The best climate novels to ward away your global warming anxiety and give you hope for humanity

Eleutheria is a fantastic climate novel that paints a dire, realistic portrait of the near future and then combats that dystopia with bright-eyed hope.

I loved the narrator, Willa Marks, who is endearing and desperate to save the world against overwhelming odds, ultimately elbowing her way into a commune-like movement in the Caribbean that has very big plans. I really loved how Willa encapsulates what many of us feel: this urgency to do something to stop the climate crisis, even if we don’t know how.

What I truly loved about this book, however, is that it leaves us with a spark of real hope, rather than falling into dystopia. The author, Allegra Hyde, has declared the growing number of us hopeful climate writers as “Team Utopia,” and I’m a proud member.  

This is a one-of-a-kind novel by two authors who are also members of “Team Utopia.”

The entire novel is told from “interviews” of people who participated in the complete revolution across our planet, from the liberation of Palestine to the foundation of the New York City Commune. While not exclusively a climate novel, the book depicts the total transformation of society and the economy over the largest hurdles that we face today, of which the climate crisis plays an oversized role.

I was super excited to find this book because it depicts not only the “utopia” that exists in the near future, but shows how people fought and organized to build that utopia. I tried to do the same thing with my book, offering a sort of utopian blueprint for my wildest dreams. 

This is the grandmother of all great utopian fiction, my favorite science-fiction novel by my favorite science-fiction author, and the number-one source of inspiration for my book.

The novel opens on a moon (not ours) where a utopian anarchist society has long existed, but is now under threat from a host of antagonists on the mother planet. The novel is masterful because it is both enormous in scope (covering entire economies and political structures) but also extremely intimate (following one man, one relationship, one family).

The novel does not have to do with the climate crisis, or Earth, but I’m including it here because of the role it played in my writing; when I set out to write a climate crisis utopia, The Dispossessed was absolutely instrumental, offering me a blueprint on how to build tension and make a utopia personal. Most of all, it will give you so much hope and love for humanity. 

I read this novel when I was about three-quarters finished with my novel, and was just blown away by the attention to detail, possibilities, and hope between the pages.

This is another hopeful near-future novel, in which humanity is trying its best to overcome the worst of climate change. Unlike my novel, however, which is told from the perspective of one family, Ministry for the Future is a truly global story, with dozens and dozens of narrators, many unnamed, who give us snapshots everywhere from the Arizona border to Antarctica to Switzerland to India, all coalescing into what becomes a global movement to try to save the planet.

This novel is a little lighter on plot, but fascinating as a menu of hopeful options and possibilities for what could be done if humanity really got its act together. 

This is a really fun, slim novel set on a moon, Panga, where technology long ago achieved sentience and decided to leave humanity for the wilderness.

The novel opens with a tea monk, Dex, who lives in a gentle utopia and becomes the first human to meet a robot in distant memory. The robot, named Mosscap, asks Dex, “What do humans need?” and what proceeds is a marvelous rolling conversation between robot and monk that spans philosophy, theology, and ecology, providing so much food for thought regarding a happy, nurturing post-transition world.