Why Climate Fiction

As the climate crisis impacts the world, Climate Fiction—literature that addresses the climate crisis—helps readers understand the present and reimagine the future by exploring how changes in the climate affect specific characters and societies. This literature lets readers appreciate the beauty of the environment that surrounds them, the families that support them, the communities that bind them, and the spiritualism that uplifts them, showing how home is not only threatened but healed. From the cutting of redwood trees in The Overstory and the desolation of hurricanes in Salvage the Bones, to the infrastructural damage of New York City in 10:04 and the water wars in The Marrow Thieves, these stories exemplify contemporary manifestations of the climate crisis. They show what is being lost on both an ecological and human level.