Climate Fiction

Rune Graulund

Related terms: Anthropocene, climate, climate justice, dystopia, Eco gothic, emission, environment, energy, science fiction, speculative fiction, utopia, weird fiction

‘Climate fiction’ is, in the narrowest of definitions, literary fiction about climate. More broadly speaking, ‘climate fiction’ can be said to include fictitious narratives about climate, for instance, in film, television, computer games, or comics. As such, climate fiction is defined by being fiction and by focusing on climate, either overtly or as a central premise that influences the characters and the world described. Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006), while certainly about climate, can thus not be said to be climate fiction. Contrast this to Cormac McCarthy’s grim novel The Road (2006), or the horror comedy Sharknado (2013), both of which can convincingly be argued to fit the genre even if they were perhaps not intended as such. While the novel and the film are clearly fictional, they are extremely different in tone and plot, and both are set in radically different climates from the one we know today. Most commonly, however, “climate fiction” is a term applied to literary short stories like Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Tamarisk Hunter” (2006) or Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s novel Lost Ark Dreaming (2024). These are stories set in a world in which the climate has shifted for the worse and often due to human pollution or other kinds of environmental mismanagement and overreach.

From the perspective of the environmental humanities, climate fiction thus dramatises and makes legible what can otherwise seem too incremental, obscure, or abstract. A rise of average global temperature of 1.5 or even double that over a century, perhaps, sounds insignificant to the layman. But if we are shown the effects of the latter through a projection a hundred years into the future, as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140 (2017), even the former figure will give most of us pause, regardless of expertise or any deep scientific understanding of global warming. Through narrative and the imaginary, climate fiction was one of the early drivers of public awareness of the costs of a shifting climate, and this article attempts to present some of the major contributions from climate fiction to the field. 

Defining Climate Fiction

Climate fiction can conjure a range of complex and sometimes contradicting feelings. The climate is something we should care about. But it is also, we have been told ad nauseam, something which we are not managing very well. In the news, on film, and in literature, the overarching message is that the climate is broken and that we, the politicians, the wealthy, someone is to blame. Consequently, in the public eye, climate fiction can reek of negativity, of doom, and an obsession with collapse. Yet in a world where we are bombarded with dire facts and statistics about rising temperatures, melting ice caps, incessant forest fires, and bleached coral reefs, it is perhaps no surprise that fiction, too, veers towards a future that is largely dystopian and apocalyptic.

As a literary term and genre, ‘climate fiction’ is to some extent relatively recent and can be seen as a direct response to the realities of a planet perceived to be in crisis. Yet in another sense, ‘climate fiction’ is as old as storytelling itself. In stories and mythologies like The Legend of Gilgamesh, the myth of Atlantis, or The Bible, flooding, droughts, and other forms of extreme environmental events shape the destinies not just of the central characters, but of entire peoples and civilisations. Similarly, looking back on texts predating the large-scale use of fossil fuels, it is certainly possible to read older texts in the light of ‘climate,’ even if they do not directly address climate as we understand it now through the insights offered by modern climate science. As such, climate fiction is and always has been instrumental with regard to the ways in which we interpret the world around us, as well as how we react in the present in order to plan for the future. Further, as Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye remark in The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction (2017), commenting on the apathy of the public and the lack of comprehension in the face of the dire predictions of the increasing scientific proof of catastrophic global warming, “humanistic disciplines can help to such findings and discover ways to address the public more effectively” (8). Here, Emmett and Nye argue, the environmental humanities can provide us with “knowledge that is affective, or emotionally potent, to be effective, or capable of mobilising social adaptation” (8), and climate fiction serves this need precisely.

A famous early example of a fiction in which climate is strongly present, and a text that in a sense came to be due to a changing climate, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Written in draft format in 1816, the so-called ’year without a summer’ caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia one year earlier in 1815, the global climate was at the time colder than usual. As Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori arrived at Lake Geneva, the group was forced to spend most of their time indoors due to the inclement weather. Bored, they decided to stage a story-writing competition, resulting in the story of Dr Frankenstein and his invention, the Creature, a sentient but tormented being abandoned by his creator.

