The climate crisis feels big—too big to think about, at times.
The desire to ignore or push away anxieties about our shared environmental future is understandable but should be fought through.
As someone who recently decided to double major in sustainability studies, I’ve grappled with how to even think about the climate crisis in a productive manner.
Since my first major is English, I began in a familiar territory: fiction.
In recent years, the term “climate fiction” was coined to describe the growing selection of books about climate change.
Simply put, climate fiction describes any fictional work written about the effects of climate change and global warming.
Here are five books that helped me organize my thoughts.
- Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta
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Written by Finnish novelist Emmi Itäranta, Memory of Water envisions a world in which access to scarce water resources drives wars.
Seventeen-year-old Noria Kaitio is studying under her father to become a tea master—a position that would allow her to know where hidden water is located, including the spring Noria’s family possesses.
As Noria becomes more and more obsessed with the past events that led the world to this point, she must choose between protecting secrets and sharing knowledge.
Memory of Water resonated with me because of Itäranta’s beautiful writing.
Much like water, her prose ebbs and flows, mixing lyrical descriptions with stark emotions.
Noria, too, is instantly likable and memorable as a protagonist.
Her deep desire to know everything she could about the past and how the world came to be the way it was resonated with me.
One of the most thought-provoking parts of this novel is that it’s set in the far future, so the world Noria is looking back on—her past—is the reader’s present.
- The Swan Book by Alexis Wright
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*Content warning: sexual violence*
The Swan Book draws from Aboriginal Australian storytelling techniques to arrive at a unique story about hope and the complex situations Aboriginal people face.
The novel is set in an Australia that has been irrevocably changed by the negative impacts climate change.
Specifically, it focuses on Oblivia, a mute young woman who lives in a decaying community by a swamp.
Oblivia marries Warren Finch, Australia’s first Aboriginal president, and struggles for authority over her own story.
This novel was like nothing I’d ever read before.
It mostly avoids western conventions of storytelling as Wright prioritizes her Aboriginal heritage.
Wright also sheds light on some of the most complex issues of the climate crisis, such as how indigenous knowledge about land use is often disregarded when thinking about solutions.
She also explores how these communities are disproportionately impacted by environmental issues.
Perhaps this novel’s greatest achievement, though, is that even while examining these topics, The Swan Book also manages to be humorous and heartfelt.
- The Overstory by Richard Powers
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The Overstory is Richard Powers’s 12th novel and it won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2019. Powers stated that the novel demonstrated, for him, “a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans.”
The novel centers on nine characters, all of whom have life-defining interactions with trees that drive them to activism or deep appreciation.
In this novel, it may seem like the people are front and center, but the truth is something more complex.
The trees in The Overstory are complex beings with a will of their own.
Before reading this book, I had a healthy appreciation of what trees contributed globally.
After, I was in awe of them.
This novel fills you with the desire to do something, anything, to save just one tree—and Powers designed it that way.
As one character states: “The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
- Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
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*Content warning: sexual violence*
Set in Africa after a nuclear holocaust, Who Fears Death follows a young woman named Onyesonwu, whose destiny is to save her people from genocide.
From childhood to womanhood, Onyesonwu learns what it means to be responsible not only for herself but for a people’s history and culture.
Okorafor is a self-described “Africanfuturist.”
On her blog, she writes that Africanfuturism is “concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the earth, skews optimistic, is centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people) and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa.”
It’s less concerned with “what could have been” and more concerned with “what is and can/will be.”
It acknowledges, grapples with and carries “what has been.”
In her vision of a post-apocalyptic Africa, Okorafor grappled with deeply feminist issues while still focusing on the changing natural landscape, making Who Fears Death a read I couldn’t put down.
- A Conspiracy of Stars and An Anatomy of Beasts by Olivia A. Cole
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In Cole’s YA science fiction series, she presents a world in which humans have fled Earth and settled upon Favloiv, a planet already inhabited by the indigenous Faloii.
The protagonist, Octavia, has only ever wanted to become a scientist who studies Favloiv’s natural environment, like her parents.
Yet when she witnesses a Faloii being attacked, she realizes something is deeply wrong with the way humans are living on this new planet.
These two books never fail to take my breath away.
The second book, particularly, explores what it means to coexist with non-human species and decenter ourselves from an ecosystem.
Cole makes it clear that humans should not prioritize ourselves over any other species and doing so could be our downfall.
She also builds a rich, beautiful world that you can’t help but want to be a part of.
All of these books, in one way or another, helped me begin thinking through issues surrounding the climate crisis in a way familiar to me. If you’re looking for more climate fiction, Goodreads can provide further reading!
This article is part of an ongoing series surrounding issues of sustainability and the climate crisis.