Why is being straight about the climate-changing world we live in so hard?

Austin and Clare Aslan, the authors of the post “Climate Fiction Writing as the ‘Slow Blade that Penetrates the Shield’,” published on  Climate Fiction Writers League Substack on May 19, 2026,  raise some good questions about climate fiction. They are co-authors of The Crystal Halo, which is described as “an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the ‘Chosen One’ myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature.” One of the authors is the director of the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University; the other serves on the Flagstaff City Council, “first winning a seat and then re-elected on a carbon-zero-by-2030 platform.”

So, serious people. They describe how their professional roles rely on “clarity and directness…[where] every action is directly and tangibly tied to evidence and outcomes. Our arsenal is our professional knowledge and our armor is facts.” They then go on to make the safe claim that storytelling is different than their day jobs… “not the same as policy, white papers, or climate action plans.”

Well, yes.

The two Aslans argue that “Fundamentally, fiction is about entertainment; there is a contract between writer and reader that the latter will enjoy themselves through the former’s work. When we invent stories that pontificate or proselytize, that sense of enjoyment is dulled or lost. No one wants to feel coerced by a novel.”

Well, right. So far, so good. This may be an overly stark distinction, though, especially thinking of Horace, the 19 BC poet famous for his Ars Poetica and many still lively phrases, including aut prodesse aut delectare, typically put as “Poetry should either entertain or edify.” The modern consensus is that literature can do both.

Hey, really, I just wanted to quote Horace in a post.

Their argument continues, basically claiming that people connect with “…stories [that] have a unique power to speak directly to hearts and souls, to get under the skin and to topple defensive front lines. People have long understood the world through myth, parable, and narrative—not climate models and temperature graphs.”

So we’re still in safe territory. We all understand, one hopes, that there is a big difference between fiction and policy statements, white papers, or climate action plans.

“Stories teach us to envision new possibilities, to sympathize with others, and to experience new or emerging obstacles. They ignite our imagination and allow us to conceptualize alternative futures and to consider their ramifications and anticipate our own responses,” the Aslans state, but here’s where the question about climate fiction gets interesting. The authors of the post go on to describe The Crystal Halo, the first novel in their Prophecies of Fathom series, where they “grappled with the seduction of trying too hard to make a case—to convey a moral lesson… There is no exposition presenting the problem and how to fix it. There is no straightforward lesson.”

Is Dune Climate Fiction?

While their phrasing shows their rejection of didactic or pedantic reporting on climate change in climate fiction, I question how this fantasy series becomes climate fiction rather than simply a fantasy series, albeit one where issues of “environmental collapse is present as background pressure, a deviation from normal, something characters plan around rather than solve. In this way, the disruption to climate in the world of Fathom is much like we experience it today, on Earth.”

But is it? The answer, of course, will be found in the reading of this work.

By the way, the “slow blade that penetrates the shield” is a story element in Frank Herbert’s Dune, where firearms and other fast kinetic weaponry are annulled by personal force fields, making knife fights based on slow(ish) movement the main form of close combat. Because the story revolves around the planet Arrakis, a virtually waterless place defined by vast stretches of bone-dry desert, severe windstorms, and extreme temperatures, the series is often cited as an early or proto-climate fiction series. A nifty enough if a bit bloody metaphor for how climate fiction must tread.

But let’s get back to the Aslans’ post and the question of “What is climate fiction?”

Unlike white papers and scientific lectures, they argue that “fiction can show us how people live during a crisis, but should be set before the complex problem has been resolved. To remain authentic, it ought to dwell in the long middle, where adaptation is uneven and life stubbornly continues…. Most human experience does not take place at the edge of extinction. It takes place in the in-between, charting a winding path through daycares and deadlines, bills and bedtime. When climate fiction doesn’t account for this real life, it risks becoming spectacle—harrowing, yes, but disconnected from how change actually unfolds.”

