Earth's oceans are having a rough time right now. They're oily, hot, acidic, full of dead fish—and their levels are rising. But even though these things are true, it can be hard to grok (or muster up the will to care about) the oceans' subtle changes over decades. Every time you go to the beach, everything's still as blue and salty and vast as it ever was. But these changes directly impact human life (just ask the Marshall Islands). So to make the ocean's plight more relatable, a Swedish sustainability group is putting out a message that will hit you where it counts: right in the nerd.

Andrew Merrie, a sustainability scientist at the Stockholm University's Resilience Centre, thinks science fiction can succeed in attracting attention where scientific papers have failed. "There's no easy entry point to scientific papers," says Merrie. "I’ve always felt in my gut that science fiction—taking changes in technology and socioeconomics and politics and putting it in a different context—has a lot of value." So he sifted through dozens of scientific papers, wrote up some stories based on them, and commissioned images from nerd-approved Swedish conceptual artist Simon Stålenhag. If you recognize his style, it's because Stalenhåg also did the cover art of a little game called No Man's Sky.

It's a pretty Silicon Valley-esque strategy: using science fiction to get a handle on the implications of future technologies, social structures, or (in this case) environmental conditions. The technical name is science fiction prototyping, which futurist Brian Johnson came up with when he needed a way to help Intel engineers anticipate the way people use the stuff they were making. For Merrie and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, they hope their narratives and images will help people understand the implications of letting the ocean get all radioactive green and steamy. "We're trying to create empathy for the oceans," Merrie says. "So hopefully people and policy makers will want to go into the science."

The whole project won't come out for another few weeks, but we've got all of Stalenhåg's eerie images collected for you in a gallery above, and even got a glimpse of what the narratives will look like. They're definitely speculative fiction: There's a kind of futuristic TED Talk, the obituary of a seafood company's CEO, the journal entries of Earth's last fisherman, and an ersatz National Geographic article—but each has a robust scientific basis. This is the Earth's oceanic reality, carried out to a logical extreme. And if you want proof of their validity, well, the narratives were part of Merrie's dissertation, and he is a doctor now. But that doesn't mean he dispensed with all the sci-fi fun. The obituary goes into the protein wars fought between corporations and fish pirates over Super Tuna®, which the narrator describes as "our generation’s Big Mac®."

It's not uplifting stuff, but Merrie says it's not all apocalyptic. "Dystopia can be very disempowering," he says. "So we mixed dystopian and utopian elements to show humans' response capacity. These narratives have people able to come together in new ways to have a more sustainable future." Which, of course, is what he hopes his audience will do. So get reading.