The question in the title above seems like a good one for me to ask, considering that I write climate fiction.

I also do other things, including living as best I can with a reduced carbon footprint, with a special focus on the built environment, which is to say making the buildings I have lived in more energy efficient. I’ve renovated two houses in my adult life, and each of these renovations had insulation, air-sealing, and energy-efficient mechanicals as priorities. The most recent of these projects, undertaken on a large two-family house, was an attempt toward deep energy retrofitting. While the results fell short of the best DER benchmarks, what I learned in the course of this multi-year project led to my starting Retrosheath, an effort to bring digital technologies into construction in order to significantly reduce costs for DER. Unfortunately, Retrosheath failed, whether because it was too early in the market, or I was inept, or because I lacked the capital required to get an ambitious concept off the ground, and it is entirely possible that all of the above are true.

I am also a climate activist, at least of sorts, with my work with Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) as my current main bona fide in this regard.

What I wish is that my writing about the climate crisis will help people think about their own contributions to the problem and to consider that they must and will take actions toward climate change solutions. I know that this is a big wish.

I have long educated myself on climate change, and if you want to see my origin story (well, one of them, anyway), check out “Greenhouse Gases, Global Warming, and a Sony DV-2400.”  I’ve been writing for a long time, and I started writing what has become The Steep Climes Quartet series back in 2015, and I had already been studying the widest range of climate change issues as possible. Well, as possible for me, that is, but I do pride myself as a solid autodidact, plus, you know, I know some people.

What I also know is that I was interested in writing a book that would offset the deficit I found in many climate fiction novels, which was the tendency to create apocalyptic scenarios—drowned worlds, burnt worlds, post-apocalyptic survivor worlds. There are some entertaining and good—even great—books of this sort, but I was concerned that many such books did little to make climate change real to readers. After all, most of us (in the developed nations, anyway, at least so far) don’t find ourselves wandering hellscapes in search of the last gun and girl or paddling around among sunken buildings for cans of beans or climbing aboard spaceships to head for pristine planets for a new start at ruining a planet.

“Can a new wave of climate fiction inspire climate action? (commentary),” by Ryan Mizzen, December 16, 2021, in Mongabay, comes down on the positive side of the question I ask myself:

Here is what Ryan Mizzen has to say:

Cli-fi has typically been made up of “Dystopian and pre-/post-apocalyptic worlds of the past, present, or future stricken by a myriad of climate change calamities,” according to Kübra Baysal in Apocalyptic Visions in the Anthropocene and the Rise of Climate Fiction. These end-of-the-world stories may serve as a warning of why we should address the climate emergency. But can they inspire change? Investigations into this question are ongoing, but here’s what we know so far.

Research published in the journal Environmental Humanities in 2018, by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, found that readers of cli-fi were more concerned about the climate crisis than non-readers. Cli-fi encouraged readers to think about the ways climate change would impact people and life in general. However, Schneider-Mayerson found that the majority of cli-fi was associated with “intensely negative emotions.”

But danger! Negative emotions can lead to apathy!

The article goes to great detail in listing the books that have had a recognizable effect on the world. Here some examples:

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe played a role in bringing about the American Civil War, in the fight to end slavery.
• The American sitcom “All in the Family” produced an episode which showed chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in a negative light in October 1974, and PBS has reported that the aerosol industry attributed the episode of “All in the Family” as that which sparked their decline [in use].
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and 1984 by George Orwell warned us about the rise of totalitarian states and have become part of our cultural fabric.

The article cites Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, where he writes, “Research results have been consistent and robust: fiction does mold our minds. Story – whether delivered through films, books, or video games – teaches us facts about the world; influences our moral logic; and marks us with fears, hopes, and anxieties that alter our behavior, perhaps even our personalities.”

Well then. So far, so good.

“Can Climate Fiction Writers Reach People in Ways That Scientists Can’t? A new subgenre of science fiction leans on the expertise of biologists and ecologists to imagine a scientifically plausible future Earth,” by Anna Funk, appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, on May 14, 2021, and it also lists many books that can be thought of as climate fiction, among them Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021).

Funk quotes Adeline Johns-Putra, a literary scholar at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, who published the monograph Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel and has edited multiple books on climate fiction. “It’s part of a pattern. It’s a feedback loop, as [these books] feed into our awareness and that feeds into our demand to read these books.”

On the other hand, with unrealistic portrayals (the movie The Day After Tomorrow is cited), there is the danger that real-world climate effects are seen as limited or sow confusion, which raises the question of the non-fiction-fiction value differential. In the end, that question is moot, since only fiction can take place in the future, and VanderMeer is quoted on this: “The thing I think we [fiction writers] can tell you about the future the most is how it’s going to viscerally surround you. More than the actual accuracy of the details, what I’m mostly concerned about is what is it like to live in a particular moment.” Ted Howell, a literary scholar and lecturer at Rowan University in New Jersey who teaches a class on climate fiction makes a similar point, saying, “When we typically look at climate forecasting, there’s a lot of excellent science and data crunching behind it, but it usually gets depicted numerically. We say things like, the future will be 2.4 degrees Celsius warmer, the sea level will be 3.6 meters higher… but what fiction can do is give people a sense of what it would actually look like to live in such a world that’s been made hotter, or where the weather is more extreme.”

