A listing of novels for high school students and adults exploring dystopic futures and the social and practical effects of climate change.
For more see:
- Climate Change Fiction: An Updated Annotated Bibliography
- Climate Poetry for Teaching
- Climate Short Stories for Teaching
- Climate Novels for Teaching
- Climate Fiction: Dystopias and Allegories
- Climate Movies
Even if Everything Ends by Jens Liljestrand (2023). Translated from Swedish, this story captures the boredom and panic of modern first-world consumer culture as people desperately try to ignore, or escape, the impending disasters in their lives. Four younger narrators, each affected by climate change, deal with the doom and dread of their changing world. As Sweden burns from protests and wildfires, this novel’s characters deny the possibility of the social breakdown, expected in other countries, is actually happening “here.” The book offers a satirical contrast between the trappings of privilege and the sudden humiliations of suffering.
Blue Skies by T.C. Boyle (2023). This novel delivers a biting satire of America’s near-future climate collapse. The wealthy congratulate themselves on their eco-friendly practices while recklessly buying, consuming, and wasting material items. Disaster approaches so slowly that people don’t notice. Instead, they adapt to the new normal as they lie to themselves about how bad it has become.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (2023). Guerrilla gardeners are entangled with a tech billionaire on the edge of a New Zealand national park. The ambitions of the main characters lead to disastrous consequences. While this book does not deal with climate change, specifically, its focus on environmental devastation and repair enhances a psychological thriller concerned with, asserting control through technology and the ways we deceive others and ourselves.
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (2022). This is a novel in which every chapter is from a different narrator, tracing centuries of unraveling after a pandemic virus. Climate change is a minor theme in what’s primarily a book about loss.
The Displacements by Bruce Holsinger (2022). This plot-driven disaster novel examines how one privileged Miami family copes with a hurricane reducing their comfortable life to living in a tent in a FEMA mega shelter. It examines the varied options for responding to disaster, including blame, exploitation, and aimless navigation? It’s a cautionary tale for those who think climate change won’t affect them.
Denial by Jon Raymond (2022). Set in a future where technology and criminal trials have dramatically reduced carbon emissions, this book follows a journalist about to expose a convicted climate criminal currently in hiding. When facing a terminal diagnosis, journalist begins to wonder, what this will accomplish.
The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg (2022) depicts a community’s attempt to cope with warnings of the apocalypse. Nonbinary gender identities reflect alternate ways of knowing and encountering the world.
Bewilderment by Richard Powers (2021) chronicles a young boy’s wonder at the world around him as well as his anger at the mass extinction of humans via murder. He revels in a sense of interconnection and imaginative wonder at the world yet is also racked with grief and anger at its loss. His father, the narrator, tries to use neural biofeedback to help his son, using technology to invoke a transcendent state of awe and empathy. This is an excellent introduction to Powers’ work if you’re not ready to dive into his enormous The Overstory.
Appleseed by Matt Bell (2021) is a bizarre fable set in three different time periods: the colonization of America, the present day, and a far-future ice age triggered by technological hubris. The same man (Johnny Appleseed) is the protagonist in all eras employing three different relationships to nature. First, he tries to conquer it via agriculture, then to supersede it via geoengineering, and, finally, desperate to find it for survival.
The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik, including A Deadly Education (2020), The Last Graduate (2021), and The Golden Enclaves (2022). This YA trilogy is an ironic take on the magical school genre, featuring a witty and somewhat unreliable narrator. Close attention’s paid to class and power and a beautifully constructed 3-part plot with cliffhangers pays off. Most importantly, the trilogy offers an allegory of environmental disaster and the need for climate justice.