The later rewriting and publication of Shelley’s tale in print format as a novel would become not just one of the most influential books in gothic and science fiction, but also a central trope of scientific overreach and human hubris that lasts to this day. Indeed, reading the novel now, some two hundred years after it was first published, Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein’s obsession to create artificial life without thought for the consequences seems prescient of a range of problems facing us in the twenty-first century. Yet while the novel can be (and has been) read as a morality tale applicable to everything from the invention of robots and AI, the atom bomb, and lab-grown meat (often referred to as “FrankenBeef”), weather and climate are both at the foreground and background of the novel. Reading the novel into the climactic context in which it was produced, with the hindsight of two centuries of emissions and climate science, Frankenstein can be said to be the product of climate change, but also an allegory of climate change, as it is now routinely viewed as one of the urtexts of scientific and technological arrogance.

The way in which climate fiction is most usually defined is, however, as a far more recent and self-conscious phenomenon. Coined by the journalist and activist Dan Bloom in 2007, it was initially described as speculative fiction centred around climate change. Initially, the focus was on science fiction either of the near or far future, in films like Waterworld (1995), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and Snowpiercer (2013), or in novels such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), Frank Shätzing’s The Swarm (2004), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). As Adam Trexler has argued in Anthropocene Fictions (2015), science fiction offers itself readily to climate change narratives not only because it tends to focus on the future, but also because of its wide imaginative scope. This is confirmed by Pieter Vermeulen in Literature and the Anthropocene (2020): “Because of the genre’s ability to reimagine the present as the past of a future yet to come, science fiction is less constrained by the demands of probability and the human scale, and can address urgent present-day concerns such as the dangers of biotech and energy depletion through the detour of, for instance, an imagined future” (Vermeulen 62).

While early studies of climate fiction tended to focus on science fiction as the primary expression of the genre, the term has since evolved to include other speculative genres, including the fantastic and the gothic (Smith and Hughes 2013; Edwards, Graulund, and Höglund 2022). N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015), which combines elements of science fiction with fantasy, is one such recent example, but this is also a trend discernible in popular culture more broadly speaking. Television shows like Game of Thrones (2011-2019), with its central refrain that “winter is coming,” contain characteristics of climate fiction, as does The Last of Us (2023-2025), in which a global mycelia infection driven by increased global temperatures is turning people into zombies. Since “global warming profoundly unsettles the dualistic modern thought predominant in Western societies, which is based on philosophical division of nature and culture” (Mehnert 9), a door has been opened to a wide variety of genre fiction in which sharp dualities between magic and realism, the natural and the supernatural, the human and the non-human are difficult to uphold.

A central feature of climate fiction is human culpability. While J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World (1962) is often listed as one of the earliest examples of climate fiction as we would recognise it today, more restrictive definitions of the genre find the label a misnomer due to the origin of the climate change described in this novel. Since the rising temperatures and waters in Ballard’s novel are caused by solar storms, events outside of human control and therefore also beyond blame, The Drowned World “forces us to confront climate change in terms of impact rather than cause” (Clarke 26). Ballard’s novel thus explores, like so many post-apocalyptic novels, how society and human nature would fare in a world in which the climate is radically different from what it used to be. As such, it provides what political theorist Claire P. Curtis calls “a terrain for thinking about the social contract” (Curtis 18). Postapocalyptic fiction, Curtis argues, is two-pronged in that it tells us “… how we should act to both keep this from happening and improve our chances of survival if it does happen” (Curtis 17-18). A novel like The Drowned World thus employs climate to make the reader ponder the world that is and the world that could be, but it also acts as a thought experiment concerning the way in which we humans define ourselves in the first place and the degree to which this is dependent on the environment we live in. In comparison to more recent climate fiction like Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018) or Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), where blame is clearly laid at the feet of human activity like industrialisation, capitalist drive for profit-maximisation, consumerism, pollution, and more, a novel such as The Drowned World does not have much to say about environmental impact or culpability. The changing climate in Ballard’s book is mainly an opportunity to investigate the interesting pathologies of a bizarre yet colourful set of characters in a tropical climate that used to be a clammy, grey, and boring London.

As Gregers Andersen points out in Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis (2020), there is no central consensus on what precisely defines ‘climate fiction.’ “Libraries, bookshops, journalists, and teachers apply the term to fictions varying wildly in form, genre, style, plot, and theme” (Andersen 1). Andersen proposes a more rigid and limited approach, arguing for a set of parameters that includes a direct description and address of climate change, preferably also with a clearly identifiable anthropogenic source. “Climate fiction,” as Andersen defines it, is necessarily a recent phenomenon, and authors situated historically as Ballard or earlier, simply did not have the scientific basis or even a general awareness that the primary cause of a changing climate as we are now experiencing it is anthropogenic.

