A climate fiction syllabus

Climate fiction is literature in any medium which explores how climate change might transform the world, and how humans respond.  It’s a powerful and, I think, essential genre for our century.

I’m writing about climate fiction* today because an educator and colleague asked me to.  Joshua Kim is Director of Online Programs and Strategy at Dartmouth College. He’s also an Inside Higher Ed columnist who is – by far – their writer most keenly focused on climate change.  He’s been a terrific supporter of my Universities on Fire book.  Last week he posted about what his ideal climate fiction class syllabus might look like.  I had to follow suit.

I’m thinking of a college class, either undergraduate or graduate. A high school class could sample this.  What follows is too much, most likely, so anyone trying to use it would really have to carve out what they can best use.

Each entry has some introduction, along with why I include it in this class.  I tried to pick materials which each offer something different from the others: small scale and huge, satire and grimness, historical fiction and future-oriented stories.  There’s some sense of a sequence here, starting with groundwork, then some more accessible texts, then building up in scale and out into variations.  I linked to Wikipedia pages for each title, where available, and otherwise to authors.

I don’t include any nonfiction explainers about climate change.  Fortunately those are plentiful, many freely available.

All of the readings are novels or novellas. I haven’t to a short story anthology that I’d recommend as a whole yet.  Maybe I should start assembling one.

One caution to consider: such a class will represent a major emotional stress for some participants.  I say this as someone who has taught literature of war. It might trigger students, along with any support staff and, of course, the instructor(s). Reading after reading depicting epic human suffering may take a toll. I have tried to include works with optimism and hope as best as I could.

I’ll start with books, then move on to other media.

1: Novels

• Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (2016). This is a series of essays, so it’s nonfiction, and a fine grounding for any examination of the fiction.  Ghosh makes the case that several centuries of mainstream literature have taught us that humanity has completely tamed nature, and this helps explain why we’re so wrongfooted by global warming.  He asks good questions about what climate fiction might do and look like.

Midjourney imagines a university class studying climate fiction

• T. C. Boyle, Blue Skies (2023). The novel traces a family as they try to wrap their lives around escalating natural disasters. It has a narrow focus on a handful of characters.  It also has the author’s wry satirical gaze.  That combination of attitude and scale might make it a good first reading.
• Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (2012). The setting is Appalachia, as an unusual butterfly migration upends a poor family. The focus on rural, lower socio-economic status characters stands out from a lot of climate fiction.
• Monica Byrne, The Actual Star (2021). A fascinating, criminally underappreciated work of science fiction, this novel manages to include history, utopia, and myth through an usual combination of settings: a thousand years in the past, the present, and a thousand years hence. I recommend this as an example of how far imaginative fiction can go under the climate fiction aegis.
• Paulo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (2015).   A thriller taking place in a lethally drought-stricken American southwest, so a good example of blending those two genres.  It’s very smart, builds a depressingly realistic world, and is rich with local details.  (We read it for our online bookclub.). Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock (2021), a geoengineering thriller, might be an alternative here.
• Stephen Markely, The Deluge (2023). This sprawling work is something close to a social novel, tracing a lot of characters across American society, from poor outcasts to the White House.  It’s very political in many ways, including the story of crafting an ambitious climate change law.
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (2020). Another sprawling novel, here Robinson portrays humanity struggling to grapple with the crisis – and actually getting it more or less right.  Important and inspiring for its positive vision. (Here’s our online book club reading.)
• Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild Built (2021). Another work of speculative fiction, this story takes place on another world where people have managed to reorder a good life after a climate-crisis-ish disaster.  It’s an example of the solarpunk idea, an attempt to imagine the best possible world in light of global warming.  It’s also very soothing and kind. And short.  (As an exercise I like to ask people to Google image search for “solarpunk” as a discussion starter.)
• Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus (2015). This imagines southern California and points inland after climate change has inflicted horrendous droughts on the region. We follow several characters as they plunge into the resulting deserts. I picked this because the prose becomes lyrical in ways I find unusual in the genre. It also engages with religion.
• Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003).  This apocalyptic novel is about climate change and a series of other crises which bring down humanity, including disease, genetic engineering, consumerism, and more.  It depicts an increasingly dystopian society.  I think it’s interesting for our class to consider texts which include climate change this way, as one powerful element but not the total one.  (I also admire the sequels, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam,) For this purpose we could also use Octavia Butler’s powerful The Parable of the Sower (1993), which traces a society breaking down under climate change and other problems.  A heroine starts building a movement to survive.

2: Film and tv

The most important text here is, by far, the astonishingly underseen Extrapolations (Apple TV; 2023).  The series consists of linked stories, one per episode, which imagine decades hence as the world largely fails to cope with climate change. Each story differs from the others in terms of tone, genre, and location, offering a political thriller, a heist, a Jewish community story, a science (marine biology) story, and so on.  It’s uneven, with the first and last episodes being the weakest, I think, but well worth watching and discussing. (my notes on episodes 1-3 then 4-8)

The best known movie isn’t about climate change, except by way of allegory.  Don’t Look Up (Netflix; 2021) is a dark satire about a comet threatening the Earth, and the many bad ways we might respond: willful ignorance, bad technology, distraction.  It’s easy to read as a cautionary tale about climate.

Franny Armstrong‘s The Age of Stupid (Dogwoof; 2009) is actually about climate change directly.  A satirical mockumentary, it concerns a survivor in the future who explains to us why humanity failed to address climate change.

I’m not sure about Bong Joon-ho‘s Snowpiercer (2013).  It’s a terrific film about bitter survival, but is based on the opposite of global warming.  Should we include it as an exploration of geoengineering gone wrong?  Perhaps.

3: Extra materials

There’s so much more to recommend, depending on where such a class wanted to go.

• There are many interesting antecedents to consider, especially in terms of ecological fiction.  The 1960s and 1970s saw many of these.  Perhaps the most powerful is John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972), which shows humanity struggling with environmental disasters and failing to grasp them in the end.  J.G. Ballard‘s quartet of destroyed world novels (The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, The Crystal World) offer by contrast surreal visions of humanity in grim transitions.
• I said I wouldn’t include nonfiction, but did begin with Ghosh, and now want to leave with Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). This is an enormously complex and challenging collection of essays and stories which push the boundaries of what we think about climate change and our responses.  Haraway teases out new implications for the language we use, how we think about science in global warming, and much more.  A key theme is rethinking human reproduction.  It actually includes nominal fiction, with a story imagining a new human-animal world.  It’s very rich and also funny.

I’ll stop there for now.  There are books I haven’t read, which I’d like to, which might work for this syllabus, like Ian McEwan’s Solar.  I’d like to find more non-American and non-European titles, and am looking forward to Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Alistair Mackay’s It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way. I’m not sure if the great Richard Powers’ recent novels The Overstory or Bewilderment count as climate fiction.  I need to restart Claire North’s Notes from the Burning Age.

I’d like to do another post about short stories, which also involves reading more, like the Grist Imagine 2200 and Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors collections.

(many thanks to many friends, including Krista Hiser’s fine online reading group)

*Please don’t say cli-fi. It sounds awful and has all the trivializing downsides of “sci-fi.”