Climate fiction

Based on Wikipedia: Climate fiction

In 2020, Kim Stanley Robinson published The Ministry for the Future, a novel that imagined what happens when climate catastrophe becomes policy. The book was not merely fictional—it generated presidential mentions, United Nations invitations, and a Pentagon meeting with the author himself. It arrived at a moment when the genre it represents had finally found its name.

That name is "climate fiction," or "cli-fi"—a term coined by freelance reporter and climate activist Dan Bloom in 2007 or 2008 to describe literature that grapples with one of humanity's most urgent challenges. The designation stuck, even if Bloom himself felt the media overlooked his role in coining it.

What exactly is cli-fi? It is literature that deals with climate change—usually speculative, often dystopian, occasionally utopian, and frequently science fictional in its methods. But unlike pure science fiction, climate fiction centers on our world undergoing transformation: works may take place in the present we recognize, in a near future we might inhabit, or in imagined worlds where climate disruption has reshaped everything. The genre distinguishes itself from general disaster literature by focusing specifically on anthropogenic change—human-caused shifts in temperature, sea level, weather patterns, and ecosystem collapse—rather than natural disasters unlinked from human activity.

The genre's emergence has been uneven, marked by decades of precursors before anyone called the category by name.

The Pioneers

Long before "cli-fi" existed as a term, certain authors were already imagining what climate catastrophe might look like. J.G. Ballard, the British science fiction writer, produced several works that explored climate-related disasters with uncanny prescience. The Wind from Nowhere (1961) imagined civilization devastated by persistent hurricane-force winds. The Drowned World (1962) depicted a future where melted ice caps and rising sea levels have transformed the planet. His later work The Burning World (published as The Drought in 1964) portrayed a climate catastrophe caused not by natural forces but by industrial pollution disrupting precipitation cycles.

Laurence Manning's 1933 serialized novel The Man Who Awoke has been called an exemplary work of ecological science fiction from what scholars call the genre's golden age. The story follows a man who awakens from suspended animation in various future eras and discovers that Earth's climate has been destroyed by fossil fuel overuse, global warming, and deforestation. People of the future refer to twentieth-century humans as "the wasters"—a term that carries both condemnation and pity.

Isaac Asimov later credited The Man Who Awoke with bringing the "energy crisis" to his attention forty years before it became common knowledge in the 1970s.

Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel Dune, set on a fictional desert planet, has been proposed as an early pioneer of climate fiction for its themes of ecology and environmentalism. The novel explores how scarce water shapes religion, politics, and survival on Arrakis—a planet where climate itself became the central character.

The Modern Classics

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) imagines a near-future United States where climate change, wealth inequality, and corporate greed have caused apocalyptic chaos. The novel dissects how instability and political demagoguery exacerbate society's underlying cruelty—especially regarding racism and sexism—while exploring themes of survival and resilience.

Butler wrote the novel "thinking about the future, thinking about the things that we're doing now and the kind of future we're buying for ourselves, if we're not careful."

Margaret Atwood explored similar territory in her dystopian trilogy: Oryx and Crate (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). In Oryx and Crate, Atwood presents a world where social inequality, genetic technology, and catastrophic climate change have finally culminated in an apocalyptic event. The novel's protagonist, Jimmy, lives in a "world split between corporate compounds," gated communities that have grown into city-states, and pleeblands—"unsafe, populous and polluted" urban areas where working classes struggle.

Michael Crichton's State of Fear (2004), a techno-thriller, was a bestseller upon release but faced sharp criticism from scientists for portraying climate change as "a vast pseudo-scientific hoax" and rejecting the scientific consensus on global warming. The novel's political simplicity troubled those who saw climate fiction as a space for nuanced engagement with contested science.

Susan M. Gaines's Carbon Dreams (2000) was an early example of a literary novel that "tells a story about the devastatingly serious issue of human-induced climate change," set in the 1980s and published before the term "cli-fi" was coined—or at least before it entered mainstream discourse.

Sigbjørn Skåden's novel Fugl (2019) is a Sámi novel written in Norwegian that weaves environmental collapse with an allegory of colonialism—connecting ecological crisis to questions of indigenous rights and cultural survival.

Entering the Mainstream

The term "climate fiction" began appearing in the 2010s, though it was retroactively applied to works spanning decades. By the 2010s, climate fiction had attracted greater prominence and media attention.

Cultural critic Josephine Livingston at The New Republic wrote in 2020 that "the last decade has seen such a steep rise in sophisticated 'cli-fi' that some literary publications now devote whole verticals to it."

The genre generated presidential and United Nations mentions, invitations for authors to meet planners at the Pentagon, and significant coverage in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Dissent magazine. Organizations like Grist, Outside Magazine, and the New York Public Library have compiled lists of recommended climate fiction.

University courses on literature and environmental issues now routinely include climate change fiction in their syllabi—a sign that the genre has achieved academic legitimacy alongside cultural recognition.

The Critical Conversation

Not everyone celebrated this emergence. In 2016, Indian writer Amitav Ghosh expressed concern that climate change had "a much smaller presence in contemporary literary fiction than it does even in public discussion." His book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unconscious asked what literary forms must do to negotiate these "waters"—or whether they would fail as aspects of a broader imaginative and cultural failure at the heart of the climate crisis.

But critic Mark Bould argued something different in The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. He suggested that "art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness"—that the cultural moment already contains the seeds of what needs to be written.

The Canon Takes Shape

Since 2010, prominent cli-fi authors have included Kim Stanley Robinson—who has become perhaps the genre's most visible name—alongside Richard Powers, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Barbara Kingsolver. Each brings different techniques: Robinson with his gift for bureaucratic detail and policy imagination; Powers with structural innovations that mirror environmental complexity; Bacigalupi with world-building that makes climate consequences feel visceral; Kingsolver with narratives that show how intimately human lives intersect with ecological systems.

The publication of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future in 2020 helped cement the genre's emergence. The novel imagines a body constituted by humans, animals, and ecosystems—legal entities whose rights are vindicated through tribunals and tribunals—against the backdrop of climate catastrophe. It proved that cli-fi could be both commercially successful and culturally consequential.

What makes this literature distinct? Climate fiction typically involves anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society. The genre frequently includes science fiction, dystopian and utopian themes—imagining potential futures based on research about the actual impacts of climate change.

Perhaps most significantly, climate fiction asks what kind of world we're building. It is literature that does not merely warn but imagines—what happens when we succeed at stopping emissions, or fail to stop them? What do adaptation and resilience look like in practice?

The genre has arrived—uncertain as its future may be.