Everything Change, Volume III, edited by Angie Dell and Joey Eschrich (2021), includes “Invasive Species” by Amanda Baldeneaux, a near-future story in which people are caught in the midst of slow ecological and economic disintegration. Yet, life goes on without fanfare. This anthology also includes “Redline” by Anya Ow, about a rescue mission in a heat-stricken Singapore. Everything Change Volume II (2018) includes “Monarch Blue” by Barbara Litkowski, a story of the extinction of pollinating insects overseen by poor citizens and “The Last Grand Tour of Albertine’s Watch” by Sandra Barnidge, which illuminates the economic and social tensions of disaster tourism. Everything Change Volume I (2016) includes “On Darwin Tides” by Shauna O’Meara, in which a young girl struggles to survive without legal papers in a rapidly warming Malaysia and “Victor and the Fish” by Matthew S. Henry, in which wildfires slowly destroy fish and the communities around them.
Weather by Jenny Offill (2020) focuses on a depressed librarian, overwhelmed by a sense of oncoming climate doom even as the banalities of daily life continue. If the world is indeed dying, as we all are, how do we appreciate it and care for it anyway? I also enjoyed the book’s companion website, obligatorynoteofhope.com.
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (2020) imagines a few lucky escapees from a global city, set loose into the world’s last remnant of protected wilderness and left to survive or perish.
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghey (2020). A woman with a deep connection to the ocean follows the last population of arctic terns on what might be their final migration south.
The Interdependency Series by John Scalzi (2017-2020). When scientists predict that cataclysmic change is coming, the profit motive and inertia make it difficult for society to take the drastic action needed to stave off disaster. While it’s not explicitly about climate change, the allegory is clear and could help students analyze the present moment. Be aware: This book includes frequent use of obscene language and sex.
After the Flood by Kassandra Montag (2019) imagines a scenario in which water rapidly covers the world and dramatic social change ensues, as a mother searches the increasingly lawless ocean for her stolen daughter.
The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) makes trees the unexpected protagonists through a dazzling use of symbolic connections, deep-dive science, and the epic interwoven timelines of multiple human and arboreal characters.
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers (2018). This book imagines a self-sufficient civilization comprised of a fleet of generation ships in space, arising from the long-ago ecological collapse of Earth. For some a prison and, for others, a promised land, the fleet sees itself as a living archive of humanity’s past mistakes. See Chamber’s other books, A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) and Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022).
Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller (2018). A floating Arctic city governed by AI allows the wealthy to escape the aftermath of past climate wars, but the poor who keep Blackfish City running must find ways to survive.
The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin (2015-2018), includes The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky. This series depicts a fantasy world in which society’s need to survive recurring geological disasters acts as an allegory for the social and physical devastations of climate change.
The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde (2017), translated from Norwegian. This novel combines two stories set two decades apart: One is about an environmental activist near the end of her life, tracing her losses and, the other about a father and daughter trying to stay alive as drought collapses their world. Be aware: This book includes non-explicit depictions of sex.
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (2017) and sequel Hunting By Stars (2022). In this YA dystopian series, Native Americans flee mainstream (“settler”) culture, which is hunting them as a resource. The melting ice and risen oceans of a devastated climate future form a backdrop for this story, which focuses instead on the struggle to hide and survive in the still-beautiful wilderness of a broken world.
American War by Omar El Akkad (2017). This book primarily focuses on the refugee crisis and political turmoil that climate change could cause. Be aware: This book includes scenes of torture.
Tales from the Warming: Envisioning the Human Impact of the Climate Crisis by Lorin R. Robinson (2017). This series of vignettes offer possible futures punctuated by frequent action and romance sequences. The most memorable stories include “Exodus,” concerning Polynesian islanders’ decision to leave their home; “The Perfect Storm,” in which a Bangladeshi man becomes a second Noah; and “Starting Over,” about Midwestern refugees moving to Greenland to farm.
Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities and Tool of War by Paolo Bacigalupi (2011-2017). This YA series depicts a post-apocalyptic world of radical inequality after seas rise due to global warming.
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2016). This book uses a non-fiction style as if written from the perspective of a historian four hundred years from now, chronicling how climate change destroyed civilization.
