It’s cli-fi time! A portmanteau of “science fiction” and “climate change,” “cli-fi” has been rising popularity at the same rate as our climbing seas! Now that climate change is an undisputed fact of modern life, we’re turning to fiction to cope. Some authors say that it’s not too late, we can still turn back the clock, while others believe that climate-related doom is on the horizon. Whether you’re a climate hopeful or a cynic, these authors have something for you. Here are the 10 best sci-fi books about climate change, to read while you’re prepping to move to a floating city – not a bad option.
The Parable of The Sower
Octavia Butler’s The Parable of The Sower is set in the near future, where climate change has caused global instability and environmental collapse. Before her home burned down in one of the many wildfires that plague California, teenager Lauren Oya Olamina lived in a gated community that was isolated from the poverty of the outside world. Now thrust into the American climate wasteland with nowhere to go, she turns to spirituality to give her a new direction in life. She invents her own religion called “Earthseed,” whose central tenant is the radical notion that “God is change.” Accompanied by a group of similarly lost youths, Lauren spreads her gospel to the turbulent world – hoping it will give comfort in the constant flux. It’s a radical book about the radical acceptance of one’s fate, and about embracing uncertainty as part of a divine quest.
The Ministry For The Future
The Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson serves as a “how-to” for stopping climate change – assuming the governments of the world can get it together. In the near future, Earth’s climate crisis has become so untenable that world governments come together to form “The Ministry of The Future” – an organization given the legal right to ensure a livable world for coming generations. Told through a series of eyewitness accounts, the novel details exactly how we could stop climate change by pooling our resources and working side by side. The author explores all sorts of radical ideas for technology, including the creation of a global currency whose value is intrinsically tied to the reduction of carbon emissions. Other notions include cargo ships with giant sails! Drilling into icebergs to stop them from melting! Airships for global travel! The groundbreaking ideas are endlessly cool and based in sound science!
Blackfish City
Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller is set in a floating metropolis bobbing around the Arctic Circle. The city was built in response to rising sea levels, in a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” style move that would allow humans to sustainably live on the ocean. While the city was built by starry-eyed engineers hopeful for a better future, corruption and crime have settled in – making the place a floating Gotham. The hero that this city deserves? It isn’t Batman – it’s a woman riding an Orca whale. With the arrival of an “orcamancer” and her polar bear companion, the city is encouraged to stand against social decay. A little whacky, middlingly based in science, and largely hopeful, this novel is an exercise in optimism. Perhaps an orcamancer will visit our world one day. Or perhaps it will inspire you, dear reader, to become the Orca riding hero that the climate ravaged world deserves.
The Water Knife
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi is a portrait of the future The United States during climate change – and that portrait looks a lot like Dorian Gray’s. Starved of resources, humanity has succumbed to its baser instincts, and we’re now trying to outcompete each other for survival. Society west of the Mississippi has broken down, and Las Vegas and Phoenix have become warring city-states. In a constant struggle for water, a group of shadowy assassins called the Water Knives have risen up to protect their fluid supplies from Phoenix’s meddling – via murder. After a Water Knife named Angel Velasquez hears tell of a new water source ripe for the taking, he travels to Phoenix to investigate – and begins to investigate the morality of his mission in the process. This is not a hopecore novel about the fight for a better future – but a bitter struggle to survive until next sunrise.
The Drowned World
When J.G. Ballard wrote The Drowned World back in 1962, he was onto something. While climate change was hardly a concern for the fossil-fuel guzzling United States of yesteryear, Ballard’s novel was a prophetic warning that it someday would be. That “someday” is the year 2145, when widespread ice cap melting has caused London to be covered in a tropical jungle so thick it would make the Triassic Era jealous. Led by Dr. Robert Kerans, a team of scientists attempts to save the dying city from a plague of giant reptiles and even bigger bug swarms. As the novel goes in, it becomes clear that hope has all but melted too – and the scientists are helpless to stop a prehistoric world from taking over the future.
The Broken Earth Trilogy
Part fantasy and part sci-fi, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is 100% climate fiction. The action takes place on a supercontinent called The Stillness, which is periodically rocked by climate cataclysms called “fifth seasons.” Why the seasons seem to be the symptom of an angry Earth, one of the most recent was of human origin. Society has stratified into a strict caste system, with energy-manipulating orogenes sitting at the very bottom. Hated and feared for their supernatural abilities, orogenes are subject to widespread persecution – which was recently exacerbated after a particularly powerful orogene summoned the last fifth season. In the wreckage that followed, three orogene women were left to pick up the pieces – traveling across the supercontinent in order to find the source of the world’s suffering. Hopefully, they’ll end it before it ends them.
American War
American War by Omar El Akkad is the story of the Second American Civil War, which was Franz Ferdinand-ed into existence by the ticking powder keg of climate change. In a resource starved United Stares, The South has splintered off from the rest of the country by refusing to comply with a law that makes fossil fuel consumption illegal. Willing to wage war for oil, the southern states threaten to tear apart the fraying fabric of American society. Caught in the crossfire is Sarat Chestnut, born in the now half-underwater city of Louisiana. After she and her family are forced into a military internment camp, she’s radicalized into insurgency – with devastating consequences for her country, her kin, and her future descendants.
Gold Fame Citrus
Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins takes place in Mojave Desert, now an even more drought-ridden wasteland. One time Greta Thunberg-style conservationist Luz and army deserter turned surfer Ray are now squatting in the abandoned mansion of a Hollywood star, holding out for no one but each other. Prevented from traveling to more habitable areas by armed militias, the pair subsist on soda, love, and whatever scraps they can find. Content to live in the oasis of each other’s arms, their desert paradise is upset by the arrival of an orphaned toddler. Determined to take care of the kid, the lovebirds decide to head off in search of a new, less sweaty Eden somewhere beyond the blistering horizon. According to a doomsday prophet, there’s a habitable place in the east – if you wanna take a doomsday prophet’s word for it.
Termination Shock
In Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson, climate change has arrived – and the world is having a rough time. Rocked by superstorms, baked by heatwaves, drowned by rising seas, humanity is barely hanging on – that is until a plan for climate salvation arrives from an unlikely source: a Texas oil barren. Billionaire oil man T.R. Schmidt has a plan to launch thousands of tons of sulphur into the air – creating a sort of “global sunscreen” the reflects solar radiation and cools the world. It kinda works – helping flood-prone countries like The Netherlands but worsening droughts in water-parched India. Not everyone is on board with Schmidt’s plan, and other world governments are attempting to sabotage the oil man’s big geoengineering idea. The result is a global identity crisis – the nations that benefit from the project fight to keep it going, while countries that suffer from it attempt sabotage. A climate-based geopolitical thriller? Eerie predictor of the cause of the next world war? This novel is a little of both.
The Annual Migration of Clouds
The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed is a The Last of Us take on climate change. After widespread climate disasters caused North American society to break down, a new complication emerged: mind altering fungus. While the fungus known as “Cad” thankfully doesn’t cause people to turn into mushroomy cannibals, it does exert subtle control an infected person’s mind in order to ensure their survival. Nineteen year old Reid is a carrier of Cad, and after she’s invited by the government to shelter in one of the last known safe zones in the area, she’s torn between seeking a better life and leaving her community behind. As Reid navigates this tension, she’s unable to determine whether or not it’s her own mind or Cad that’s influencing her decisions. This book is basically Inside Out if all of the emotions were fungal survivalists – useful for the apocalypse, devastating for one’s sense of autonomy.
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