As a writer who engages with climate issues in my fiction, I can be picky about such portrayals by other writers. I’m less interested in factual veracity than I am in the psychological truth of the lived-in moment: Fiction, I feel, is less suited to prediction or policy recommendations than it is to immersing readers in situations that show the reality of what an experience might feel like.
While I’ve chosen purely speculative novels, the sobering reality is that we are living in the middle of a climate crisis now and thus any contemporary novel can grapple with it — say, a romance set in Houston where flooding swamps the city during a hurricane. Similarly, novels from and about the past can easily be re-contextualized as speaking to our current situation. While most would point to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” as climate fiction, you might just as easily look to his earlier novel “Blood Meridian,” where the past seems like prologue to our present.
The novels I recommend below — many of which I’ve championed in the past — may reassure simply by being so clearly fictional. I worry that, in the decades ahead, they will come to seem ever more realistic. But don’t fret: Grim monotone makes for a boring novel, so there’s a liveliness to my selections that I hope will challenge and reinvigorate readers — even amid the darkness.
Private Rites
by Julia Armfield
This novel by the author of the widely acclaimed “Our Wives Under the Sea” posits a near-future of constant rain and flooding in Britain. Against this backdrop, three sisters try to make sense of both the changing climate and the death of their father, a lauded architect whose creations include their family home. In the aftermath of his passing, the women — Isla, Irene and Agnes — return to the house, where their father’s influence on not just the past but the present and future becomes clear in startling and evocative ways. The sui generis quality of “Private Rites” comes from its beautiful rendering of mundane life and loss juxtaposed with a soggy, almost Gothic atmosphere.
Read our review.
Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
The biotech science of Atwood’s 2003 foray into a ruined future may seem dated now, but the book’s foregrounding of a pandemic and its whiffs of colonialism and iffy scientific ethics are no less relevant. Atwood gets to the heart of our current climate problems in exploring how the scientist Crake tries to establish control over living things, and how his best friend Jimmy, a.k.a. Snowman, tries to live beside them. The Ballardian feel but impressionistic expression of details like the “rosy, deadly glow” of sunrise or the “reefs of rusted car parts” puts the reader firmly in the moment without overwhelming with speculative flair.
Read our review.
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler
It has become almost cliché to name-check Butler when discussing hyper-relevant dystopian fiction, but her work itself remains as fresh and prescient as ever. Never in its history has the United States needed Butler and her vision more than now (except, of course, for all the other times this has been true). A terrifying glimpse into the effects of climate change, “Parable of the Sower” also documents the breakdown of society over festering wealth and racial inequality. Butler offers hope in the resiliency of Lauren, the novel’s teenage protagonist, whose strength and faith inspire against the ominous backdrop.
Read our review.
The Dosadi Experiment
by Frank Herbert
The sand worms of “Dune” are Herbert’s most famous climate fiction creation, but the ecologically perilous planet of Dosadi might be even more relevant to our times. Dosadi is uninhabitable except for a narrow valley populated by some 90 million souls. This despotic city-state — constrained not just by walls but by the titanic efforts of rationing, recycling and water reclamation necessary for survival — sets the stage for a spy story about an agent for the Bureau of Sabotage on a mission for a powerful alien civilization. To connect the valley of this novel to the Earth of today is no stretch and exemplifies how fiction can render visible what can seem hard to make concrete through both distance (a fictional world) and scale (one valley rather than an entire planet).
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
When it was published in 1969, “The Left Hand of Darkness” was hailed as a Jack London thriller crossed with a first contact story. But it feels much more ominous at a time when extreme, barely livable environments on Earth are becoming more and more ubiquitous. The novel chronicles life on the planet Winter through a series of botched cross-cultural exchanges between Genly, a human envoy from an intergalactic empire, and various local governments. A journey across ice fields by Genly and an ally from Winter is not only one of the great adventure narratives of the 20th century: It’s also a poignant reminder of how we must adapt to our environment in order to stave off catastrophe.
Read our guide to Le Guin’s essential works.
American War
by Omar El Akkad
Few authors have predicted the current political chaos in the U.S. — and its devastating repercussions on so many lives — as chillingly as El Akkad does in this novel about a family navigating a second American civil war starting in the 2070s. In this dystopian future, the South secedes so it can continue extracting fossil fuels, despite the environmental consequences. The racism on display, the prison camps for undesirables, the ways — both intimate and geopolitical — that El Akkad chronicles one possible future should all be extremely alarming as the real political situation in the U.S. continues to devolve.
Read our review.
Theory of Bastards
by Audrey Schulman
Francine, an evolutionary biologist suffering from endometriosis, falls in love while studying bonobos at a remote research institute, as the world outside falls apart. This is perhaps the most refreshingly unique novel on the list, combining stunning observations of the nonhuman with a refreshingly complex protagonist. Political instability caused by the climate crisis is juxtaposed with how bonobos, for example, “don’t go to war with rival groups; they’ve never been recorded to kill.” As Francine’s professional and personal worlds transform, so does the situation beyond the institute — culminating in a third act that is both compassionate and extremely wise about our modern condition.
Black Wave
by Michelle Tea
In this dreamlike novel, the author’s mirror self, Michelle, hangs out at Los Angeles dive bars and slam poetry events while doing drugs, having sex and navigating quixotic relationships and the looming threat of environmental collapse. You can smell the “flat beer stench” as Tea’s street-level, queer epic rollicks across a messy but often tender life — like a non-misogynistic Henry Miller fused with gritty cyberpunk. The environmental flourishes, like invasive lion fish described as the “Mad Maxes of the sea,” have a tossed off, lived-in quality that sets this book apart from most climate fiction. “Black Wave” feels wholly of the future — a slow dance with growing uncertainty.
Read our review.
The post Jeff VanderMeer’s Favorite Climate Fiction Novels appeared first on New York Times.