I think their view here is spot on. The problem with most apocalyptic or fantasy climate fiction is that these stories do not represent real life. Readers may very much enjoy such stories, but close identification between the reader’s life and the settings and characters in such stories, set as they are in alien worlds—whether post-apocalyptic here or on some distant planet or an entirely fantastical world—makes it less likely for us to identify the books closely with our own situation. Even if the setting is Earth, the situation is alien.

Today, we may be heading toward an apocalypse, but we ain’t there yet, although we might be setting up an unavoidable conclusion of disaster locked in, albeit slow motion. Of course, we’re getting ever closer to such disasters in some places more than others. Bill McKibben writes a particularly sobering post in his Substack, The Crucial Years,” titled “A Question of Margin: And there’s so very little,” about the Somali humanitarian crisis, with some Ebola and India and Pakistan heatwaves thrown in, and a sound ass-kicking of Elon Musk, to boot.

Finally, a Solid, Working Definition of Climate Change

But let’s get back to the Aslans’ post:

In The Crystal Halo, the stakes are real, but they are often unspoken. The moment of disaster passes without drama, and challenge emerges from how characters negotiate meaning in a world that no longer behaves as expected. What do you hold onto when the future crumbles? What counts as success when progress is redefined as nothing more than survival?

These are not questions with tidy answers, and fiction should resist providing them. Advocacy, in story, does not come from instruction but from proximity. Readers must be allowed to inhabit uncertainty without being rescued by didactic answers. They need room to wrestle, to disagree, and perhaps to come to a different conclusion from the one the writer would reach. This is where storytelling enters a realm that policy cannot.

Amen, I say. The above quote may be one of the best definitions of climate fiction I’ve seen.

Still, there seems to be something of an allergy to stories set in the real world of today and the near-future, which is the most important time when climate amelioration will or won’t happen. The Fathom series’ description is “an epic high fantasy series,” but I haven’t read the first book in the series, so I can’t fully judge the series alignment with our reality. As author of my own series, The Steep Climes Quartet, the first book is set in 2026, the second in 2029, the third in 2035 (this one, Over Brooklyn Hills, is on pre-order, with a publishing date of June 15, if I may so report!), and the last book is set in 2047. I want to tell the story of our contemporaries in the developed world, where resources to cope with climate consequences are plentiful—certainly in contrast to today’s Somalia, for example—and where political actions hold the best hope for climate progress.

The main point in my series is that while we live in a time of significant climate crisis we are human and that even in a climate crisis, our daily lives typically trump (sorry) our attention. Such lives are filled with many priorities, and mostly of the personal and immediate sorts, but one question to be asked is how climate change subtly intrudes into our lives. Here in the developed world, climate change is mainly in the static of news and the noise of weather around us and in our daily home economies, too. Unless you happen to live in the wrong spot at the wrong time, of course, such as with Helene and Asheville, North Carolina, back in September 26, 2024, and there are many more examples of acute crises by the minute.

Climate fiction makes readers witnesses, as the Aslans say, and bring into greater relief the experiences within “the consequences of our collective decisions [and] granted the authority to decide for themselves how their new experiences within this world will impact their perspective.” With fantasy books, are we reading of a world where our collective decisions are manifest? If only there was an AI called Gandalf the White we could query.

The Aslans’ also rightly state that “Fiction… can hold and expose contradictions without resolving them. It can show characters who make imperfect choices for understandable reasons. It can honor the reality that people care about climate change and still drive, fly, consume, and contradict themselves daily.”

They continue:

That contradiction is human. It captures all the daily complexity we must each balance, the easy and the difficult, the joy and the pain, and the tiny decisions that add up to a real life.

Too often, climate narratives reduce people into caricatures: villains of extraction, heroes of resistance, victims of circumstance. But real people are much more complex and also much more relatable. They resist change not because they are evil or because they deny science, but because change threatens identity, memory, and belonging. Stories that ignore this complexity may feel righteous, but they rarely feel true.

A climate story that refuses to simplify, that aims to show its characters as whole people with tangled and contradictory values, can reveal that truth. Characters can be complicit and caring, fearful and hopeful, informed and overwhelmed all at once. Characters can want to do the right thing, but can face many axes of rightness, constrained by the challenges of social ties, health, finances, and dreams.

