~ Writers at the MOG Sunday talk, said fiction can succeed where climate data and policy language fail to move people.
Panaji, April 2026: Climate change can no longer remain confined to data, policy language and alarming headlines, writers at a recent MOG Sunday session at the Museum of Goa,arguing that fiction has a crucial role in making the crisis feel immediate, personal and impossible to ignore.
Speaking during a discussion on Earthbound: Climate Stories from South Asia, writer Prthvir Solanki said climate fiction allows the crisis to be felt through everyday life rather than as a distant catastrophe.
Drawing from his short story, The Solution, set in a future Mumbai grappling with floods and rising temperatures, Solanki spoke about using absurdity to reflect how increasingly irrational responses to real crises have become normalised. “What I wanted to capture was how absurd responses to real problems have become normalised,” he said, adding that people often continue to live with “some semblance of normalcy” even amid visible breakdown.
The story imagines a government-backed technology that turns people into fish as a response to a city going underwater, a deliberately exaggerated metaphor that, Solanki argued, mirrors the increasingly surreal nature of real-world responses to crises.
He said climate change should not be viewed only as a large-scale disaster, but as something that enters homes, relationships and daily routines. “I don’t want to present climate change as this huge disaster… the idea is to indicate how this becomes, how this seeps into your everyday life,” he said.
Another story from the anthology, The Hotel Wall by Prashant Vaze, explored climate justice through access to water and the continuation of privilege amid scarcity, reinforcing the session’s larger focus on who bears the cost of ecological crisis.
The conversation also reflected on how the language of climate change often fails to move people. Tarana Reddy, Game Designer, Author and co-speaker at the MOG Sunday talk, said the anthology emerged from a recognition that facts alone were no longer enough to provoke action.
“We realised that this had happened, that it had gone from news to nothing, nobody cared anymore,” Reddy said, explaining that the book was conceived to create stories that “impact people, pisses them off, makes them think.”
Vaze, who has worked extensively in climate policy, said technical projections and statistics often struggle to communicate the lived reality of the crisis. “If you mathematically tell people that if it’s a two-degree-centigrade temperature rise, then sea level will go up… it doesn’t really communicate,” he said. “You do need to actually introduce humanity in their conflicts.”
The speakers stressed the importance of grounding climate fiction in South Asian realities, where rising heat, changing coastlines and water insecurity are already visible. Reddy said the region is not imagining a distant future but responding to changes already being felt in everyday life. “We are facing it in our bones basically,” she said.
While the discussion acknowledged the value of cautionary futures, it also called for stories that imagine alternatives and possibilities for change. The speakers said storytelling must do more than warn, it must provoke reflection and action.
Photo caption 1: Writer Prthvir Solanki (left) and writer, game designer and transmedia creator Tarana Reddy (right) at the Museum of Goa, during a recent MOG Sunday talk on storytelling, climate narratives and creative practice.
Photo caption: Prthvir Solanki (left) and Tarana Reddy (right) at the Museum of Goa, ahead of their MOG Sunday Talk session engaging with themes from the anthology Earthbound: Climate Stories from South Asia and contemporary storytelling formats.
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