Reading and writing speculative fiction is a big part of how I make sense of the world—particularly complex problems like climate change. I also believe our environmental problems are inherently political, which is why I went to grad school to study sustainability and the institutions trying (and often failing) to fix our broken planet. After attending the UN COP24 climate conference, I came back more sure than ever that we need a range of stories about future environmental politics to help us understand the onrushing challenges. I hope this book list is a good place to start!
In the 2050s, the world meets in Buenos Aires for the 60th annual UN climate negotiations. But what kind of world and what they’ll negotiate are determined by the choices we make now. Our Shared Stormweaves together stories that explore five real-world IPCC scenarios, ranging from the harrowing to the hopeful. When a superstorm blows in, four characters—Noah, Luis, Saga, and Diya—are brought together or thrown into conflict. But in each story there are different people living different lives, shaped by the diverging paths the planet has taken. Called “deeply affecting” by Publisher’s Weekly, this book will get you up to speed on climate politics and the culture of the people trying to save the planet.
Robinson’s work has long been a cornerstone of the cli-fi genre, and I love this magnum opus for its ambition and subtlety. Opening with what I think is the all-time most harrowing climate disaster story, Robinson then charts a kaleidoscopic path out of the crisis featuring geoengineering, glacier megaprojects, ecoterrorism, carbon currencies, refugee uprisings, rewilding, fixing Facebook, and airships. There was a lot to learn and digest, but in the end I came away feeling like this book was unique in how far it went to capture the truly planetary scope of climate change and all the smaller stories that implies. Come for the master class in climate politics, stay for the touching story of turning away from violence and toward unlikely friendship.
“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite…
What if a gas station billionaire decided to save the planet from oil by using the world’s biggest gun to dim the sun? Oh, and he teamed up with the Queen of the Netherlands and the Captain Ahab of feral hog hunters to do it. I’m a fan of Stephenson’s colorful characters and addictive, page-turning plots. This one is particularly provocative, making a technological case for geoengineering and arguing that the fossil fuel industry is too entrenched to go away overnight. What I enjoyed most, however, was the exploration of the history and geography of real locales: Texas, Punjab, Papua, The Hague. The book was a great reminder of how strange and peculiar our world is, and how even though politics can feel stuck, it can also cascade in chaotic, scary, exciting ways.
The #1 New York Times bestselling author returns with a visionary technothriller about climate change
'Stephenson's reputation as a sci-fi titan is deserved' Sunday Times
'His most visionary, and timely, book yet' Chicago Review of Books
'Absorbing speculative fiction' Guardian
'Brilliantly entertaining... at science fiction's cutting edge' SFX
'Ingenious and sometimes prophetic' Telegraph
Neal Stephenson's sweeping, prescient new novel transports readers to a near-future world where the greenhouse effect has inexorably resulted in a whirling-dervish troposphere of superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, merciless heat waves, and virulent, deadly pandemics.
One man has a Big Idea for reversing global warming,…
As a resident of Phoenix, Arizona, I love this intense climate thriller as an all-too-real exploration of how climate change—and the water crises that may ensue—might play out for my city and state. Bacigalupi is an expert at not pulling punches, while also getting you invested in exciting plots and brutal but complex characters. I recommend this book to people who want a plausible vision of how the stressors of climate change can lead to breakdown and violence without a single apocalyptic catastrophe. It’s sobering, but also a helluva read.
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…
I tend to shy away from “dystopian” fiction, which too often reduces political choices to tragic inevitabilities. But Parableis an exception. Butler’s vision of the near future is terrifying, but it is also one of the all-time most memorable novels of hope and survival. Her story is full of thoughtful analysis of how class, race, sexuality, and religion intertwine to create both frictions and strengths—all in the pressure-cooker of dangerous societal turns brought on by climate change. If you want to get in the headspace to handle the worst-case scenario, this book is a good way to do it.
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…
Sometimes climate fiction can feel a little less technologically futuristic than its older cousin science fiction, and that’s often a good thing. But Sterling manages to put together a wild (and entertaining) tale of clones, augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, and other fantastica that also has a lot to say about the politics of environmental collapse. Years after reading it I still think a lot about the rival factions this novel invents, like the everything-is-entertainment Dispensation and the utopian hive mind Acquis. Plus, this book features one of my all-time favorite lines from speculative fiction: “I won’t hide from the bandits in a nuclear robot suit! That useless strategy is for cowards!” A great, weird romp.
Alongside William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling stands at the forefront of a select group of writers whose pitch-perfect grasp of the cultural and scientific zeitgeist endows their works of speculative near-future fiction with uncanny verisimilitude. To read a novel by Sterling is to receive a dispatch from a time traveler. Now, with The Caryatids, Sterling has written a stunning testament of faith in the power of human intellect, creativity, and spirit to overcome any obstacle–even the obstacles we carry inside ourselves.
The world of 2060 is divided into three spheres of influence, each fighting with the others over…
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not a criminal, she stumbles into other secrets that will challenge what she thought she knew about her own family, her friend, Russ—and herself.
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not…
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