When I was eight years old, I read a book titled Dar Tellum: Stranger from a Distant Planet, by James R. Berry. It told the story of a boy who communicates with an alien intelligence to save the Earth from… global warming. That was in 1973, and it was the first time I’d heard about “the greenhouse effect”. Some things haven’t changed since then: I still read (and write) sci-fi, and I still have Dar Tellum on my bookshelf. But our climate is changing, and I’ve chosen four books of science fiction and one of science facts that help us think about the future—and present—of our planet.
This classic science fiction novel, first published in 1962, is set in a future earth where the melting of the polar ice caps has turned the world’s cities into jungles teeming with life that hasn’t existed since the primordial past. The vision of a world where society has collapsed and human beings are no different than any animal struggling to survive is vivid and terrifying, and Ballard’s prose has a dreamy intensity that heightens the experience.
A debut novel, set in London in the near future. The capital city has been flooded and transformed into a tropical location where social aberrations only serve as an indicator of the level of corruption of the modern mentality.
In the wake of super-hurricanes and the deadly pandemic that follows, New Orleans has been quarantined from the rest of the United States, and those who seek to cross the border wall are killed. Narrator Fen, a member of the clan-based culture that has developed behind the wall, tells the story of her people and her personal quest for freedom in a dialect voice that is both beautifully rendered and brutally honest.
After a string of devastating hurricanes and a severe outbreak of Delta Fever, the Gulf Coast has been quarantined. Years later, residents of the Outer States are under the assumption that life in the Delta is all but extinct…but in reality, a new primitive society has been born.
Fen de la Guerre is living with the O-Positive blood tribe in the Delta when they are ambushed. Left with her tribe leader’s newborn, Fen is determined to get the baby to a better life over the wall before her blood…
An unflinching portrait of a world plagued by heatwaves, water shortages, shrinking coastlines, and desperate poverty, Butler’s celebrated novel focuses on an African American teen who comes to accept the dire choices facing her and who founds a new religion, Earthseed, that promises hope, but not certainty, for the unknown future. Butler is simply one of the best sci-fi writers of all time, and Parable of the Sower shows her at the top of her game.
The extraordinary, prescient NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling novel.
'If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true. This is what makes Parable of the Sower even more impressive than it was when first published' GLORIA STEINEM
'Unnervingly prescient and wise' YAA GYASI
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We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.
America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to…
Another master sci-fi storyteller shows us a world where climate change runs rampant and mega-corporations have swooped in to monopolize the world’s dwindling supply of potable water. This novel can be particularly grisly, so be warned. If you’re looking for a (somewhat) less dark vision of the future, Bacigalupi has also written an excellent climate change duology for teens, Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities.
From the international bestselling author of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning The Windup Girl, comes an electrifying thriller set in a world on the edge of collapse.
WATER IS POWER
The American Southwest has been decimated by drought, Nevada and Arizona skirmish over dwindling shares of the Colorado River, while California watches.
When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Las Vegas water knife Angel Velasquez is sent to investigate.
With a wallet full of identities and a tricked-out Tesla, Angel arrows south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape…
My other choices were fiction; this one is not. Journalist Wallace-Walls assembles the scientific data on anthropogenic climate change and comes to an inescapable conclusion: it’s happening, and we can’t stop it from affecting us. What we can do is decide how bad it’s going to get, and that means making some tough choices in the next decade or two. As he sums up: “What happens, from here, will be entirely our own doing.”
**SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
'An epoch-defining book' Matt Haig 'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this' David Sexton, Evening Standard
Selected as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Sunday Times, Spectator and New Statesman A Waterstones Paperback of the Year and shortlisted for the Foyles Book of the Year 2019 Longlisted for the PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
It is worse, much worse, than you think.
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says…
In Earth’s distant future, Nature has mutated into the Ecosystem, a planet-wide sentience that has driven humankind to the brink of extinction. While survivors seek shelter in small villages of stone, those known as Sensors—people gifted with the psychic ability to read the Ecosystem’s mind—travel in the wild to gather food, water, and fuel for their communities.
At seventeen, Sarah is the youngest Sensor in her village. She doesn’t fear the Ecosystem, but she hates it for killing her mother when Sarah was a child. Her hunt for revenge leads her into the Ecosystem’s deadliest places, where she discovers secrets that threaten to tear her—and her society—apart.
I’m a thrill seeker when it comes to reading, and I want to be so immersed in a story that I have to read it in one sitting and then can be completely taken by surprise by a plot twist. It was extremely hard to pick only five titles, so to narrow it down, I 1) made an attempt to pick from a few different sub-genres and, 2) stipulated that Agatha Christie could populate the entire list. All of these titles blend wonderful writing with great twists, and I hope you enjoy them. I did my best to avoid spoilers in the descriptions, although by being on this list, it’s a little bit of a spoiler…
"Dizzying . . . Audiences who wished the TV series The Bear had made room for Russian mobsters are in for a treat" - Kirkus Reviews Starred Review
Sagarine Pfister is a great cook but has been blacklisted by almost every restaurant in Chicago. She gets her chance at Louie's, a below-average restaurant, the only place that will give her a job. Things change when she finds head chef Louie Ferrar dead in the walk-in freezer of his restaurant. But instead of closing the place down, the owner, Russian gang boss Anatoly Morozov, offers not only her Louie's job but…
"Dizzying . . . Audiences who wished the TV series The Bear had made room for Russian mobsters are in for a treat" Kirkus Reviews Starred Review
Sagarine Pfister is a great cook but has been blacklisted by almost every restaurant in Chicago. She gets her chance at Louie's, a below-average restaurant, the only place that will give her a job.
Things change when she finds head chef Louie Ferrar dead in the walk-in freezer of his restaurant. But instead of closing the place down, the owner, Russian gang boss Anatoly Morzov, not only offers her Louie's job, but also…
