Essential Climate Change Fiction
Stories we need to help us understand and change who we are
Many folks have lately been advocating that we need to tell new stories to help us come to grips with climate change, ecological overshoot, and the collapse of our civilisation, and to think about its aftermath. Here are some terrific works of fiction I’ve found that fit the bill for me. If you have others to recommend, please tell us about them in the comments section.
Everybody is talking about Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future. The shocking opening chapter about a major heat wave event in India is required reading. (BTW, Kim is a dude, if you were wondering.)
The Road by Cormack McCarthy (2006) is already a classic. It is the story of a man and a boy travelling a long road in early post-apocalyptic times. Not much happens, but the story paints an unforgettable portrait of devastation and struggling hope. There is a movie but I haven’t seen it. I watched the trailer and they seem to have pumped it up into a big action movie. I won’t watch it because it will spoil the feeling of the book for me.
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (2012) are important. You may have run across references to Earthseed*, a psuedo religion central to this story. I read the second book, Talents, first, and that honestly may be a better order. If you’ve never encountered any of Butler’s remarkable work, you are in for a treat. Sadly, Butler, possibly science fiction’s only successful black female author ever, passed in 2006.
* Not to be confused with Ursala K. Le Guin’s Earthsea fantasy series.
Camus’s The Plague (1947), about a town ravaged by pestilence, is relevant since plagues like COVID are part of climate change. I was reluctant, thinking Camus meant a heavy philosophical slog, but The Plague is surprisingly readable and highly relatable.
Margaret Atwood, yes, she of The Handmaiden’s Tale, wrote a trilogy starting with Oryx and Crake in 2004, that paints a picture of a world restarting in the aftermath of a devastating plague (an apocalypse MaGuffin). It’s not a post-apocalyptic gore-fest but a more interesting take on the simple question of “How do we go on?” There is weirdness, too.
Author Neal Stephenson essentially invented the cyberpunk genre with 1992’s Snow Crash. [Wrong! William Gibson invented it, as T.J. and Crimm point out in their responses.] His latest, 2021's Termination Shock, is a story based around a private Texas company’s geo-engineering project to mitigate global warming. Interesting and entertaining, and it is nice to revisit the old master, but it doesn’t really add much to the climate change discussion.
2009’s Ishmael by Daniel Quinn: Is it a novel? Philosophy? Anthropology? This book and its two successors are impossible to pigeon-hole. Ishmael is a wise talking gorilla who teaches us who we (modern humans) are, how we got here, and what a dilemma we are facing. Eminently readable and unforgettably revealing, it is certain to change the way you think about yourself and our society. The follow-on books go more or less over the same ground but you will be happy to read them as your brain cries out for more. At least my brain did. I suggest you read one, wait a while, then go on to the next one for a refresher course.
— Lannie Rose, March 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
Written with NO HELP from ChatGTP or other AI resource
(All book cover images screen-shotted from Amazon.com)
