The best eco-fiction books that make you care and give you hope

What resonated with me on so many levels was the author’s use of lyrical and beautiful language in describing trees and forests: as characters. I’m an ecologist and I felt a particular kinship with the botanist Patricia Westerford, a disabled introvert who must swim against the hegemonic tide with heretical ideas. When she argues that trees communicate, learn, trade goods and services, have intelligence and society, her scientific peers ridicule her and end her university career. This story is as much her triumph over overwhelming challenges as it is about the dwindling majestic forests that must quietly endure our careless apathy as they continue to offer their gift of life-giving oxygen and medicinal aerosols for hundreds of years. 

This 600-year saga about human-environment interaction through the forest industry in Canada evoked emotional connections with my environment, the Canadian forests, and the plight of indigenous Canadians. From the arrival of the Europeans in pristine forest to its destruction under the veil of global warming, Proulx weaves generational stories of two settler families into a crucible of terrible greed and tragic irony. The bleak impressions by the immigrants of a harsh environment crawling with pests underlie their combative mindset of a presumed infinite resource. I was particularly moved by the linked fate between the Mi’kmaq and the majestic pine forests, how both were similarly mistreated and changed. This history is also my legacy. As the daughter of immigrants, I felt both educated and moved.  

What struck me most was the use of simple language to portray powerful intimacy and connection between human and animal, and by extension, environment. Murphy’s humorous dialogue, together with sparing, often ironic, descriptions, struck deep into my heart. The play starts in 1535 on an ice shelf up north—when an Inuk widow risks her life to save a lost one-eared polar bear cub on an ice floe, and adopts him. In the last scene five hundred years later in the oily waters of the Northwest Passage, the same bear—starving and cruelly injured by eco-tourists on a cruise ship—struggles to keep from drowning. No one on the ship cares. No one weeps for him. But I did. I wept for him and for his world destroyed by apathy. 

Paolo Bacigalupi’s biopunk science fiction novel explores a 23rd-century post-food crash Thailand after global warming has raised sea levels and depleted carbon fuel sources. The main character, Emiko, is a ‘windup,’ a modified human who is vilified and abused by humanity, despite her abilities. I was struck by how well this work of ‘mundane science fiction’ used Emiko as an avatar for a trickster Nature after abuse by humanity through the disrespect of reckless gene-hacking, greedy corporate espionage, and arbitrary foreign takeovers. I cheered Emiko’s breakaway from her oppressors as she emerged from a cloak of obedience and embraced her survival in this changing world of unintended consequences—only realizing later that I was cheering for that changing world and the optimism it promised. 

This book features a passion of mine as an ecologist and mother: water and how we treat it. Life-giving symbols of water flow throughout this story, which explores a post-climate change world of sea level rise in which freshwater is severely rationed due to scarcity. Water’s very nature is tightly interwoven with the main character, Noria, a tea master who guards a secret spring in the fell by her house against cruel government agents who would kill her for water crimes. In prose both sensual and lyrical, this book explores honor, sacrifice, betrayal, and friendship, and how each can be victimized through commodification in a power play of ideology. I found myself pulled in by the intrigue even as I cherished and lingered in the beautiful metaphoric prose.