e.g. Water by Ellen van Neerven); or multispecies interaction and collaboration, where beings engage with one another or form cooperative relationships of mutual dependence in which agency emerges (e.g. I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin… by Ai Hasegawa, Reference Hasegawa2013; Heise, Reference Heise2016). These new relational configurations unsettle the “fixed” boundaries between humans and other-than-humans, revealing new frictions, meanings and materialities.
For instance, a short story from Ellen van Neerven’s collection Heat and Light, entitled Water, follows Kaden, a young queer woman of Jangigir heritage who works for the government and is tasked with monitoring the plantpeople. The plantpeople are an ungendered species that look like humans, have a green appearance, occasionally connect their roots to the land, and can transform salt water into drinkable water. While exploring themes of identity, heritage, relationships and political discomfort, van Neerven (Reference Van Neerven2014) speculates an alternative world, one where plants and humans are entangled with colonial histories and presents. The story illustrates how beings co-become and are knotted together with the world and with each other (Phillips et al., Reference Phillips, McLean Davies and Truman2022). Similarly, in the short film “I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin…,” the artist Ai Hasegawa speculates about women giving birth to endangered species: “With potential food shortages and a population of nearly seven billion people, would a woman consider incubating and giving birth to an endangered species such as a shark, tuna or dolphin?” (Ai Hasegawa, Reference Hasegawa2013). By foregrounding a woman-dolphin entanglement, Hasegawa reimagines ethical and relational accountability towards other-than-human species.
As discussed by Gibson (Reference Gibson2020), such speculations shape how we think of and address climate change. Scientific approaches, for instance, have extensively mapped and analysed species extinction and displacement. While these insights are crucial for understanding the scale and intensity of climate change and its impacts on other-than-humans, they often fall short in evoking an affective understanding of what such disruptions mean for the other-than-humans themselves. As a creative mode of inquiry, multispecies cli-fi foregrounds these affective dimensions by learning-with other-than-humans to build care-full and empathetic relationships amid climate change and speculative climate futures. In other words, the ways we story climate matters (Gibson, Reference Gibson2020; Haraway, Reference Haraway2016), and taking a multispecies perspective enables us to think critically about human and other-than-human relationality. However, in speculating-with multispecies entanglements, there lies a challenge to address multispecies relationality without assuming that all entities — human and other-than-human — are similar or are given equal agency, thereby neglecting power structures and injustices (Heise, Reference Heise2016). Instead, multispecies-focused speculation can serve as a lens through which to confront these inequalities, while at the same time re-imagining relationality between human and other-than-human beings. To further explore multispecies cli-fi, I turn to (the creation of) Canopy of the Hidden Alley as a case that illustrates how speculating-with other-than-humans in climate fiction can generate insights into material and relational dimensions of the climate emergency. The following section presents the multispecies cli-fi story Canopy of the Hidden Alley, along with a brief discussion of the main themes and tension it explores.
F i e l d n o t e s _ H i d d e n A l l e y
Interaction registered_
It’s an easy one to overlook — I pass it every day on my way to work. But today, with the morning sun, a flicker of blue movement at the edge of the sidewalk caught my eye. My sensors prickle, an unfamiliar static feeling crawling along my hand. A connection request? I haven’t had one in months, not since the accident.
I step into the alley, and a wave of discomfort crawls up on me. The darkness is thick and my instincts murmur warnings: a dark, abandoned alley in the middle of the city, not the best place to wander around by yourself as a woman. But look at that canopy! It’s living! How have I missed this place for years? Every day, the same route, the same streets and yet, I have never noticed this alley before.
There it is… My hand lights up — a request!
I take a step closer, observing, trying to make out a form, but the alley is impossibly dark, swallowing the morning sun. Looking up, I notice how the blue canopy stretches overhead, blocking out the sky. Just a few shimmers slip through, scattering the ground in fractured light. Roots push through the pavement, climbing all the way up to the sky. Her leaves — deep, electric blue — indicate decay. Something has hurt her. In between the tangled branches, small orange worms light up. Hearing the writhing of their wet bodies against one another makes me shiver. Is this disgust?
I lean in, just slightly, getting close enough to see the worms’ glimmer. The canopy moves. I almost feel her, think her.
But… nothing.
The canopy doesn’t spark any memories, no recognition. Strange… I’ll have to check my memory file when I get home. Perhaps the connection with the server is weak here. The System surely has some details about her — her origin, a record, something to help me decide if I can trust her.
