5 Celebrated Climate Fiction Titles to Explore
As the world becomes more aware of climate change, it’s no surprise that the topic has found its way into literary works and blossomed into a new genre. Climate fiction, or cli-fi as it’s sometimes known, is a type of speculative fiction that uses a climatic disaster or a changing climate as a major plot device.
It can overlap with science fiction and feature dystopian and utopian themes. Climate fiction also runs the gamut from light to heavy reads, and more often than not, includes sound explanations backed by science, technology and economics.
If you’re new to this genre, here are five celebrated cli-fi books to borrow today.
1. Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman
Novelist Patrick Hamlin heads to Hollywood with several goals in mind: work on a film adaptation of one of his books; prevent child star Cassidy Carter from derailing said adaptation; and resuscitate his ailing career and impress his wife and daughter back home.
But California is far from what he had imagined. Tap water has become so scarce in the state that it’s now a luxury. People in California survive on WAT-R, an artificial substitute. Patrick gets suspicious when he learns of people falling victim to a new phenomenon called “Random-Onset Acute Dementia”. In an unlikely partnership with Cassidy, he decides to investigate the link between the new disease and WAT-R, as well as the real reasons why the film production that they’re working on appears to be cursed.
In Something New Under the Sun, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. Through a cross-genre of climate horror story, Hollywood satire and mystery novel, Kleeman explores human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies and ultimately, responsibility to the truth.
Get the book here: Physical Copy, eBook, Audiobook
2. South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby
Cooper Gosling, an artist, finds herself re-evaluating her life after her twin brother’s death. To seek inspiration for her next project, she applies for an opportunity to live in South Pole Station, situated in Antarctica, where the average temperature is minus 48 deg C and perpetual night is the norm for half the year. There, she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own.
When a fringe scientist claiming that climate change is a hoax arrives, his presence rattles the already-imbalanced community. Cooper and the station inhabitants find themselves dragged into the centre of a global controversy that threatens the ice-covered continent they now call home.
Author Ashley Shelby explores themes such as survival extremes, climate change denial and political biases in her wry and witty debut novel. Hop on for a hope-filled misadventure as Cooper and her new community muster the courage to band together while everything around them falls apart.
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3. Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
A young wife and mother on a failing farm in rural Tennessee stumbles upon a hillside covered with swathes of orange monarch butterflies that look like a lake of fire in the forested valley.
Dellarobia Turnbow, our protagonist, finds internet fame when she gets credited for discovering a new pattern of butterfly migration. It sparks a raft of explanations from scientists, religious leaders and the media, prompting Ovid Byron, an entomologist who blames the phenomenon on climate change, to move into town to investigate.
He hires Dellarobia to help research the monarch butterflies’ unprecedented behaviour, but Dellaboria doesn’t believe in climate change because she wasn’t taught about it in school or in her church. Meanwhile, the rest of the rural community struggles to make sense of the relentless rainfall unexpectedly flooding their town.
Through these plot arcs and characters, author Barbara Kingsolver weaves in discussions on climate change and shares sympathetic insights on how some climate change deniers come to be. Yet, it’s clear from the scientific facts and explanations on global warming peppered throughout the book that Kingsolver wants to stress that climate change is anything but a hoax.
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4. The Overstory by Richard Power
The Overstory presents an ambitious structure of introducing nine protagonists through short stories in the first part of the book. Titled “Roots”, this section tells the stories of seemingly separate lives tied together by the common cause of nature activism. In the subsequent sections titled “Trunk”, “Crown” and “Seeds”, we watch how the nine lives intertwine, fighting to save trees and lobbying against logging companies destroying American forests.
Ultimately, The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, is a passionate book about environmental activism, humans and our relationship with the environment. A delightful but difficult read, this novel plants a clear warning from Richard Powers that humans are wreaking havoc on our planet through overconsumption. He also shows us that trees, like us, are social, have their own sophistications and hold more power and wonder than we give them credit for.
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5. The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
It’s the year 2025, and a new world organisation called the Ministry for the Future is incepted by the United Nations. Its purpose: to advocate for future generations and to protect all living creatures. But a mere two months later, 20 million people die in a heat wave in rural India, and everything changes.
A story told from multiple points of view and through anonymous eyewitnesses, we follow Mary Murphy, the head of the ministry, and Frank May, the sole survivor from the heat wave, and their efforts to save the world. Through Mary’s perspective, we learn about the different ways to tackle climate change: geoengineering, renewable energy, reducing carbon emissions from travelling and more.
For this reason, The Ministry for the Future doesn’t feel like a dystopian novel even though it tackles climate change and the unsustainability of our capitalist economic system. There’s a sense of optimism that it is possible to reverse the damaging effects that we’ve inflicted upon the earth and ourselves. Author Kim Stanley Robinson delves into various topics including engineering, technology and economics to show that solutions are out there, and we just have to keep trying.
Get the book here: Physical Copy, eBook, Audiobook
