Kim Stanley Robinson has been called a cli-fi (rather than sci-fi) writer and his book Ministry for the Future has been seminal on moving the climate change discussion further into the mainstream. In fact it even inspired Seth Godin to bring together people from across the globe to create The Carbon Almanac.
There’s no denying that Ministry for the Future is, in many ways, a weighty book but it is, in the words of podcaster Akshat Rathi, “not a dystopian novel where civilization has already been destroyed. It's a story of how the world gets to grips with the crisis. It's a long road, but it allowed me to imagine how the solutions can work despite the planetary scale messiness that comes with an advanced civilization, and that ability to tell a story of solutions, even though it's fictional, is a powerful thing.”
In the podcast Robinson lays out the approach he has used in deciding what type of a novel this would be:
“If we dodge a climate catastrophe and a mass extinction event in this century, that's a utopian story. And indeed, I've been using a word that I think Johanna Russ invented called the optopia. So it's not the utopia, the no place, the perfect place, it's the optopia. It's the optimum that we can do given the situation that we're handed. And that's what I think I was doing in Ministry for the Future. That too, is utopian novel, because at the end of it, we've decarbonized and then moved onto all the other problems that still remain. Science fiction does so many things, but one thing that it does do, especially if you're thinking distant science fiction, is that it plants ideas in people's head that become reality. So what was the motivation in writing the Ministry for the - not a utopia or a dystopia but an optopia.”
Perhaps you can find inspiration in these words. One could argue there is little point in looking backward, except to make sure that we avoid the traps that have hindered us previously by recognizing their hallmarks. Rather, let’s move together, as the characters in Ministry for the Future do, quickly and often with shaky confidence that the outcome will be successful, but still with commitment and passion to shape the best possible future - an optopia - that if we work together, is attainable.