As my hand nears the structure, her damp and warm body immediately connects to mine. My hand flushes purple. The air around me seems to thicken, humid and heavy. In close proximity, my sensors sharpen and can better understand the canopy’s needs. She moves, almost unnoticeably. A slow, deliberate movement. My hand darkens — deep blue now, then pain — a sharp, cramping pulse. Something’s wrong. I pull away to recover. My fingers stiff, but no steam.
Decline request_
How did I let this happen? So quickly, so easily, after everything that happened last year, I should know better. A random request in a hidden place like this should’ve set off alarms. Looking down at my hand, the blue is fading from my skin. Still, my fingers twitch as I feel the warmth of my pocket. I need to be more careful. My sensor can’t take another injury. And if they fail completely…
At least now I know the canopy is compatible with my sensors. I haven’t connected since the accident. I was worried my radicles were too outdated, but they still seem to work. When I get home, I need to check my memory log. Maybe delete this entry? I don’t know if she’s registered in The System. Better to keep this moment tucked away in my human memory, where no one else can access it. Even if details blur, even if they fade — it’s safer this way.
Delete OR edit OR save interaction_
Delete memory_
F i e l d n o t e s _ I l l u m i n a t i v e N e m a t o d e s
Search registered_
I ran a search. Keywords: “living AND [canopy OR covering OR shelter],” then “blue AND [tree OR bush OR branch OR roots OR twig].” Nothing. I tried “[hidden OR secluded OR secret OR veiled] AND [alley OR lane OR backstreet OR path OR ecosystem]. Still nothing.
No records, no images. My memory has no trace of anything like this blue canopy-like structure. Maybe The System knows her, perhaps she is registered. I copy my search history, let The System weave through its archives. Again, nothing… At least she has no criminal record. Relieved, but disappointed, although I was expecting it. A being in a hidden place like this rarely leaves a trace, often stays anonymous by choice. But still, there was a part of me hoping for a sliver of information, some small confirmation of her presence in the city.
Delete search history_
It’s been days since visiting the alley, days since the request. And still, she lingers in my mind and sensors.
I miss connection. I haven’t shared memory in too long, haven’t felt that moment of merging — where self dissolves into something plural, where you get to know other beings through time and space, through memory. You inherit their thoughts, their sensations, their griefs and joys as if they were your own. Instant connection, instant understanding, empathy. You don’t get these kinds of connections without sharing. It’s a more intimate way of relating, something human language can’t quite cover. I’ve been fortunate — privileged, really — to inherit this authority from my mother, who got it from hers, tracing back to the earliest days of The System. My grandmother, with the right lineage and affiliations, qualified for sharing authority when access was granted selectively, granted only to select families and beings with certain histories.
Losing my sharing-authority would be more than just a personal loss; it would mean being stripped of something that defines how I exist, how I relate. Combined with creative-authority and intellectual-authority, my identity is programmed to think, create, share — a combination that comes with certain perks like land and climate immunities. Soon, I might even qualify for political-authority. And then, perhaps programming-authority, something I once thought unreachable in this lifetime. But all of it hinges on my ability to share. Losing that would jeopardise my position in The System. And once you lose it, there’s almost no way getting it back.
I can’t afford to make a mistake. I can’t risk my authority rights, not without knowing what she wants, not without knowing whether I can trust her.
Search registered_
Let’s run a final one. Keywords: “[illuminative OR orange OR yellow OR luminescent] AND [worms OR larvae OR Nematodes OR parasites].”
One result: “Illuminative Nematodes.” Open file_ Delete search history_
Delete memory_
F i e l d n o t e s _ L i v i n g C a n o p y
Interaction registered_
Passing the alley again, the longing for sharing sharpens. My hand lights up — another request! She sensed my presence. From here? I haven’t even stepped inside the alley. My sensors barely reach three metres, four at best if I’d really try. But she notices me from across the street. I’ve not even entered the alley and my hand is glowing.
Decline_ Not today… I’ve back-to-back meetings in half an hour. Decline_ Decline_ Nothing happens. Am I too far for the signal to process?
I step closer, the alley swallows me once more. Light slips through this time, I can see her now: her hollow branches, filled with glowing worms. Decline_ It works this time. I let my hand hover, drawn to the substance. I can feel warm radiation coming from the dust. My hand flares up again. Brighter this time.