Fragment by Craig Russell (2016) starts out as an eco-thriller about a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf but develops into a tender exploration of interspecies communication and solidarity.
Drowned Worlds: Tales from the Anthropocene and Beyond, edited by Jonathan Strahan (2016), includes “The Elves of Antarctica,” as well as 14 other stories exploring the way future cultures t both exploit and idealize remnants of the past. Standouts include “Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit - Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts,” by Ken Liu, a dreamy meditation on the relationship between nature and artifice.
Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (2015). Having lost its water, California has become a land of scavengers and outlaws. Makeshift families build communities amidst physical devastation, but the human appetite for self-induced fantasies persists. Be aware: This novel includes some explicit sexual content.
Clade by James Bradley (2015). This interconnected series of brief snapshots tell the epic story of three generations of one family as they experience the slow burn of climate change over time.
Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, edited by John Joseph Adams (2015). This anthology explores human relationships and emotions in the context of climate change, including standout tales about a Midwestern family facing desertification (“A Hundred Hundred Daisies” by Nancy Kress), ecosystem destruction in the Pacific Northwest as humans move there to escape climate change (“The Myth of Rain” by Seanan McGuire), journalists covering drought refugees in Arizona (“Shooting the Apocalypse” by Paolo Bacigalupi), a family struck by a tropical pandemic (“Outer Rims” by Toiya Kristen Finley), an environmentalist fighting technological solutions to climate change (“Eagle” by Gregory Benford), a marriage crumbling along with dikes against the storms (“The Netherlands Lives With Water” by Jim Shepard), and a meditation on denial as water rises (“Quiet Town” by Jason Gurley).
The Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta (2014), translated from Finnish. In this complex YA dystopia, water is scarce, land is polluted, democracies have collapsed, and Chinese dictatorship rules the world– but we never get all the details because the protagonists inner world is the heart of the story.
Orleans by Sherri Smith (2013). This YA dystopia depicts a post-hurricane Gulf Coast where a blood disease has restructured society into tribes based on blood type. It explores issues of rebuilding communities and the power of technology vs. the power of relational bonds, through the perspective of a young Black girl trying to survive.
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2012). This poetic novel explores climate change denial through the perspective of a rural Appalachian woman who finds monarch butterflies in the forest after climate change pushes them out of their native Mexico.
“The Alchemist,” a novella by Paolo Bacigalupi (2011), later collected in The Tangled Lands (2018). In this fantastical allegory for climate change, any use of magic causes the growth of more and more deadly brambles, which threaten to sicken children and swallow towns.
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2009) explores personal and political independence from slavery, gene modification, and colonialism in this early work of climate fiction.
“Diary of an Interesting Year,” by Helen Simpson (2009) at the New Yorker, is a funny and disturbing short story set in 2040, written as a series of journal entries. It vividly depicts how environmental collapse transforms laughable inconveniences into inhuman horrors.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004) deals with how power inflicts violence on the powerless and how communities of empathy might develop against cultures of greed. Ecological devastation is a central theme, though war and nuclear weapons are more direct causes here than climate change.
Earthseed series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents) by Octavia Butler (1993 and 1998). These two groundbreaking YA dystopias feature a young woman who journeys through a disintegrating, overheating world to spread the message of a new religion in the face of relentless change. Octavia Butler pioneers some of the major tropes of contemporary climate fiction, including social breakdown, religion, community, and the allure escaping to outer space. Presciently, in 1998’s Parable of the Talents envisioned a president who promised to “Make America Great Again.”
“The New Atlantis” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1975). This novella imagines a future America in which the combined forces of government control and corporate ownership have made art, knowledge, nature, and meaningful work equally obsolete.
If you’re interested in post-apocalyptic visions, there’s Earth Abides by George Stewart (1949). Though its initiating apocalypse is a pandemic, rather than climate change, its central focus is the reciprocal relationship between people and their world, and how each changes the other. After the majority of people are gone, how does the earth change? And how do those changes affect the people who are left?