Compelling Climate Fiction To Read Before It Becomes Nonfiction

by Claire Vaye Watkins

In the wake of a devastating Southern California drought, two idealistic holdouts fall in love and scavenge for their needs before taking charge of a mysterious child and embarking on a perilous journey in search of water.

by Stephen Markley

In 2013 California, environmental scientist Tony Pietrus, after receiving a death threat, is linked to a colorful cast of characters, including a brazen young activist who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

by Yun Ko-Eun

On the verge of losing her job, Yona, a top representative at a cutting-edge travel agency, takes an assignment to assess a struggling desert island getaway, where she uncovers a plot to fabricate a catastrophe.

by Nick Fuller Googins

When her mother, a suspect in the public assassination of a dozen climate criminals, disappears, Emi Vargas and her father, Larch, a part of a movement called The Great Transition, which had changed the world, arrive in New York City, a lightly populated storm-surge outpost, but they aren’t the only ones looking for her.

by Premee Mohamad

In post–climate disaster Alberta, a young woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her community.

by Maja Lunde

Explores the threat of a devastating worldwide drought, witnessed through the lives of a father, a daughter and a woman who will risk her life to save the future.

by Sam J. Miller

When a climate-wars project involving the construction of a sophisticated floating city in the Arctic Circle begins to succumb to corruption and crime, the arrival of a woman riding an orca at the side of a polar-bear companion subtly brings together four marginalized people to stage strategic acts of resistance.

by Nathaniel Rich

While working for a mysterious financial consulting firm that offers insurance to corporations against impending catastrophic events, a gifted young mathematician becomes increasingly obsessed with doomsday scenarios until one of his actual worst-case scenarios unfolds in Manhattan.

by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Ministry for the Future uses 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. 

by Octavia E. Butler

Set in a future society that has been ravaged by climate change and economic stratification, its heroine is a young woman living in a gated community who suffers from "hyperempathy" which makes her feel the pain of anyone around her. When her home is destroyed, she leads a group to found a new community, Earthseed.

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus. Once unleashed, the Arctic Plague will reshape life on earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy.

by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

A house in flooded Bangkok reflects a confluence of lives shaped by upheaval, from a homesick missionary doctor, to a haunted jazz pianist in the age of rock, to a woman who would escape her political past.

by Alison Stine

An impoverished girl from a marijuana farming family is forced by another summerless year to embark on a treacherous journey through the backroads of Appalachia to find missing relatives and a new way to survive.

by Diane Cook

A mother desperate to save her dying daughter in a world ravaged by climate change joins a hunter-gatherer initiative to test humanity's capacity to survive in the wilderness without destroying it.

by Omar El Akkad

Depicts a second American Civil War and devastating plague in the late twenty-first century that forces a family into a camp for displaced people, where a young woman is befriended by a mysterious functionary who transforms her into a living weapon.

by Paolo Bacigalupi

Working as an enforcer for a corrupt developer, Angel Velasquez teams up with a hardened journalist and a street-smart Texan to investigate rumors of California's imminent monopoly on limited water supplies.

by Neal Stephenson

In a near-future world plagued by superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, heat waves, and deadly pandemics, one man has a big idea for reversing global warming despite the possible consequences for the planet and all of humanity.