She’s persistent.
What do you want from me? Why do you keep reaching?
The worms unsettle me. There are so many of them. Are they a sign of distress? Decay? The canopy looks as though she hasn’t shared in a long time. And to be fair, neither have I. I could use it too. My sensors have grown rusty. I tell myself I’ve been careful, that I’m just protecting myself, but I can feel the stiffness in my hand, the way my radicles hesitate before syncing. Without regular connection, they grow slow and outdated. Sharing ensures they stay compatible, that they remain functional and well-nourished.
An excuse, maybe. But I reach for the canopy anyway. Touching her now, accepting her request. The physical touch might damage my sensory structure again, but the depth of connection it allows is worth the risk. In that moment, my sensors connect, my hand turning purple, then blue, cramping. My radicles turn blue too, crawling up my arm, spreading through my neck. Rusty, painful — something I expected, but it still hurts.
The connection locks in, the sharing takes off, in flashes, fractured pieces, fragments of a time long before my own.
I can see how she grew to become a small bush in the middle of a dry, open landscape, where she lived most of her life. Then, how she becomes interwoven with the urban fabric: City development; apartment buildings; Cockatoo nests, thirty-six of them; tearing roots, cutting branches; neighbouring shrubs; humans finding shelter; traffic noises; too little water, then too much; birds hatching; invasive species; heat; a tram-line cutting off half of her body, growing back after; small critters bringing her goods; fire; worms, so many worms; the erasure of her existence above the Earth’s surface; darkness. Below, she endures, while the world above changes: society restructured; The System established; authorities distributed; immunities granted.
Her memories move quickly, too quickly — I can barely process one before another takes its place. I struggle to keep up. I feel the cramp loosening; my hand starts to fade. Trying to keep the connection stable, I hold on to her stronger, but my sensors get disconnected.
She must have reached the end of me.
“Coffee?” My phone buzzes. Right, my meeting. Cancel_
F i e l d n o t e s _ L i v i n g C a n o p y A N D M e m o r y
It’s not fair. My memory file only holds twenty-six years — 208 spanning across three generations, my mother’s and grandmother’s included if she reached for the extended folders. She has reached the end of me while I haven’t even glimpsed a tenth of her memory, haven’t even scratched the surface of who she is.
In the meantime, she has seen it all, seen the accident. Perhaps she shut down the connection then. The moment it surfaced, she withdrew, unwilling to go further, afraid of exposal. If only I could delete that memory, erase it from my file… But The System has locked it in, permanently. No matter how many memories I build, it will always be there, in any interaction. My only choice is to build new memories, to outweigh the old ones, to prove that I can be trusted.
I reach out again, touching her, sending a request of my own. I wait for her to answer, to let me in.
Declined_
I wonder how she saw it — whether it played through my eyes or through the perspective of The System. I haven’t opened the file myself yet.
Try again. Be persistent like her.
Touching her, my hand shifts colour once more — is she accepting?
A flood of memories flash by: sprouting; blinded by sunlight; sharing with humans; registered; receiving official authorities and immunities; The System; illuminative Nematodes; sharing with humans; worms, so many worms; pesticides; pesticides.
Her distress is tangible. She got registered in The System after years of hiding below, then illuminative worms were introduced into her branches, altering her existence, which got out of control. Pesticides! Pesticides! I can feel her scream it through my sensors — pain seizing my arm.
She slows down now — I think I’ve reached her more recent memories — the ones they tried to take away from her.
The moment they penetrated too deeply, attempting to steal and erase this past. She was able to withstand, but was forced to leave The System, forced below once more, stripping her of recognition, leaving her in the dark. Only recently, she has reached sunlight again.
She’s persistent.
Through her memories, I can feel her grief — it builds a deeper understanding of who she is, has been. I understand her hesitation now. Perhaps she understands mine. More and more reports have surfaced in the black outskirts of The System — incidents where unknown beings reach too deeply, hacking memories, inserting new, never happened ones, or stealing what matters most. It messes with your memory, with your identity.
I never thought it would happen to me. One wrong interaction and you’re rewritten. And if The System finds out about your mistake… So far, I have only suffered sensor damage through such an invasion, with minor sanctions from The System, but it could have been a complete memory reset. Adding those memories would have completely changed my identity, would have compromised my being.
