How to write climate fiction without being a doomer
by Denise S. Robbins
Six alternatives to the apocalypse
I’m tired of reading climate apocalypse narratives.
It’s not just that I think they’re unhelpful — which I do — it’s that I think they’re boring. There’s something unimaginative about climate change doom, and something unenjoyable about reading a story by an author who’s resigned humanity to this fate.
Because we don’t read stories to learn facts; it would be far more informative to read the United Nations’ climate science report than to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s wild, far-ranging story Ministry for the Future. We read stories to learn perspectives. To live in someone else’s head for a while. To reframe the brain around a new way of seeing the world, each other, and ourselves.
Unfortunately, I think everyone understands that the climate is going to shit if we don’t do anything about it, so reveling in doom is not presenting any new information, and presenting apocalyptic climate scenarios as inevitable is a disservice to the collective imagination. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Climate change can instead be a problem waiting to be solved or a mystery waiting to be uncovered. So I’d like to propose a range of cli-fi subgenres that stay categorically far away from doomerism. This list is not comprehensive, and not meant as a hard definition or roadmap. I simply would like to show a range of possibilities that exist without doom. There’s a world of perspectives to explore.
Climate Science Fiction
Perhaps this seems redundant in a piece about “climate fiction.” But I’d like to emphasize the word “science.” “Climate science fiction” stories dive deep into science as a narrative tool. In a way, this is what “science fiction” is meant to be.
Yet this genre is not limited to conventional sci-fi. For example, Barbara Kingsolver’s literary novel Flight Behavior is about a woman who finds a field of fire on a Tennessee mountaintop… only to realize it’s a massive colony of monarchs. The narrative then turns to the mystery of why these butterflies are there, what’s at risk, and what the narrator can do to save them, with the help of a charismatic scientist, who teaches the main character — and, by default, the reader — about global warming, insect behavior, and more. Kingsolver writes about complicated family dynamics and about the scientific process of measuring butterfly lipids with equal rigor and beauty. The field of butterfly fire is at the same time an omen of climate calamity, a miracle for the town, and a life-changing reckoning for the character.
These stories see the climate not as an immovable force of doom, but as a never-ending question, a mystery to be solved. It’s about learning how things work. The “why” to the chaos. Because there is no hope without understanding; only once we have the “how” and “why” can we begin to think, “what now?”
Climate Utopia (Including Solarpunk)
If “climate science fiction” is the “how,” “climate utopia” is the “what for.” Kim Stanley Robinson is a self-described utopian novelist — a rare thing these days. Many of his novels come out on the side of hope. For example, his “Mars” trilogy features a group of scientists terraforming Mars to create a truly sustainable agricultural model. His epic novel Ministry for the Future ends with a surprisingly hopeful new world order (although it takes a lot of death and hardships to get there).
Yes, the initial meaning of word “utopia” was literally “non-place” because it was supposed to describe an impossibility. Since the “Mars” trilogy was released, and scientists discovered a poisonous chemical prevalent on Mars, Robinson has walked back his Martian dreams. But still. Utopias can provide a good model, and with climate change, it seems everyone is looking for answers.
Of course, no one wants to read a book about a perfect society where everything is wonderful. It takes struggle and despair to get there. Enter: “solarpunk,” which I consider a subgenre of climate utopia. While the “punky” narratives involve a small group of individuals rising up against an oppressive, bureaucratic system, “climate utopia” narratives are broader and can exist within our current societal structures. Robinson’s novels often involve global bodies where scientists propose ideas — and are eventually listened to. New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman summarized: “He believes that scholarly and diplomatic meetings are among our species’s highest achievements.”
Whether utopias can be achieved through resistance or diplomacy, all utopian narratives serve dual purposes. First, they can actively influence the world. Robinson, the utopian, often gets invited to conferences around the world, as CEOs and entrepreneurs look to his fiction to provide a road map for solutions. Second, they can change one’s attitude by creating space for joy — literally, building a space in the mind that can be imagined, turned over, explored. Rather than running from doom, we can work towards something better. Utopian writers are often not inventing anything new but simply gathering ideas that already exist and putting them into a readable, highly enjoyable format, which, if all goes well, can leave the reader transformed.
Energy Fiction
Energy is at the heart of the climate crisis — and the engine of society, if not our lives. Aside from our physical needs of light and internet, a good story has a productive energy, with energetic verbs and narrative movement. And yet, energy is often overlooked in climate fiction.
The only novel that comes to mind is Ian McEwan’s Solar, which is about a scientist who studies solar power and makes a fortune from a solar power patent, while getting involved in scientific and romantic betrayals. But the novel’s main character, you learn in the first act, is not actually responsible for the groundbreaking research that drives the story, and himself inhabits a slothful, apathetic, gluttonous frame of mind. This is not exactly the kind of worldview I’d like to see when it comes to “energy fiction.”
I’d like to see instead, for example, a solar scientist so compelling and magnetic that everyone nearby revolves around him like a system of planetary bodies. I’d like to feel the tidal movements from ocean energy providing the backbone to a story of seafaring explorers. I’d like to see agentive characters. Characters that do interesting things in interesting ways. There is something godlike in the way we use energy: harvesting the wind, sun, and heat of the earth. There are dozens of clean energy solutions that are ripe for narrative exploration, in all the strange, idiosyncratic ways we relate to anything and everything. I’m not trying to prescribe a plot, but to lay out a framework that could be explored further. I’d like to read perspectives about energy that feel as interesting and alive as the energy source itself.
