Telling Stories About Climate Change

In this original piece, novelist and essayist David Guenette suggests that, too often, ‘climate fiction’ fails to bridge the planetary-scale climate crisis with human-scale everyday life. Climate fiction should focus on human stories that connect readers directly to our present challenges: more stories we can identify with may relieve suppressive social silence on climate change.

The count of novels and short stories taking on the mantle of ‘climate fiction’ numbers, conservatively, in the tens of thousands to date, but ‘climate fiction’ is a would-be genre without distinction. BISAC, the publishing industry’s massive list of book categories maintained by Book Industry Study Group, doesn’t have ‘climate fiction’ as a category and neither does Amazon (see my post There Can Be a Tax on Taxonomical Confusion). This is problem number one in getting climate fiction in front of readers.

Without a genre to call one’s own, writers face significant challenges presenting climate fiction for effective discoverability. In Amazon, a reader looking for this type of creative work is left with a search term that is ineffective in identifying a work of climate fiction. The typical search result corrals non-fiction books about climate change, and that’s when Amazon’s search function is working well, which it is not known for. Even when an author uses “climate fiction novel” as a metadata label to aid searching, the searcher is as likely to get hits that include anthologies and academic books and other just plain odd results, although better results may vary if the book being searched for is already a well-selling novel. If you are a writer of climate fiction novels, your best bet is to hope that the searcher has your book title and your name, otherwise your book will be somewhere in the many pages — over 50,000! — of results. You want readers reading your book, of course, but without the title and author, the would-be reader is stuck reading a novel-length list of search results. That’s problem number two.

The Climate Fiction mess 

There are now many thousands of novels that describe themselves or are otherwise provided the mantle of ‘climate fiction’. Add to that the poems about climate change, or short stories, paintings, drawings, prints, songs, and videos, and the question arises: Are any of these creative expressions helping in any significant way to shift the course of the Anthropocene away from dire climate consequences? There is some academic research on this question and different programs and departments, but the answers still rely more on anecdotal findings rather than replicable facts.

Climate fiction has been studied and there are a few academic departments focused on climate fiction. Some research sees a reader’s shift toward climate action from reading novels like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future or Stephen Markely’s The Deluge. Other readers of works like Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Jenny Offill’s Weather, or Richard Price’s The Overstory may have come for the literary enjoyment but have gone away with a personal awakening to the dangers and challenges brought forward by global warming or nature’s collapsing biodiversity through unconstrained economic development.

Unfortunately, the vast amount of ‘climate fiction’ stories use global warming and climate change as a story premise. Climate change’s potential for a flooded world, desert wasteland, burning forests, life-denying temperatures, or terrible storms contribute to an action-adventure tale, often without much concern about accuracy of the climate science or much discussion of how such terrible worlds could have been avoided. Worse yet, many of the apocalyptic novels breeze past the human cost the premise requires, skipping directly to some form of “guy-gets-gun-and-girl” book or something otherwise not about climate change and what it does to us or we might do about it. Many other novels and short stories use the premise of climate change to present magical realism, evolved humans in distant futures, aliens, or fantasy. Can a story of a person who can speak to mushrooms help people address the climate crisis? Depends on the book, I guess.

The problem I have with a lot of what gets called climate fiction is that many such novels deal with serious problems of today and tomorrow in unserious ways.

What is Climate Fiction?

I’ve written nearly two dozen essays on or related to this question, and that’s not counting the many climate fiction books that I’ve reviewed. My attention to this question is understandable, considering that I’m writing the final book of The Steep Climes Quartet, a series I describe as ‘literary climate fiction.’ The third book, Over Brooklyn Hills, published last spring and the last book, Farm to Me, has a publication date of Spring 2027, if the good lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.

Maybe this is a stupid question, but is climate change as a premise for climate fiction enough, or is climate change as subject the essence of climate fiction? Just a couple of weeks ago, I posted a long piece on my website titled A Fantastic Essay about Climate Fiction but Still a Lot of Fantasy, with a shorter Substack version called Why Fantasy Climate Fiction is Lazy (And Why Realism is Harder). At various times, I’ve also left comments and raised questions about climate fiction on Substack’s Climate Fiction Writers League and on the Goodreads Climate Fiction Group, not to mention asking friends and family and complete strangers.