They tried to do the same to her. Memory manipulation — erasure, addition.
We share memory.
Disconnect_
F i e l d n o t e s _ L i v i n g C a n o p y
We share memory.
Easing my grip now, my hand fading, cramp loosening. Looking down on my hand: No damage, no steam. My sensors: intact! No hospital, no surgery this time around. No System, no sanctions.
She needed to share her memory, let another being know what happened to her. She trusted me, although her accident, although mine. She moves now, slowly, toward me. I feel embraced by her warm radiance. I wish I could stay here just a little longer. But she knows it too, I need to hurry.
Walking home now, fast, running almost, but I can’t seem panicked, or they’ll know. I need to make sure our interaction is deleted in time. I can’t risk them figuring out I shared with an unregistered being again, and she cannot get registered through me. She trusted me.
Home now. Connecting to the server.
Delete OR edit OR save interaction_ Delete memory_
Search registered_
Tapping into my memory, searching to make sure there are no traces left. Keywords: “accident AND memory AND [manipulation OR invasion OR occupation]”
One result.
Good, only one. Only mine, not hers, I guess.
Open file_
Memory starts to play, flashes of a tiny bug crawling up my leg. Request; Decline_; request; request; why not?; Accept_; purple hand, then blue; cramp, pain; something is wrong; Disconnect_; Disconnect_; but it isn’t working; I’m being hacked!; inserting new memory; my grandmother; Disconnect_, but still not working; my grandmother, sharing with an unregistered being; one from the black list; The System found out; losing her sharing-authorities; losing her climate-immunity; Disconnect_; it worked! Looking down on my hand, my sensors hurt, damaged, steaming, but still intact. Needs treatment, soon.
Running, steaming home; connect to server; Delete OR edit OR save memory_; Delete_ Just in time…
But I haven’t reached the end of this memory yet and I know it.
My sensors, hurting, steaming; rushing to the hospital, surgery; they know, The System; investigation; connection with an unregistered being; being hacked; The System takes sanctions; locked memory.
Close file_
No delete or edit options available
Shivering. To see it again, live it again — I wish I was able to forget.
Save search history_
Delete memory_
Speculating multispecies interaction in Canopy of the Hidden Alley
Structured as a field report, the story Canopy of the Hidden Alley follows a researcher encountering uncanny urban landscapes shaped by multispecies presences, being drawn into sites of abandonment and extraction emblematic of the Anthropocene (Kirksey & Chao, Reference Kirksey, Chao, Chao, Bolender and Kirksey2022; Gómez-Barris, Reference Gómez-Barris2017). Based on the artworks created by participants in the Multispecies City Labs, the story explores themes of multispecies interaction and communication, and sensory connectivity through memory. It further incorporates contextual and environmental elements that were part of participants’ imaginaries, such as a hidden alley, a living canopy, memory, worms “so many worms,” heat, and water (Speculations by participants in the Multispecies City Lab project in Magandjin/Brisbane, June 22, 2024; Narrm/Melbourne, October 5, 2024; Boorloo/Perth, November 15, 2024).
In the story, beings establish an intimate connection through memory-sharing: a relational exchange that generates empathy, care and trust, “where self dissolves into something plural, where you get to know other beings through time and space, through memory. You inherit their thoughts, their sensations, their griefs and joys as if they were your own.” However, building intimate connections through memory-sharing is constrained: not everyone possesses the authority to share memories, doing so might be risky, and The System records every exchange unless one of the sharers deletes it in time. This suggests that certain things are permitted to be remembered, while others are better forgotten or erased. Accordingly, Canopy of the Hidden Alley does not present an uncritical ideal of multispecies interaction; rather, it juxtaposes these hopeful imaginings with critiques of systemic control and inequalities.
As part of this juxtaposition, I began thinking-with what Grove et al. (Reference Grove, Rickards, Anerson and Kearnes2020) call the “uneven distribution of futurity.” Futurity, as Grove et al. (Reference Grove, Rickards, Anerson and Kearnes2020) discuss, stands for the hopeful possibility for change, growth, and further development. However, this possibility is not equally available for all. In the context of climate change, hope and opportunity are mainly distributed among privileged peoples and nations that possess the social and material means, and economic and institutional power to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Meanwhile, those more exposed to climate disasters often lack access to such protective resources, although contributing less to global emissions (Heise, Reference Heise2016). Accordingly, McKenzie et al. (Reference McKenzie, Henderson and Nxumalo2023) pinpoint this uneven distribution of futurity as a “key injustice at the heart of climate change” (4). While engaging with Grove et al.’s concept, I began speculating-with futurity in various ways in Canopy of the Hidden Alley, exploring the researcher’s personal sense of futurity alongside its meaning in multispecies entanglements and questioning how this sense of futurity is manifested in a society where humans and other-than-humans both wield authority.
