Defying Futility

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About the book

Defying Futility: The Fairhaven Stories is a standalone companion volume to the award-winning Fairhaven: A Novel of Climate Optimism.

Is disaster inevitable?

Defying Futility offers sixteen stories by the authors of the award-winning climate fiction Fairhaven – A Novel of Climate Optimism that offer a definitive answer to the 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.

Defying Futility was previewed at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024 and launched at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival in March 2025.

Steve Willis is an engineer and innovator who works on industrial and environmental projects, and writes short climate action stories which explore potential positive outcomes to the climate crisis. Steve’s background in heavy industry is combined with sharp observation, a vivid imagination, relentless persistence and a talent for lucid dreaming. He uses these unusual skills to continuously seek massive scale climate solutions, to identify climate start-up opportunities and to write stories which capture some of the essence of working on the climate crisis challenge.

Jan Lee is a Hong Kong-based digital native, who first published via Telnet in the 1990s. Following a decades-long career in corporate affairs and sustainability, Jan turned to writing and activism in retirement. Jan’s science fiction stories have been published in various small presses and anthologies, and are collected in the book Route One and Other Stories. Jan’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognised several times in the “Writers of the Future” contest. Jan is Editor-in-Chief of The Apostrophe, the quarterly magazine of the Hong Kong Writers Circle.