One of my favorite chroniclers of climate fiction gets some ink, too. “I have friends and family members with whom it’s difficult to talk about climate change because we’re here in the United States where climate change is still a highly politicized subject,” says Amy Brady, the executive director of Orion Magazine, who writes the monthly climate fiction newsletter Burning Worlds. “But after reading a really interesting novel, I can hand that to a friend and say, ‘hey, you might like this.’ Then we can start talking about climate change via that story—it’s an entry point that doesn’t have to be politically charged… we need a lot of pathways to conversations about it [climate change].

Unfortunately, few seem confident that an interest in climate fiction has beneficial real-world effects. Funk sums it up this way:

If you’re wondering whether reading a novel with themes of environmental degradation can be a bit depressing, you’re not alone. Stories of dystopian climate futures can indeed make readers feel kind of bad. A 2018 study found only 26 percent of cli-fi readers said a book they’d read elicited any sort of positive emotional response. Most were left feeling distressed, sad or anxious.

Fair enough, I guess.

Jeff VanderMeer has his own say in an article he wrote in Esquire, April 2023. The title of the article “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us: As the world burns, readers increasingly look to climate fiction for hope, predictions, and actionable solutions. But can the genre really be a manual for useful change?” pretty much sums it up.

This is a great essay about climate change as a pervasive and unavoidable topic in his own fiction, but VanderMeer only accepts the importance for himself. He states, “I make no claims for the success of my ecological themes in my fiction—I only know that I have been thinking about ‘climate fiction’ in one form or another for my entire life.”

VanderMeer spends some ink on the originator of the term “cli/fi,” and it is an interesting tale, complete with threatened legal actions against Dan Bloom, a journalist and 1971 graduate of Tufts University in postmodern literature, who coined the phrase and pursued his neologism with ardor, even as the writing community and the science fiction purists resisted, although SF has largely concluded speculative fiction may be the better environment for examining climate change. And then Amitav Ghosh published The Great Derangement in 2016, with his argument that any and all literary fiction going forward should be about the climate crisis, even while triggering another spike in the battle between literary fiction and genre fiction, probably to no one’s joy.

But this is getting in the weeds. What conclusion, if any, does VanderMeer come to regarding his question? This tells the tale:

The search for hope is hopeless or beside the point. Fiction can’t save us in this particular way, although it can pretend to, but if in a book a heroine survives climate crisis, this has no corresponding nexus or loci in the real world, no matter how strong the will of the reader that it be otherwise.

This is an excellent article, by the way, especially if you enjoyed being an English major (which I did).

“Does Climate Fiction Make a Difference? Art As Mirror, Art As Hammer,” by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, published in Literary Hub, December 16, 2021, has a particularly interesting paragraph about the question of the value of climate fiction, as follows:

There is a great deal that is magical, mysterious and unknowable about what happens when people are exposed to a story, but there are, in fact, ways that we can evaluate the effects of a narrative encounter. This is an area of research that receives relatively little attention in publishing and popular criticism, but the proposal that narratives have tangible and enduring effects that might be evaluated via experiments, interviews, focus groups, and surveys is hardly news. The advertising industry, worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, is based on it.

Needless to say, Schneider-Mayerson follows this with a mention of a survey he conducted, bless him. Also needless to say, we are talking sample sizes that render results only as points of interest, but hardly conclusive.

I appreciate his argument that climate fiction’s use as a “Trojan horses for message-smuggling” is slight if for no other reason than the readers who are interested tend to be already counted among the choir of the converted. Still, more surveys ensued and not surprisingly readers were affected by climate fiction. Also not surprising (if disappointing) is that, “their [climate fiction] influence was short-lived. A month later, we tested the same people again and found that the effects we observed had diminished to statistical non-significance.” On the other hand, “Since any single work of climate fiction (or article, film, or song) is unlikely to have an enormous or permanent impact on most individuals, we need a constant stream of climate narratives. We need all authors, filmmakers, and cultural workers to include climate messages in their narratives.”

Score one for The Steep Climes Quartet, which, if you haven’t figured it out already, is a four-book series.

And score one for Paulo Bacigalupi, whose climate fiction gets good coverage, although, apparently, the pulp-like toughness of the water-scare world of The Water Knife makes some readers worried about protecting themselves from others and such reaction may be counterproductive toward a world that must join together to solve the climate crisis. This concern is a stretch, and hardly well-supported by anything empirical, but Schneider-Mayerson ends with this long phrasing for the truism that anything can be good or bad, depending how it’s used:

While it’s clear from my surveys and experiments that climate fiction can play an important role in warning us of the dangers of inaction, helping to shift perception, attitudes, and beliefs, and modeling effective actions, it’s logical that if literature can do all these things then it can also have a negative impact on readers.

Speaking of longwindedness, this post is nearing 2500 words, a veritable mortal sin for any content on screen.

I’m going to keep looking at the question of the value of climate fiction, though, and have these three articles to start me off for next time: “Writing for Impact: How Climate Fiction Can Make a Difference,” by Dominic Hofstetter, Medium, February 22, 2019; “The rise of apocalyptic novels,” by Hephzibah Anderson, BBC Culture, January 10, 2021; and “What The Last of Us, Snowpiercer and ‘climate fiction’ get wrong,” by Tyler Harper, April 18, 2023.

Oh, and don’t forget to buy my books as they come out. I’d love for my titles to appear in future academic papers and literary essays on the consequences on climate change of climate fiction, don’t you?