My interest was once again piqued by the recent post Neurodivergence as a Blueprint for a Solarpunk Future by N.E. McMorran on the Climate Fiction Writers League (CFWL) Substack.¹

The guest poster is introduced thusly:

Today we have an essay by N.E. McMorran, the author of the children’s adventure trilogy Moojag, a quirky mystery for readers 10 years and up. When Nema and her friends discover a hidden sugar-hooked society holding lost kids, they find their perfect world in danger.

I’ve long followed CFWL, looking for trends, examples, opinions, and theories of climate fiction. Unfortunately for me, all my attention to CFWL has produced greater confusion rather than clarity on the question of what makes something ‘climate fiction.’

In fact, this recent post by McMorran is a good example of this confusion-generating effect. I’ve been making the argument that using some reference to climate change as a story premise is not the same thing as climate fiction. A premise is a foundational statement or assumption used as the starting point for a conclusion, argument, or story (yes, I just cribbed this).

A premise is not what the story is about. For example, a good number of apocalypse stories work from a premise that merely sets the stage or conditions of the story. Consider the vast majority of post-EMP survival stories that were rampant for a few years and with new titles still being written. These stories use the event of wide-scale electromagnetic pulses from some sort of attack by enemy countries or terrorists or extreme solar storms that crash the world’s power grids and destroy advanced electronics, overthrowing modern civilization and bringing chaos. These sorts of stories don’t have much to say about power grids or the nature of digital devices based on today’s endemic integrated chips but are typically survivalist in nature and all too frequently in the shallow end of the action adventure pool. Most of these stories don’t revolve around larger issues such as fragile supply chains and the complexity of the developed nations’ economies and our relationship therein, or lack of infrastructure redundancy or resilience, or what happens to the weak or vulnerable in times of crisis — you know, real world questions — but instead concentrate on the hero’s journey, and at that, mostly on the hero getting guns and ammo and the girl. Throughout the 1970s and into Reagan’s years of the 1980s, survivalist stories were often post-nuclear holocaust stories, where the death of hundreds of millions or even billions of individuals from nuclear weapon exchanges was the premise, but the story subject was typically one of lone-wolf survival. Most of these stories weren’t concerned with the causes or consequences of the premise, instead treating potential human extinction as a story’s starting point, in what has always struck me as a bit cavalier even if it’s only an imagined stake.

Literary Climate Fiction, Thrutopia, Solar Punk, oh my! 

My argument is that climate fiction is fiction that carries useful knowledge of the issue of climate change in the hope that readers will be more conscious of the circumstances of climate change and more thoughtful and engaged toward solutions to ameliorate it. This definition reflects one of the trends in climate fiction that is sometimes called ‘Thrutopia,’ although I’ve recently come across ‘Protopian,’ too. Whatever your term of choice, the basic idea here is a story where readers not only better realize the climate crisis but also wrestle with how we may get to solutions — or fail to get to solutions — whether societal or personal. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is perhaps the prime example of this type of climate fiction.

Like all new categories, Thrutopia tends to broaden toward uselessness. For some authors, Thrutopia can simply mean a rejection of climate apocalypse stories. For me, I use the old Downeaster joke “You can’t get there from here” and apply this challenge to climate fiction, where paying attention to what we know about climate change and its causes and how we might indeed make our way toward climate progress and the trials therein are the relevant subjects. Note that I’m not arguing that climate fiction, in this definition, must be about getting to successful solutions for climate change amelioration, but only that climate change is the pervasive subject of the story, not simply the premise or starting point that is too often ignored thereafter.

While we are on the subject of climate fiction definitions, a mention of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement is in order. Ghosh argues that all fiction today is effectively climate fiction because the defining reality of the Anthropocene shapes every setting, economy, and human experience. He also argues that:

… contemporary literary fiction suffers from an imaginative failure. Historically, serious novels have dismissed unpredictable, catastrophic climate events as too ‘improbable’ for realistic fiction. Because our modern literary traditions were built during an era of stable, predictable weather, authors have struggled to conceptualize humans as planetary forces.²

There’s plenty to take issue here, but basically Ghosh believes that fiction of today must consider climate change when addressing contemporary stories. I like to point to Weather, by Jenny Offill³ — a product of the MFA Writing-Industrial Complex and nonetheless an excellent writer — as a solid example of a literary climate fiction work, and I recommend her book highly.