Taking this reasoning further, one could argue that another marker of climate fiction is what kind of human activity, and what specific humans, are to carry the blame for a rapidly changing climate. In this, the discrepancy between the emissions of the Global North and the Global South is often highlighted. In Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), for instance, we are presented with a global adventure story that flits from Kolkata to New York, Los Angeles to Venice in order to show us both the local and the global impact of a heated climate. In Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017), the story is set in a dystopian near-future version of India, where water is fought over, and fresh air is reserved for the elites. And in Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor (2021), we witness a world that has largely been successful in transitioning to solar and wind power, but is fought over in a desert landscape ravaged by chronic and never-ending sandstorms.

Culpability/Causality

A different, yet interrelated issue central to much climate fiction concerns the distribution of generational guilt. Some writers of climate fiction aim to illustrate the uneven and unfair distribution of climate change over place, while others are more interested in the slow yet unstoppable change effected by shifts in climate over time. In John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019), for instance, a future Britain has been inundated literally and figuratively by water and by immigrants. As waters have risen, a wall has been built around the perimeter of what remains of the British Isles in order to protect it against the elements and ‘the Others,’ the people from beyond the wall. While the novel does treat the physicality of place and how to control it, it eventually becomes clear that the divide, which the book is particularly interested in exploring, is at least as much temporal as it is spatial.

In the aftermath of what has become known in the novel as ‘the Change’, the citizens of the fortified nation realise that there is a climate before and after this shift. It is difficult, however, to pinpoint an exact moment when this happened:

As you all know, the Change was not a single, solitary event. We speak of it in that manner because here we experienced one particular shift, of sea level and water, over a period of years, it is true, but it felt then, and when we look back on it today, still feels like an incident that happened, a defined moment in time with a before and an after. There was our parents’ world, and now there is our world (Lanchester 110).

What is clear, in this world of a before and an after, is that even if the event itself cannot be delineated precisely, there is a sharp divide between those born before the change (the parents) and those who are to inherit the world (the children). As the novel progresses, the divides internal to the younger generation, who are forced to patrol the wall against the sea, against immigrants, against the climate now and the climate to come, merge with the generation divide, and this is a rift presented as one that cannot be healed.

While countries like India, China, and many of the oil-rich nations of the Middle East have in recent decades joined (and in China’s case even surpassed) the US and the EU as top emitters, historically it has been countries from the Global North that caused by far the highest emissions. Further, as Rob Nixon points out in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), this unequal distribution is made doubly unfair in that the detrimental impact of global heating tends to hit earlier and harder in the impoverished Global South than in the affluent Global North. In the strictest of terms, however, no single person, generation, or nation can be said to be the cause of anthropogenic climate change. At the most fundamental level, anthropogenic climate change is caused by a range of structural and processual factors that have led to an extreme dependency upon fossil fuels, yet other forms of anthropogenic change to the environment do, of course, also contribute to a changing climate. Deforestation, for instance, leads to the release of carbon stored in the trees and stops the carbon capture of present and future arboreal growth, just as the excessive use of fertilisers in factory farming nitrous oxide, which leads to algae blooms in the ocean.

Discussions of when exactly anthropogenic climate change began have, too, like its subject matter, been heated and cannot be said to be laid at the carbon-releasing door of fossil fuels only. Suggestions going as far back as the invention of agriculture and the concomitant concept of “nature”, a “twelve-thousand-year structure” described as being akin to the ”lowest and perhaps most effective weapon of mass destruction yet devised” (Morton 5), is one such suggestion. But it is possible to go back even further, to the mass-scale use of fire over fifty thousand years ago, used by the indigenous peoples of Australia to produce more fertile soil (Flannery 1994). Others point to the invention of the more immediately obvious weapon of mass destruction, namely the explosion of the first atomic bomb in White Sands in 1945, as a convenient starting point.

Still, while the detonation of atomic bombs in wartime (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and peacetime (tests from the Bikini Atolls over Kazakhstan to the Australian desert) have been enormously destructive in terms of human, animal and plant life, as well as caused violent temporary change in local climate conditions, even the total accumulated contribution of nuclear explosions the world over is negligible compared to the emissions of carbon released through the use of fossil fuels. Similarly, while agriculture is incontrovertibly also a driver of climate change and has been for millennia past (Morris 2015; Scott 2017), agriculture’s impact on climate increased a hundredfold once it became literally and figuratively driven by fossil fuel. The clearing and tilling of a field in ancient Rome or of animal husbandry in the Indus Valley during the Harappan period is nowhere near the detrimental emissions and pollution of a contemporary American factory farm maintained with modern machinery in largely automated buildings, where thousands of animals are fed with mass-produced fodder originating perhaps thousands of miles away.