When readers recognize themselves in a story, they are more likely to carry that story with them. Stories that linger shape perception. This is why narrative must come before message. A reader who would instinctively reject a manifesto or moral may be captivated by a character, haunted by a choice, or quietly changed by a narrative conflict.

Okay, maybe this is the best description of climate fiction.

Giving Austin and Clare Aslan the Final Word… Well, Until My Final Word, Anyway

If The Crystal Halo succeeds at all, we hope it succeeds in this way—immersing readers in a world where climate change is neither abstract nor theatrical, but intimate—a world where environmental collapse is a force that shapes relationships, ambition, hopes, and dreams. This is a world where climate change is a presence that cannot be ignored, but also cannot be reduced to a slogan.

The future will not be saved by stories alone. Policy matters. Infrastructure matters. Science matters. Our day jobs allow us to tackle environmental problems directly. But stories can shape the cultural ground on which society stands. Our shared artistic passion allows us to play a role in shifting the landscape under people’s feet. Storytelling prepares us—not by telling us what to do, but by helping us imagine who we might be and the world we might shape.

The Aslan post is impressive overall, as are the concluding paragraphs quoted above, in what I see as the continuation of a useful definition for climate fiction. I’ve been struggling with what the intrinsic elements of stories called “climate fiction” are, and it’s not easy. In fact, when I read this post, I was in the early stages of writing a post titled “What is Climate Fiction? As a Genre, It’s a Fiction,” so I was pleased to see that the Aslan post goes far in defining key concepts of what I think are the necessary elements of fiction to be “climate fiction.” Debates, no doubt, will ensue.

There’s an odd tension, however, between what the Aslans’ post says about climate fiction and the climate fiction they write. When I saw that the series is described as “an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the ‘Chosen One’ myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature,” I thought The Crystal Halo was going to be yet another post-climate change future or alternate world when what we are facing today is ancient history or worse yet, the real world supplanted by allegory. One of my critiques of many books that get labelled as climate fiction is that such books are fantasies or stories beyond our time or otherwise some sort of dystopian tale. There are also books that incorporate magic and special beings or evolved humans, but that sure as heck isn’t the world I see around me.

First though,  I haven’t read the first book, The Crystal Halo, so there nothing like a review or critique of the novel itself here. I know well enough that writing quality is as important as anything else in terms of a book’s value, as are the vividness of characters and compelling scenes and intriguing actions and situations. I well know that I can’t critique the book, not having read it. What I’ve done is studied The Crystal Halo’s Amazon page and the book’s descriptive copy. I’ve also read through the start of the book that’s provided through the book’s Amazon page, and I’ve gained a sense of the book. What is clear is that the book is fantasy, the locale and people quite different from today, at least in the developed world. It reads, at the start, like a scene from the Middle Ages, although as previously confessed, I haven’t read any further than the first six pages of Chapter One as provided by the “Read Sample” and that’s not even the full chapter that is, according to the Table of Contents, eight pages.

Why a fantasy series as climate fiction? This is a question I think a lot about. For example, I wrote “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction” a week or two ago, and the subtitle is “Why are so many novels about climate change pursuing myth and fantasy instead of actual solutions?” Here’s the first paragraph of this post:

I am a student of climate fiction, and not surprisingly so, since I write climate fiction. I’ve long rejected the easy story of apocalypse, and not because such stories are uninteresting or a failure as a fun read, but because such stories most often have little to do with the subject of climate other than as a premise for the story. Likewise, I’m not a big fan of far-future climate fiction stories that show mankind changed in response to the climate crisis, even while the stories don’t bother to do the work of showing how the change comes about.