Unfortunately, the literary fiction focus on characters and language is rare in climate fiction, though, fortunately, there are dozens of great examples of great character development. One of the shared elements among literary climate fiction is that the stories have climate change — and the people, institutions, and cultures that get caught up in it — as the subject. But there are likely thousands of self-assigned climate fiction novels and short stories that may point to climate change but then move on to a story that develops from some resulting condition or consequence of climate change and afterwards never look to examine the premise. In many of these books, the premise might as easily be alien invasions, zombies, astrophysical events, or pandemics.

Take the example of Moojag, as described by the author in the CFWL post above:

The seeds of Moojag were planted during a period of intense climate anxiety…. My manuscript began as an environmentally charged fantasy but quickly transformed into a neurodivergent Solarpunk “dystopia-versus-utopia” that asked: What if we got it right? What if we could live together peacefully as ourselves, accepted and celebrated for who we are?

In the post-climate-catastrophe Surrey Isles, technology is an extension of the ecosystem. Cephalopod-inspired, full-bodied electronic sensory-powered skins allow the “Real World” community to live outdoors, protected from all weathers, danger, and disease. No more buildings, no homelessness, no money, no disease, no refined sugar. The characters live in a state of high-tech harmony with nature….

“Post-climate-catastrophe” is the giveaway, and reference to ‘Solarpunk’ doesn’t much help, either. This term is another too-broad category, and one often used to define a story as climate fiction, and I dare say that some solarpunk may be climate fiction as I define it. Please note that I’m not judging the quality or value of any particular work of ‘solarpunk’ fiction, but I am trying to explore what makes a short story or novel climate fiction.

By the way, N.E. McMorran’s climate anxiety is a perfectly fine reason to write a book, and “Cephalopod-inspired, full-bodied electronic sensory-powered skins” may be a nifty concept and the idea of everyone living in “a state of high-tech harmony with nature” is a good one on general principle. But what does this have to do with climate fiction? Climate change seems little more than premise in Moojag and it’s a bit like writing a book about paradise regained but not mentioning somewhere in the book that once paradise was lost and not referencing the juicy details of the matter. Moojag is set in the future, so there might be lessons to be learned, but the starting point — a post-climate-catastrophe — already literally distances the reader from the world within which the reader lives.

This is an important distinction, since the character’s world, if it reflects the readers’ own experiences, makes it a more likely world within which the readers will identify themselves. I’m hard-pressed to see the shared connection between the problems of today and a world of squid-based outerwear. Please note that I’m not suggesting Moojag is not interesting or will fail to engage readers, or that there cannot be readers who identify with characters or drama in the book, or that the book cannot possibly create compelling and effective metaphor. What I am wondering is whether Moojag is climate fiction. I am wondering if there’s any practical distinction between climate fiction and other kinds of fiction.

Why am I grumpy about what gets called Climate Fiction?

First, I find fiction that uses climate change simply as a premise not to be climate fiction, as per the above discussion. Second, I call The Steep Climes Quartet a “literary climate fiction series” because the issue of climate change is pervasive throughout the series, but the emphasis is on building well-developed characters living within a world of endemic climate change.

The reason why I’m writing climate fiction is that I’m interested in living in and understanding the world today and exploring how we humans might keep this world from turning more hellish. I could, of course, write a non-fiction book that explains the contributing factors of climate change and the various ways to reduce carbon emissions and slow — even eventually correct — climate change. There are many excellent books, Substacks, videos, and magazine explainers about climate change and the methods and strategies and technologies to ameliorate it. I do write about this and related topics on my website and Substack, in large part because writing about a subject is one of the best ways of learning about it. Being climate change literate seems an essential characteristic for writers of climate fiction.

Fiction does something for many people that non-fiction often fails at. Fiction has the greater capacity to make people identify with the subject through narrative — story — and therefore more likely to engage readers more directly in actions that might address the problems. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is a famous example of this potential effect: There were thousands upon thousands of nineteenth-century Americans who thought slavery evil, but Uncle Tom’s Cabin, not abolitionist pamphlets, helped more readers feel the insult of slavery and motivated significant political will against it.

I’m not concerned that people — let’s use Americans, even, since I am one — are unaware of climate change. There’s plenty of polling that shows large majorities of people across many countries are concerned about this. But what percentage of Americans believe that they can do something about climate change? What do people believe are the actions that they might take?

I asked Gemini AI:

According to long-running polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) and George Mason University, public sentiment centers around a few core metrics regarding agency and action.

The Percentage: Can We Do Something?