In the story, futurity is shaped by beings’ place within The System. Through authority, the story speculates about social hierarchies and protection against various societal and ecological challenges such as land use and climate impacts, prompting reflection on “who are the subjects of justice in our shared worlds? […] Who has claimed a monopoly over justice in the past, and in the present, and how might we contest their sense of propriety in the future?” (Kirksey et al., Reference Kirksey, Chao, Chao, Bolender and Kirksey2022, 2). In Canopy of the Hidden Alley, other-than-humans, such as the living canopy, are integral to society and its social hierarchies. The “social” is not conceived as an exclusively human domain; rather, other-than-humans can acquire authority too and occupy positions within the hierarchies that govern communal life. At the same time, the protagonist (i.e. the researcher) embodies aspects of a hybrid existence, equipped with sensors and radicles that allow her to connect with fellow beings, her hands lighting up and her body shifting in colour to purple and blue. Her identity is not strictly human or other-than-human but explores the liminal space in between. She actively reflects on her personal prospects and her position in The System: “Soon, I might even qualify for political authority. And then, perhaps programming authority — maybe even reachable within this lifetime,” implying hopeful possibilities for future development. However, this hopeful sense of futurity is fragile. Her future possibilities are jeopardised by the locked memory of her accident, a permanent imprint that affects her relational capacities. At the same time, she risks losing her authorities by connecting and sharing with an unregistered being, the living canopy: “Losing my sharing authority would be more than just a personal loss; it would mean being stripped of something that defines how I exist, how I relate … I can’t afford to make a mistake here. I can’t risk my authority rights.”
This fragile futurity is further represented through the intimate entanglement between the researcher and the canopy, spanning diverse temporalities: “She has reached the end of me while I haven’t even glimpsed a tenth of her memory, haven’t even scratched the surface of who she is.” Working across differing multispecies timescales is, as de la Bellacasa (Reference de la Bellacasa2017) argues, “not a philosophical or scientific problem, it is an ethical and political one” (p. 176). That is, recognising diverse temporalities shapes how we live together and form community and connection. In exploring time in multispecies entanglements, Rose (Reference Rose2013) discusses how beings form ethical relationships through sequential and synchronous time: “trees’ desire for pollination meet the flying foxes desire for food,” they work in tandem across time, and these temporal patterns are “a place of mutuality” that “nurture the flows that sustain the present and work for the future” (136, 137). In Canopy of the Hidden Alley, the sharing of memory becomes such a “place for mutuality,” something desired by beings across multispecies timescales to flourish and maintain their relational capacities: “She looks as though she hasn’t shared in a long time. And to be fair, neither have I. I could use it too. My sensors have grown rusty.” The distribution of futurity becomes one of mutual dependence, similar to Rose’s (Reference Rose2013) example of the trees and flying foxes. The sharing of memory, then, presents a relational practice underscoring the importance of building care-full relationships and empathetic understandings among beings, across multispecies timescales.
In the process of writing Canopy of the Hidden Alley, the act of speculating allowed me to inhabit and embody the perspectives of both the living canopy and the researcher, exploring tensions embedded in their identities and positionality, their entangled social hierarchies and their relation with The System, as well as the diverse temporalities they each embody. Writing multispecies cli-fi became a process of becoming-with — or speculating-with — the characters, whether human, other-than-human, or somewhere in between. At the same time, the imaginaries created by participants in the Multispecies City Labs guided the writing process. Drawing on and connecting these imaginaries raised questions about multispecies entanglements: What does it mean to share memory with water? How does a living canopy experience urban transformation? What would it feel like to be inhabited by worms, or to be repeatedly exposed to pesticides? As I merged these speculative fragments of participants with my own imagination, the questions evolved into a range of new directions: What assumptions underlie human attempts to communicate with fellow beings? How might multispecies memory take shape? How would it allow new relational practices? Who is included and excluded in these new relational practices? These evolving inquiries served as speculative propositions that allowed me to delve deeper into tensions of identity and positionality, relational and social hierarchies and diverse temporalities, all contributing to new understandings of multispecies entanglements in the context of climate change and speculative climate futures.