We return, then, to the unearthing and burning of fossil fuels in general and oil in particular as the central and most direct cause of climate change. With the industrial revolution (c. 1760-1840), largely made materially possible by the large-scale extraction and use of coal, the vast increase in emissions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would in the twentieth century grow exponentially as the former hegemony of coal was replaced by oil and “the narrative of petroleum” (LeMenager 4). While the wide-scale use of coal leads to a marked uptick in emissions from the eighteenth century onwards (Malm 2016), it is in the postwar years that we see an increase in the use of fossil fuels and oil in particular that is largely responsible for the situation we find ourselves in today: “The escalation since 1945 has been so fast that it goes sometimes by the name the Great Acceleration” (McNeill and Engelke, 5). Once more, we must then return to the questions of causality and blame, the discussion of which goes beyond climate to all the many and varied kinds of anthropogenic change that have ravaged the planet. 

Future Im/Perfect

The complexity of the issue is reflected in the disagreement over what to even call the current era we are living in. As Franciszek Chwałczyk remarked in 2020, “There are now at least 80–90 proposed alternatives to the term ‘the Anthropocene’, following critique mainly from the social sciences. The most popular seem to be Moore’s Capitalocene and Haraway’s Chthulucene, but there are others” (Chwałczyk, np). This number has likely risen in the intervening years. Further, even if we were to keep ‘the Anthropocene’ as the central operative concept of the current era, one should perhaps rephrase the singular term so that it includes ”a billion black Anthropocenes or none,” as Kathryn Yusoff has phrased it in the title of her short book of that name. If we fail to do so, ’we’ are complicit in constructing an ”Anthropocene history [that] is an attempt to reclaim an ’innocence’” (Yusoff 1) that obscures the dark and violent histories of the brutal extractive practices of minerals, plants, animals and humans that have led us to the state ’we’ are in today.

As Stephanie LeMenager has compellingly argued in Living Oil (2014), as a narrative and a mode of life, oil has proven very difficult to leave behind. Formulated alternatively by the Petroculture Research Group: “So long as the time and space of oil is taken as the world, the transition to a world after oil will remain categorically impossible” (PRG 25). While other kinds of fossil fuels (Pirani 2018) and fossil fuel narratives (Scott 2020) do play a role in heating the climate, the majority of climate fictions thus tend towards thematising environmental collapse caused by the continued use of coal and oil in particular, or towards presenting narratives of what may come to replace these sources of energy.

The question of how to motivate public and political action on the use (and preferably abandonment) of fossil fuels is thus, unsurprisingly, a staple of much climate fiction and possibly even more so of the critical literature concerned with this genre. As Amitav Ghosh quips in The Great Derangement (2016), an early if also somewhat dismissive study of climate fiction, “cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future” (Ghosh 72). Ghosh, himself a writer of science fiction and an author of novels (both before and since the publication of The Great Derangement) that can be classified as ‘climate fiction,’ is trivialising the role speculative fiction can play. He is correct, though, in observing the tendency of climate fiction to catastrophize. Fictions like Stephen Baxter’s The Flood (2008), Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City (2018), and Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock (2022) all revolve around dystopian or postapocalyptic settings for their effect. Narratives like these act as warnings for the sort of futures neither authors nor readers are likely to desire as their own.

A different tack to the dystopian route is offered by utopian narratives. Dystopia and utopia are always closely interconnected, and one person’s dystopia might be another’s utopia. Nevertheless, there is a clear distinction between the dark and gloomy tales of climate fiction of the kind Ghosh is lamenting and the tales presented in Solarpunk, for example, another recent genre of speculative fiction that “imagines sustainable, post-oil futures, normally in terrestrial environments that have undergone significant climate change” (Lynall 193). While still in its early phases, utopian genres like Solarpunk may yet offer a way out of this impasse, although this remains to be seen.