To understand if Americans think they can combat climate change, researchers look at two distinct dimensions of agency: collective efficacy (what we can do together) and individual efficacy (what I can do alone).

• • • The Optimistic Majority (Collective Action): Roughly 63% of Americans explicitly reject the idea that “it’s already too late to do anything about global warming.” The vast majority believe that humanity still possesses the window and capability to change the trajectory of the crisis.
    • The Personal Sense of Responsibility: About 59% to 62% of Americans state that they feel a personal sense of responsibility to help reduce global warming.
    • The Individual Skepticism Gap: Despite feeling a personal responsibility, Americans are split right down the middle when it comes to their own impact. 53% disagree with the statement “the actions of a single individual won’t make any difference,” meaning just over half believe their solo choices matter. Conversely, a massive 47% feel paralyzed by individual insignificance, agreeing that one person’s actions ultimately make no difference.

For me, the “paralyzed by individual insignificance” result is the most interesting. The same Yale program also looks at the actions people believe they can take to address climate change, and these are broken into three categories:

1. personal lifestyle adjustments
2. consumer behavior
3. civic/political action

Yet there is a massive gap between the actions people support conceptually versus the actions they actually take.

Is that gap a gap of imagination and empathy? Can climate fiction stories help close the gap?

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University results also report that while 64% of those polled note that they are worried about climate change, of this set only 20% discuss climate change with friends and family regularly. “44% of Americans report that they never discuss [climate change] with family or friends” and assume others care less about the subject. This leads to what the report calls “social silence.”

I believe that political action is the best and biggest lever for moving climate progress forward, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021 and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 support this belief despite the setbacks that followed.⁴ I believe that more talk, more news, and more stories about climate change that people can identify with may relieve people of suppressive social silence. Climate fiction, with compelling and identifiable characters, builds connections, empathy, and relatability to the relevant issues of climate change today.

The big question here is whether climate fiction stories can combat social silence. In the depths of climate fiction, can anyone hear you scream?

Climate Fiction is inherently difficult

Climate change — and what we should do — is complicated and confusing, and at least one part of the story is murkier and more confusing still, as dark money and special interests slosh about, buying regulatory agencies, lawmakers, Trump, and even the US Supreme Court, SCOTUS. Let’s not forget that there are wealth-driven, selfish, and malicious forces who seem happy enough to chance the world burning for a few extra bucks. Such forces are certainly a relevant subject for climate fiction, but when it comes to climate change — and therefore, to climate fiction — another problematic question is who provides news to others and what influences and points of view are therefore put forward in the media.

From a novel or story’s perspective, exaggeration has its own drawbacks, and too many climate fiction stories that only focus on catastrophic consequences of climate change tend to ring false notes. Not because such events don’t occur (and not because these events are not speeding up in frequency), but because for most of us in the developed world, mostly what we hear about climate change is through the news, whether newspapers, video, or social media. There’s plenty of extreme and catastrophic weather, but unless it is your house that gets washed away in a hurricane or your city that burns in a wildfire, you’re hearing about it in the news, so readers today may find it difficult to relate to a story if the characters of the climate fiction are constantly bombarded with extreme consequences, since this even now is not most peoples’ experience. I know, I know: just wait.

The timeframe of a climate fiction story or novel needs to anticipate the future, but whoever said that writing fiction is easy? The further out in time a writer places a story, the more speculative the consequences of future climate change. Maybe that’s why a lot of climate fiction is set in the ‘safe’ zone of distant times, where fewer readers will have a basis to judge the accuracy of the climate forecast and thus relieves the author from studying the best science on future climate consequences. With a lack of this knowledge comes a more likely failure of understanding.

Climate change is complicated in other ways, too, including in terms of costs and economics. I’d argue that income inequality and wealth concentration to a tiny minority is an apt subject for climate fiction, seeing that money interests are an integral part of the causes leading to climate change. The delay of climate action is also more likely in the face of wealth concentration that demands more from those who have less, and thus plays a potentially central role in how climate work might proceed. Climate fiction that includes any political and economic elements helps further to tie the reader to the real world.