Closing thoughts: Potentialities of multispecies climate fiction
The need for building new and care-full relationships with other-than-humans grows stronger in a time when the extractive logic of treating nature as a resource persists. In re-imagining Australian cities from a multispecies perspective, I turned to Ursula K. Le Guin’s invitation to relate to other-than-humans as “fellow beings, as kinfolk” (Le Guin, Reference Le Guin, Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt2017). Instead of perceiving the city as a human space only, the Multispecies City Lab project opened space for speculating-with other-than-humans to re-imagine the city as a multispecies and relational environment. Rather than merely analysing and presenting the imaginaries created by participants of the Multispecies City Labs, creative engagement with these “findings” generated alternative understandings of multispecies entanglements. From this emerged the multispecies cli-fi story Canopy of the Hidden Alley.
The creative writing process uncovered new tensions and propositions that challenged and reshaped my understanding of multispecies entanglements amid climate change and speculative climate futures. This highlights the emergent, situated and responsive potential of speculative fiction as a mode of inquiry. In response, this article concludes by reflecting on the potentiality of multispecies cli-fi as a form of research. To do so, I continue to think-with the concept of futurity:
“To say that science fiction is about futurity is to say that it envisions potentialities rather than actualities. But these potentialities do in fact exist today, at the present moment; they are fully real in their own right. It is just that their existence does not take the form of actual states of affairs. Rather, these futurities exist precisely as potentialities.” (Shaviro, Reference Shaviro2024)
Shaviro (Reference Shaviro2024) conceptualises futurity as a range of potentialities — open, vague and plural — that nonetheless exist within present realities. I draw on this understanding to think of multispecies cli-fi as a mode of inquiry that engages with existing but not yet fully realised multispecies possibilities.
The practice of speculating-with presents a way to explore these ever-present multispecies possibilities. Through speculating-with other-than-humans, one imagines how other-than-humans are affected by and experience climate disruptions and displacement, how they inhabit various temporalities, and/or how they are positioned (or excluded) within society’s structures. From this imaginative process, critical learnings emerge, centred not only on how the self relates to climate change and other-than-humans (today and in alternative futures), but also on how to build empathetic relationships characterised by reciprocity and care. Speculating-with multispecies entanglements in multispecies cli-fi, then, can be understood as a process of learning-with, wondering-with and becoming-with other-than-humans in times of climate disruptions, and involves a shared search for alternative relational possibilities.
This process, for instance, prompted reflections on social and relational hierarchies, identity and positionality and the interplay of multiple temporalities. While these reflections were integrated into the cli-fi story, they are integral to understanding speculative fiction as a mode of inquiry as well, where the positionality of the researcher (Truman, Reference Truman2018) and relationality with research “participants,” both human and other-than-human (Dierckx et al., Reference Dierckx, Hendricks, Coemans and Hannes2020), challenge the very nature of the speculative process. As Truman (Reference Truman2018) discusses, “through recognizing situated feminisms in conjunction with speculative fabulation, speculative thinkers and writers might conjure more just futures” (32). This suggests that imaginaries emerge in and are shaped by specific social, cultural and political contexts, including the positionality of the (human) speculator and the specific place and other-than-humans one speculates-with. Attending to these situated dynamics in speculative thinking and making processes opens the possibility for more just multispecies futures.
Acknowledgements
I wish to extend my appreciation to all the participants who took part in and contributed to the Multispecies City Lab project. Their involvement in imagining alternative multispecies futures has significantly enriched this article.
Financial support
This article was developed as part of my doctoral fellowship funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (Project: 11Q4S24N). The Multispecies City Lab workshop discussed in this paper involved human participants.
Ethical standards
Their involvement were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Social and Societal Ethics Committee of KU Leuven, as well as the ethics committee of the University of Melbourne.
Author Biography
Antje Jacobs is a PhD candidate at KU Leuven (Belgium) and the University of Melbourne (Australia) in the faculties of social sciences and education. She has a background in art studies and archaeology, as well as art, science and technology studies. Her scholarly work explores climate change through creativity, focusing on speculative fiction, multispecies art, and participatory research approaches.
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