To partition all climate fiction into two categories, one dystopian and the other utopian, is, of course, to simplify what is in fact a highly complex field. As with so many dichotomies, the sticky, entangled mess of worlds both factual and fictional rarely follows neatly ordered lines and divisions. While much climate fiction is set in the future, for instance, and while the majority of such fictions follow the template of what can, in a broader sense, be said to conform to the genre of science fiction, other forms and modes of climate fiction have been gaining traction. As discussed in the introduction to Justin D. Edwards, Rune Graulund and Johan Höglund’s edited volume Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (2022), “the realities of planetary destruction are disseminated in gothic fiction” in ways that “conventional realism has struggled to imagine” (Edward, Graulund and Höglund ix, xi). Still, non-fantastic forms of climate fiction have in fact seen an increase in recent years, with for instance American Jenny Offil’s Weather (2020), Danish Theis Ørntoft’s Jordisk (2023), or Nigerian Abi Daré’s And So I Roar (2024) being recent examples of novels with a clear climate agenda, but otherwise conforming to the traditional realist genres of the confessional novel, the family saga and the Bildungsroman.

With respect to the import of ‘climate fiction’ in the environmental humanities, one must consider and reconsider the form and the definition of the term. Narrowly defined, the ‘fiction’ in ‘climate fiction’ has been interpreted to mean ‘literature’ as it has traditionally been delineated by the Western canon. Indeed, to many, climate fiction can be even more narrowly defined: short stories and, in particular, novels. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh pointed out that in an age of extremes and of scales that go far beyond the individual human, or even generational, perspective, the novel may have outlived its usefulness. With a tendency to focus on the development of the individual human, or at most scores of characters, Ghosh argued, the novel has, historically speaking, been resolutely anthropocentric as an art form. Time will tell if climate fiction will manage to expand to a planetary perspective, or if it will once again contract around the human and the quotidian.

Attempts have been made, in fiction as in critical theory, to provide non-anthropocentric ontologies that go beyond or even fully ignore the human. Ecologists and philosophers have asked us to “think like a mountain” (Leopold 1949), to consider “what it is like to be a bat” (Nagel 1974), and to wonder” how forests think” (Kohn 2013). Similarly, numerous examples from fiction point us towards life worlds that are radically different than the human, ranging from various permutations of alien life forms so different in shape, being and perspective they can be difficult to communicate with conceptualise (Lovecraft 1931; Strugatsky and Strugatsky 1972; Chiang 2002; Cixin 2006), on to life of such grand scale and temporality that even conceptualising these as forms of life can be difficult (Stapledon 1937; Lem 1961). In critical terminologies, this ‘nonhuman turn’ (Grusin 2015) has taken on many forms and names, including but not limited to fields like Thing Studies, New Materialism, Critical Posthumanism, Animal Studies, or Critical Plant Studies. All these offer valid and much-needed reevaluations of anthropocentric thinking. Further, as a reaction to and dismantling of Enlightenment thinking of ‘Man’ as of the notion of a universal humanity that is anything but, climate fiction seems an ideal genre in which to throw the net wider than the so-called human condition seeing as a shifting climate affects water as well as air, land and sea, animal and marine life, clouds and forests, glaciers and shorelines.

Yet the question remains how to pivot from anthropocentric perspectives in fiction, which is inevitably written in languages that tend to be human and are focalised through some kind of voice emanating from a human author. Forms of fiction outside literary fiction proper may offer avenues in the environmental humanities that are better suited for non-anthropocentric perspectives where prose cannot.

An example of the difficulty of conveying a non-anthropocentric turn via text is offered in the closing pages of Annihilation (2014), Jeff VanderMeer’s novel about the mysterious Area X in which anything human will, over time, change and morph into something else; the narrator-protagonist is about to shed her humanity, too. While we as (human) readers are at the end of the book, for the (soon to be not-human) protagonist and narrator, both the journey onwards and her very being ‘is just beginning, and the thought of continually harming myself to remain human seems somehow pathetic’ (194). As she informs us, in writing, ‘I plan to continue into Area X, to go as far as I can’ (194). But for her to go further, for her to leave her human form and voice behind to ascend to a true non-anthropocentric perspective, she has to exit writing, and the book, too, leaving ‘us,’ the readers, stranded on the textual shore. 

References

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Films and Series

Benioff, David and D.B. Weiss (showrunners). 2011-2019. Game of Thrones. HBO. 73 episodes.

Emmerich, Roland (director). 2004. The Day After Tomorrow. 20th Century Studios. 124 mins.

Ferrante, Anthony C. (director). 2013. Sharknado. Syfy. 85 mins.

Joon Ho, Bong (director). 2013. Snowpiercer. CJ Entertainment. 126 mins.

Mazin, Craig and Neil Druckmann (showrunners). 2023-2025. The Last of Us. 16 episodes.

Reynolds, Kevin (director). 1995. Waterworld. Universal Pictures. 135 mins.