Yes, I’ve been researching the differences between the words snarky, snide, and sardonic, and you might see why when you read a paragraph that comes later in the “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction” post:

What sticks in my craw is the propensity of novels calling themselves climate fiction that focus on fantasy, and that includes altered species or fairies or demi-gods, or far-future distant or dystopian worlds, or radical changes in human nature often focused on gender issues or BIPOC, all the while too often fitting into hyper-genre writing markets instead of having climate change the central focus. There are many fantasy, romance, thriller, or science fiction novels that have some “climate” orientation or other, but that clearly don’t address the clear issues of climate change, either in cause or solution. We’re burning fossil fuels and heating the planet. Isn’t this time and place of crucial threat to the world an interesting enough story? Who needs allegory when the menace and what needs doing to address it is staring us right in the face?

If you look at at recent posts on Climate Fiction Writers League, you’ll note that at least six out of the most recent eight posts on there involve climate fiction with fantasy or fantastic characteristics (book descriptions below from the posts), as follows:

Climate Fiction Writing as the “Slow Blade that Penetrates the Shield,” by high fantasy co-authors Austin and Clare Aslan, May 19, 2026

Today we have an essay by Austin and Clare Aslan, authors of The Crystal Halo, an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the “Chosen One” myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature

Magick & High-Tech Augmentations in YA Fiction, a discussion between Kenechi Udogu and Ray Star, Mar 10, 2026

Today’s discussion explores climate fiction dystopian concepts in YA Sci-fi and Fantasy novels, by up-and-coming authors Kenechi Udogu and Ray Star.

Kenechi Udogu’s debut novel Augmented is set in a future where humans are enhanced to ensure the survival of society. Akaego fights to prevent her power to grow plants from being weaponized by a corrupt regime.

Earthlings by Ray Star is set on a remote island where the magick-born have the ability to control earth, air, fire, water and spirit. But elsewhere, humanity is enslaved, a cruel dictator rules the land, and an uprising is on the horizon.

Imagination, Mythology, and the Return to Earth, by Steve Stine, author of I, Enoch, May 5, 2026

Steve Stine talks about mythology in fiction. His sci-fi novel I, Enoch is about a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction. Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets.

The Balance Between Immersion and Believability, A conversation between authors Denise Robbins and Amy Lilwall, April 7, 2026

This year, Denise Robbins and Amy Lilwall published novels that address climate change sidelong. Through depictions of public reactions to pending disaster—and the turmoil that ensues—both novels seek to capture the panic of a world in the midst of wide-scale disruption.

Robbins’ novel, The Unmapping, bends the laws of physics in a city—New York—that ‘unmaps’, causing world-famous buildings and streets to move and displace overnight. Amy Lilwall’s The Water That May Come imagines UK citizens in the face of a megatsunami that threatens to engulf their homeland.

Mermaids & Sea Salvage in two oceanic sci-fi novels, A discussion between Timothy Chawanga and Susan Fletcher, February 24, 2026 [Note: this post seems to split between a near-future mystery and a fantasy YA book]

Today, we have a conversation with Timothy Chawanga, author of SALVAGIA, in which a diver searching for nostalgic salvage discovers the body of the most infamous man in flooded Florida and must avoid suspicion from both feds and corporate mafias.

Timothy is talking to Susan Fletcher, author of Sea Change, a YA retelling of The Little Mermaid set in a near-future where rogue gene editing has changed humanity.

Stop the World, I want to Get Off, Adam Connors interviews Alex Foster, Feb 10, 2026

Alex Foster’s debut novel, Circular Motion, explores how a new, high-speed travel network causes the Earth’s rotation to accelerate, not just by a few seconds, but by a minute, an hour, and more.

That’s a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but I’m not sure how many of these books are fictional works addressing or focused on climate change. And, no, I’m not talking about graphs and charts, but focus.

This question of what is climate fiction, I believe, also applies to the planned The Prophesies of Fathom series. I love how Austin and Clare Aslan talk about effective climate fiction, but their talk of climate fiction and their series seem to be opposite each other.

I guess I have a lot of would-be climate fiction reading ahead of me, but at this point I’m confused about the whole domain.

Learn more about The Prophesies of Fathom Book One: The Crystal Halo.

Learn more about The Steep Climes Quartet.