Climate Politics
There is no shortage of political fiction these days. Why not make these political intrigues center around climate change? After all, at this point, climate change more a problem of politics than science. With enough political willpower, we could begin the switch to a clean, renewable energy society today. Of course, big personalities get in the way, as do small personalities, campaign politics, betrayals and romances… and the faceless foe of “society.”
Political novels can approach the world in two ways. One, as a puzzle of people. The other, as a puzzle of power. But in politics, these approaches are connected. A political network is a structure of relationships, and to utilize them effectively, you need to learn the pressure points. The power players. The question at hand is: what is power? How do you get it, what does it mean, and what can you do with it?
The Deluge, a fun thriller by Stephen Markley, dives deep into political intrigue (when it’s not terrifying its readers with firenadoes). Its large cast of characters each takes a different view of the best way to advance their political aims. Some campaign to elect new Congressmembers, others create coalitions with unlikely bedfellows, others dive deep into financial markets, and still others buck the system and opt for ecoterrorism (which itself relies on a powerful yet emotional political structure, human enough to be swayed by fear, yet powerful enough to matter).
I’ve attended two United Nations climate conferences and let me tell you: intergovernmental bodies feel nearly as immovable and uncontrollable as tectonic plates. But of course, tectonic plates do move, even if they create a few earthquakes along the way.
Climate Weird
Things are getting weird. Climate change is unpredictable. There are limits to what we’ll ever be able to understand. “Slipstream” or “new weird” fiction can serve to highlight this unknowingness, delighting in the relentless weirdness of the world.
What is “slipstream”? Typically, this is fiction that borrows elements from sci-fi and fantasy while sitting firmly in a common-day setting. But the real definition is more about a vibe than any particular element. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel wrote in their introduction to a slipstream anthology that this type of fiction “raises fundamental epistemological and ontological questions about reality that most other kinds of fiction are ill-prepared to address.’” Slipstream makes the “familiar strange or the strange unfamiliar.”
There’s no one better to write about the weird than Karen Russell, so I was delighted to see her tackling climate change — not head-on, but diagonally — in her recent story collection Orange World. “The Gondoliers,” for instance, takes place in “New Florida,” a future-Florida submerged in the ocean and filled with garbage, where a set of gondolier sisters navigate the muck by singing — through echolocation. The story could be considered post-apocalyptic if it weren’t so lush and beautiful. Our hero is drawn to a spooky “dead zone” in the middle of it all, as is her mysterious wealthy fare. There’s something magical about this world, like an underwater theme park with relics of humanity’s past.
After reading a Karen Russell story (or Kelly Link, or Carmen Maria Machado, or…) you come away looking at the world a little bit differently. In a tilted, dizzy way. Yet the weird world tilts not towards doom but towards wonder.
Climate Romance
There is a poem called “Love in a Time of Climate Change” which includes the following stanzas: “I love you as one loves the most vulnerable species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss … I love you without knowing how or when this world will end.”
The story of climate change is a story of hope and loss, and as the world changes, all we have is each other. In a sense, you could say that the call for climate action is also a clarion call to love one another. Because climate change is not about trees or polar bears; it’s about people and society and deeply human life. Refugeedom and death. If things get bad, will we remember how to love? These are the questions I would love to see explored more in climate fiction.
The writer Erica Berry argued the same in a 2021 essay for Outside Online. She highlighted Jenny Offill’s Weather, a lovely little book about a marriage strained by worries over climate change. But perhaps more surprising was her highlight of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? which isn’t often thought of as climate fiction, but on other hand, includes this passage:
“Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive — because we are so stupid about each other.”
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
A Challenge for the Future
I’m sure there’s more I’m missing: climate satire, climate thrillers, climate murder mystery…. But at the end of the day, subgenres don’t exist. For example, The Deluge is a climate politics thriller with lots of romance, a dash of solarpunk, and plenty of love for solar panels. So genres are fake. But so are stories — and they’re still useful.
Part of me is glad that “climate fiction” is appearing on more and more book jackets these days. But the other part is disappointed, because it feels too often like a meaningless buzzword, when it could be so much more.
I truly believe that climate change is one of the most important crises of our era. I don’t want fewer climate fiction stories. I want better climate fiction stories. I want to laugh, be intrigued, fall in love, remember hope. I want to understand plate tectonics and find stillness as we’re hurtling through an ever-expanding universe.
In Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, the main character Dellarobia goes on a walk in the woods with her hostile mother-in-law, only to learn she bears a surprising amount of knowledge about the local foliage, naming the boneset and virgin’s bower plants, knowledge no one seemed to care about anymore. “That must be lonely, Dellarobia thought, to have answers whose questions had all died of natural causes.”
There is a challenge in this statement. The challenge is this: can we remember how to ask questions? Can we remind ourselves of the curiosity we felt as children when we pointed to a strange new flower and asked, “What’s that?” We grow old; we learn things; we think we know things. But can you tell me the age of the rocks beneath your feet? The very things that hold us up were unexamined for so long; then we examined them; then we exploited them. Let’s take a step back and re-examine the world. The climate is changing; the climate is change. This is not a surrender but a summons.
Denise S. Robbins is a Pushcart-nominated author and teacher from Wisconsin. Her writing has appeared in Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast Journal, and more, with a novel and story collection in the works. She teaches a workshop about climate change fiction that will run Monday evenings from October 2-November 6. Learn more here.
I believe in the reality of climate change and the historical fact that if you forget history you are doomed to repeat it But I would much prefer a solar utopian story over another solar dystopia story any day of the week.
Such a good, useful article. Thank you, Denise.