Climate Fiction Writing as the “Slow Blade that Penetrates the Shield"

by high fantasy co-authors Austin and Clare Aslan

Today we have an essay by Austin and Clare Aslan, authors of The Crystal Halo, an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the “Chosen One” myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature.

Climate change is no longer abstract. It’s not a speculation or a possibility; it’s an all-hands-on-deck reality. Sea levels are rising, droughts are intensifying, wildfires are expanding: the urgency to act and to achieve collective results is existential. How should our writing community take up arms in response?

As married co-authors, we’ve put a lot of thought into the question of how to write about climate change without turning the story into a blunt instrument. We know that the worse any crisis becomes, the less tolerant readers are going to be of stories that spoon-feed them what they already know or tell them what to think.

Both of us work, in our professional lives, in spaces where values are explicit and outcomes are measured. One of us directs the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University, charting a course toward sustainability through research and curriculum. The other serves on the Flagstaff City Council, first winning a seat and then re-elected on a carbon-zero-by-2030 platform. In those roles, clarity and directness matter. Every action is directly and tangibly tied to evidence and outcomes. Our arsenal is our professional knowledge and our armor is facts.

But storytelling is different.

Fiction is not the same as policy, white papers, or climate action plans. Fundamentally, fiction is about entertainment; there is a contract between writer and reader that the latter will enjoy themselves through the former’s work. When we invent stories that pontificate or proselytize, that sense of enjoyment is dulled or lost. No one wants to feel coerced by a novel.

At the same time, stories have a unique power to speak directly to hearts and souls, to get under the skin and to topple defensive front lines. People have long understood the world through myth, parable, and narrative—not climate models and temperature graphs. Stories teach us to envision new possibilities, to sympathize with others, and to experience new or emerging obstacles. They ignite our imagination and allow us to conceptualize alternative futures and to consider their ramifications and anticipate our own responses.

Climate fiction, when executed mindfully, can be the “slow blade that penetrates the shield.”

In writing The Crystal Halo, the first novel in our Prophecies of Fathom series, we grappled with the seduction of trying too hard to make a case—to convey a moral lesson. Fathom is a continent in turmoil, shaped by climate disruption and the disintegration of natural processes. Each character struggles in a unique way because the environment is falling apart. But Crystal Halo is not about climate change in a didactic sense. There is no exposition presenting the problem and how to fix it. There is no straightforward lesson. Instead, environmental collapse is present as background pressure, a deviation from normal, something characters plan around rather than solve. In this way, the disruption to climate in the world of Fathom is much like we experience it today, on Earth.

Fiction can show us how people live during a crisis, but should be set before the complex problem have been resolved. To remain authentic, it ought to dwell in the long middle, where adaptation is uneven and life stubbornly continues.

Climate storytelling can fail when there’s an obsession with the moment of collapse. Austin is perhaps guilty of this with his debut eco-thriller The Islands at the End of the World. Moments when the norm goes out the window, when a strange celestial presence orbits the Earth and renders all electronics inert, are undeniably dramatic, and incredibly fun to game out—but they’re also myopic to a fault. Most human experience does not take place at the edge of extinction. It takes place in the in-between, charting a winding path through daycares and deadlines, bills and bedtime. When climate fiction doesn’t account for this real life, it risks becoming spectacle—harrowing, yes, but disconnected from how change actually unfolds.

In The Crystal Halo, the stakes are real, but they are often unspoken. The moment of disaster passes without drama, and challenge emerges from how characters negotiate meaning in a world that no longer behaves as expected. What do you hold onto when the future crumbles? What counts as success when progress is redefined as nothing more than survival?

These are not questions with tidy answers, and fiction should resist providing them. Advocacy, in story, does not come from instruction but from proximity. Readers must be allowed to inhabit uncertainty without being rescued by didactic answers. They need room to wrestle, to disagree, and perhaps to come to a different conclusion from the one the writer would reach.

This is where storytelling enters a realm that policy cannot.

In civic life, compromise is often necessary. In universities, progress is incremental and bureaucratic. Fiction, by contrast, can hold and expose contradictions without resolving them. It can show characters who make imperfect choices for understandable reasons. It can honor the reality that people care about climate change and still drive, fly, consume, and contradict themselves daily.

That contradiction is human. It captures all the daily complexity we must each balance, the easy and the difficult, the joy and the pain, and the tiny decisions that add up to a real life.

Too often, climate narratives reduce people into caricatures: villains of extraction, heroes of resistance, victims of circumstance. But real people are much more complex and also much more relatable. They resist change not because they are evil or because they deny science, but because change threatens identity, memory, and belonging. Stories that ignore this complexity may feel righteous, but they rarely feel true.

A climate story that refuses to simplify, that aims to show its characters as whole people with tangled and contradictory values, can reveal that truth. Characters can be complicit and caring, fearful and hopeful, informed and overwhelmed all at once. Characters can want to do the right thing, but can face many axes of rightness, constrained by the challenges of social ties, health, finances, and dreams.

When readers recognize themselves in a story, they are more likely to carry that story with them. Stories that linger shape perception. This is why narrative must come before message. A reader who would instinctively reject a manifesto or moral may be captivated by a character, haunted by a choice, or quietly changed by a narrative conflict.

As climate impacts become more visible in the world around us, the temptation to preach through fiction will grow. The stakes are too high, the timeline too short, and the consequences too severe to be subtle and to cloak our message in imagination. But shouting closes doors.

Honest fiction invites the reader in. In a world of climate change, it can allow readers to become witnesses. It shows us what it feels like to live inside the consequences of our collective decisions. The reader is granted the authority to decide for themselves how their new experiences within this world will impact their perspective.

If Crystal Halo succeeds at all, we hope it succeeds in this way—immersing readers in a world where climate change is neither abstract nor theatrical, but intimate—a world where environmental collapse is a force that shapes relationships, ambition, hopes, and dreams. This is a world where climate change is a presence that cannot be ignored, but also cannot be reduced to a slogan.

The future will not be saved by stories alone. Policy matters. Infrastructure matters. Science matters. Our day jobs allow us to tackle environmental problems directly. But stories can shape the cultural ground on which society stands. Our shared artistic passion allows us to play a role in shifting the landscape under people’s feet. Storytelling prepares us—not by telling us what to do, but by helping us imagine who we might be and the world we might shape.

Learn more about The Prophesies of Fathom Book One: The Crystal Halo.

Austin and Clare Aslan are high school sweethearts from Prescott, Arizona. They grew up and traveled the world together, once living as Peace Corps Volunteers for three years in a Honduran cloud forest ranching community. Honduras means “the depths,” and Crystal Halo’s Fathom is celebrated as a non-European fantasy setting inspired by Central American landscapes and history. Clare has a PhD in Ecology from the University of California-Davis and Austin has a Masters in Tropical Biology from the University of Hawaii, Hilo.

Austin’s debut novel, The Islands at the End of the World (Wendy Lamb Books – Penguin Random House), was named a Best Book of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews and is in development to be a feature film. He has co-authored a “Green Earth Book Award” long-listed series with environmentalist and television host Philippe Cousteau Jr. called The Endangereds (HarperCollins), about an A-Team-ish troupe of endangered animals who take environmental matters into their own hands, paws, flippers, and claws. The Aslans live with their kids in Flagstaff, where Clare directs NAU’s School of Earth and Sustainability, and Austin serves on the City Council with a strong mandate for implementing climate action.

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