Climate fiction

Climate fiction is narrative fiction that foregrounds climate change and its effects on environments, societies, and human lives. It includes stories set in both the present and imagined futures.

The Ministry for the Future: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel follows an international agency created to address climate change. Its political and institutional plot makes climate action the story’s central engine.
Cli-fi: Cli-fi is a popular shorthand for fiction concerned with climate change. The label often names the same body of work, though its boundaries can be narrower or more promotional.
Rachel Carson: Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist and writer whose work exposed environmental harms from pesticides. Her environmental writing helped establish literary attention to human-driven ecological damage.
Environmental literature: Environmental literature explores relationships between human societies and the natural world. Climate fiction is one part of this broader tradition, with climate change as its foregrounded concern.
The Overstory: Richard Powers’s 2018 novel interweaves the lives of people connected to trees and forests. Its linked human and arboreal lives expand climate storytelling beyond human-centered plots.
Anthropocene: The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marked by substantial human influence on Earth systems. Its deep-time framing informs climate fiction’s tension between human actions and planetary processes.
Silent Spring: Rachel Carson’s 1962 book documented ecological and health risks associated with pesticide use. Its persuasive account of environmental harm offers a precursor to fiction’s climate-centered public storytelling.
Ecofiction: Ecofiction is fiction that makes ecological relationships or environmental concerns central to its subject or form. Its scope includes pollution, animals, and habitats beyond climate change alone.
Parable of the Sower: Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel follows a young woman traveling through a collapsing near-future California. Its social breakdown and environmental pressures anticipate recurring climate-fiction concerns.
Slow violence: Slow violence is gradual, often dispersed harm that unfolds beyond the scale of dramatic events. Climate fiction gives narrative form to damage that accumulates slowly and unevenly.

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