Come along, dear reader, and I shall tell you of books that imagine worlds both terrible and wondrous—worlds where the weather has grown rather cross with humanity, and humanity must find its way through. These are the finest cli-fi novels, tales spun from the very real anxieties of our warming Earth, transformed into adventures as gripping as any you might find in Neverland.
What Is Climate Fiction?
Before we venture further into this enchanted forest of literature, let us first understand what manner of creature we seek. Climate fiction—or “cli-fi,” as the clever ones call it—comprises stories where environmental change serves as more than mere backdrop. Here, rising seas and scorching summers become characters themselves, shaping destinies and testing the mettle of all who dwell within these pages. Some tales warn us of futures we must avoid; others show us paths toward something rather more hopeful.
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
We begin, as one often must, at the beginning—or rather, with the grandfather of our genre. In 1962, when most folk were thinking of other matters entirely, J.G. Ballard imagined a London submerged beneath tropical waters, where great lizards basked where once stood Parliament. His protagonist, Dr. Robert Kerans, explores this drowned cityscape in the year 2145, navigating waterways that were once bustling streets. The New York Times has declared that this novel “laid the groundwork for generations of climate-change fiction to come,” and who are we to argue with such wisdom?
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Octavia Butler, that most prescient of dreamers, gave us in 1993 a tale so accurate that reading it now feels rather like receiving a letter from a prophet. Young Lauren Olamina keeps a journal as she navigates a California scorched by drought and fractured by inequality, beginning—one shivers to note—in 2024. She possesses what she calls “hyperempathy,” feeling the pain of others as keenly as her own. As society crumbles, Lauren develops a new philosophy called Earthseed, built upon the understanding that “God is change.” The New York Times readers voted it the finest science fiction of 125 years—an accolade as remarkable as any fairy godmother’s blessing.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Now we arrive at a book that dares to imagine not merely catastrophe, but response. Kim Stanley Robinson, whom many consider the greatest living architect of future worlds, gives us Mary Murphy, an Irish diplomat tasked with representing those who cannot speak for themselves: the generations yet unborn. Beginning with a heat wave in India of such horror that millions perish, the novel then unfolds across decades of struggle, ingenuity, and stubborn human hope. Bill Gates and former President Obama have counted themselves among its admirers. Publishers Weekly called it “a sweeping, optimistic portrait of humanity’s ability to cooperate in the face of disaster.”
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
If Robinson offers hope, Bacigalupi offers a blade—specifically, the water knife itself, a person employed to cut off other cities’ water supplies in a drought-ravaged American Southwest. Angel Velasquez works for Catherine Case, a Las Vegas power broker who has made survival into something resembling an art form. As the Colorado River dwindles to memory, Angel, a journalist named Lucy, and a Texas refugee named Maria find their fates intertwined. One reviewer noted this novel makes you want to “stock up on bottled water,” and indeed, one finishes it rather thirsty.
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Here we encounter a world called the Stillness—an ironic name, for it is anything but still. N.K. Jemisin imagines a supercontinent plagued by recurring apocalypses called “Fifth Seasons,” catastrophic climate events that threaten civilization every few centuries. Her protagonist Essun searches for her kidnapped daughter while the world cracks apart around her. Jemisin became the first author ever to win three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel—for this book and its two sequels. The magic system, rooted in geology and seismic energy, gives the fantastical a scientific grounding as solid as bedrock.
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
Diane Cook’s debut novel presents us with Bea and her daughter Agnes, who must flee a polluted, overdeveloped city where the very air threatens the child’s life. Their only option: the Wilderness State, the last remaining patch of protected land, where they join an experiment to discover whether humans can exist in nature without destroying it. Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, this novel asks uncomfortable questions about what we would sacrifice for survival—and what we might become in the process.
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver brings us down from apocalyptic heights to the mountains of Appalachia, where young housewife Dellarobia Turnbow discovers something miraculous and terrifying: millions of monarch butterflies where they should not be. A scientist arrives to explain that this beauty is actually a symptom of climate disruption—the butterflies have lost their way, and may not survive a Tennessee winter. Publishers Weekly called it “a clarion call about climate change, too lucid and vivid for even skeptics to ignore.” Kingsolver navigates the cultural divide between rural communities and scientific institutions with extraordinary tenderness.
Bewilderment by Richard Powers
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory comes a more intimate tale: widowed astrobiologist Theo Byrne raising his neurodivergent son Robin in a world growing ever more inhospitable. Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, this novel—partly inspired by climate activist Greta Thunberg—explores the anxiety of loving a child on a damaged planet. Powers writes of looking up at the stars and imagining better worlds, even as ours grows strange and frightening. It is, he says, “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, updated for the age of pandemics, exoplanets, and mass extinction.”
American War by Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad, a journalist who covered conflicts from the Arab Spring to Ferguson, imagines a Second American Civil War sparked by a ban on fossil fuels. Young Sarat Chestnut, a climate refugee pushed from a drowning Louisiana, becomes radicalized as the nation tears itself apart. Florida has become an archipelago; the Mississippi has swelled into an inland sea; and Mexico has reclaimed much of the Southwest. This is climate fiction as geopolitical thriller, examining how environmental catastrophe breeds the conditions for violence and extremism.
The Deluge by Stephen Markley
At nearly 900 pages, The Deluge is less a novel than an epic—a sweeping chronicle spanning three decades of American life as climate change tightens its grip. Stephen King called it “simply put, a modern classic.” The story follows a constellation of characters: activists, terrorists, politicians, scientists, each trying to bend the arc of history. Beginning in 2013 and extending into a cataclysmic near future, this is perhaps the most ambitious attempt yet to capture the full scope of humanity’s climate reckoning.
Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
After the climate wars, a floating city rises in the Arctic Circle—Qaanaaq, a remarkable feat of engineering powered by geothermal energy. Into this fragile sanctuary comes a mysterious woman riding an orca, a polar bear at her side. Sam J. Miller’s Nebula Award-winning imagination gives us a tale of resistance and hope in a world that has lost so much. As one character observes, even in catastrophe, there remains the possibility of connection, of community, of change. “This is definitely me trying to turn my fear into hope,” Miller has said.
Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada
In Yoko Tawada’s wildly inventive novel, Japan has vanished beneath the waves, and its former citizens are scattered across the globe like seeds on the wind. Hiruko, a climate refugee teaching immigrant children in Denmark with an invented language called Panska, searches for anyone who still speaks her mother tongue. A finalist for the 2022 National Book Award, this novel explores language, identity, and belonging with the playful seriousness that only Tawada can achieve. It reminds us that we too might become refugees from lands that no longer exist.
The New Atlantis by Ursula K. Le Guin
We conclude with a work that, though brief, casts a long shadow. Published in 1975, this novella imagines a future where continents are sinking even as the towers of a new Atlantis rise from the sea. Winner of the Locus Poll Award and nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula, it was written when scientists were only beginning to understand the scope of anthropogenic warming. Le Guin saw what was coming, and she wrote it down, leaving us a message in a bottle from an earlier age.
Finding Your Way Into Climate Fiction
And so, dear reader, you have before you a map of this growing forest of literature. Perhaps you prefer the intimate portraits of Powers and Kingsolver, or the sweeping epics of Markley and Robinson. Perhaps you seek the fantastical wonders of Jemisin, or the noir-tinged thrillers of Bacigalupi. Whatever path you choose, you will find stories that refuse to look away from our changing world—and authors who dare to imagine what comes next.
For in the end, that is what these books offer: not merely warnings, but possibilities. And possibility, as any reader knows, is where all the best adventures begin.