It goes without saying that on a day-to-day basis most of us are primarily worried about paying next month’s power bill or car payment or rent. It is true that solar/BESS (Battery Energy Storage System) is the cost-competitive alternative to natural gas electricity generation, and advantageous too in its relatively quicker buildout timelines. Climate fiction that helps readers understand the complexity of the transition to clean energy, whether in pursuing digital grid management, DER/VPP (Distributed Energy Resources / Virtual Power Plant, a type of DER), and other aspects of clean energy buildout or in changing the character of energy regulations and legislation, is a story that readers will come to appreciate within compelling characters’ stories. Take the example of ‘affordability’ applied to energy: All of us climate tech wags know that clean energy is the cheapest and fastest way to go, even without talking about fossil fuel’s externalities, but placing these considerations into stories may help more people understand the more immediate realities. Climate fiction may be the most effective means of providing perspective about the work ahead. That perspective needs to be realistic about how the world operates and what the demands of politics and infrastructure are so that public support doesn’t fade because of phantom expectations. The golden age is coming, but it’s not here yet, and the journey forward will carry costs.

I’m not advocating for the dreaded ‘info-dump’ that plagues some climate fiction. Obviously, a piece of fiction that fails to entertain is a book never read. But engaging stories reflect the lives of the readers, and that holds especially true for climate fiction.

Days of Our Lives

For me, this is the climate story to tell today: a snapshot of where we are in regard to climate change, even as we’re still mostly thinking about that odd comment the wife or husband made at breakfast, or the kid’s soccer game this afternoon, or whether you can stand your boss for another day, or stop worrying about your best friend’s recent diagnosis.

You know, climate change as a subject within the days of our lives.

If we want the challenge of climate change to be real for people — and we do, since that makes it more likely more people vote for the right candidates to fight the mega-wealthy and Big Oil and other corporate self-interests — then we need stories that show real people — well, fiction’s substitute of compelling ‘real’ characters — living with the issues of climate change today and the near and mid-future. The problem with apocalyptic fiction and stories featuring magical creatures or new-and-improved humans in the far future is that such stories are irrelevant to the climate struggle in our lives.

Sure, I was an English Major, and I know about metaphor, allegory, parables, and the Hero’s Journey. I’ve studied Norman Friedman’s 14 types of stories that he believed all literary works are shaped by. I know that stories come in all forms and sizes, and that applies to climate fiction, too. But I also know that the premise of climate change is not the same as the subject of climate change. The subject of climate fiction is climate change and how we got to where we are and how we can do what needs doing to get to where we’d rather be. These days, where most of us would rather be is a world where our changing climate is less destructive rather than more destructive.

Fixing social silence

How does social silence about climate change get fixed? In climate fiction, we model how climate stories reflect our own lives and our own struggles to think about climate change or talk with other people about our fears and hopes. Talking with each other about our challenges is how political actions move forward. Conversation is oxygen for political metabolisms.

The clock is ticking. Let’s tell the right stories.

How are we going to do this? We speak the truth in our climate fiction work.

Here in America and in far too many places around the world, the most vivid priority is to keep democracy alive so that the right governmental policies, actions, and legislation can be pursued. We support pro-climate action/pro-energy transition people and get them into office at the federal, state, and local levels to legislate the right governmental actions.

We push not for pipedreams but for what is already known to be possible, and the possible today is downright glorious.

We talk about our lives and the lives of our communities and the realistic challenges of climate change.

Isn’t that the interesting climate story for our times?

References

1. Neurodivergence as a Blueprint for a Solarpunk Future, by N.E. McMorran (CFWL Substack, 2/6/26)
2. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
3. Weather, by Jenny Offill (Granta Books, 2021)

4. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), also called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), is a $1.2 trillion federal law signed on November 15, 2021. It invests $550 billion in new spending over five years for roads, bridges, public transit, clean water, high-speed internet, and power grids. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 is a landmark U.S. law designed to curb inflation, invest in domestic energy production and green manufacturing, lower greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40% by 2030, and reform prescription drug pricing under Medicare.

Further

David mentions the Climate Fiction Writers League (CFWL), which has 300+ authors from around the world and has published The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook. CFWL also published members’ posts on its Substack.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication conducts scientific studies on public opinion and behaviour, informs the decision-making of governments, media, companies, and NGOs, and educates the public about climate change. Their research includes Climate Change in the American Mind — surveys they run twice a year with George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (‘Mason 4C’).

In David’s accompanying ClimateCultures blog post, The Steep Climes Quartet: My Take on Climate Fiction, he shares insights into the challenges and creative approaches he adopts in writing his literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet.

David Guenette

A writer and author of literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet, who also writes about climate fiction and climate change science, technology and policies.

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