There are a lot of types of climate fiction. I’ve followed this genre (or sub-genre, or sub-sub-genre) from well before there was a name for it. I suppose anyone who’s read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road could qualify for the same distinction, but climate fiction interests me, not surprising given that I’m writing The Steep Climes Quartet, with Kill Well, Book One, coming out this September. Well, actually August, in a week or so of this writing, since I could move up the publication date and so did move up the publication date.

I’m working on a climate fiction bibliography, but this work is early still and these few first efforts remain off-the-cuff discussions of climate fiction books on my shelf or ebook reader list. Don’t worry, though. I do love taxonomies, so expect that I’ll deliver on my categorization promise.

I’ll start this installment with Richard Power’s The Overstory, the Pulitzer Prize title published in 2018. I’m sure that I am not the only reader who found the early going a challenge, just as I am sure some readers—how many I couldn’t even guess—didn’t make it all the way through, but rest assured, this novel is worth sticking with and well worth completing its 502 pages (Norton paperback edition). The book is a reading challenge because of the large number of recurring characters that take turns in the various chapter sequences, and this means you are not going to read it while multitasking.

The story is charming and the many characters interesting and I can’t say that the book is overtly about climate change, a complaint some of the faith have with this title, but the message of the fragility and precious quality of the living world is effectively presented, and, of course, much of the book centers around the large trees of the Northwest, including some tree-climbers camping out high in the swaying breeze in an attempt to forestall lumber harvesting. The tree crown campers is the thing most often talked about in this book, but the story is far richer and any attentive reader will come away longing for better control and laws governing capitalism as we experience it today. I was reading How to Blow Up a Pipeline, by Andreas Malm, published by Verso Books in 2021, and I was surprised by his claim that he had left The Overstory unfinished, but I still think highly of How to Blow Up a Pipeline even if there are no actual instructions.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is non-fiction, and so not relevant to climate fiction bibliographies, but since I’ve mentioned the author’s reaction to The Overstory, I’ll report that the book is a well-reasoned argument against climate activists’ singular embrace of non-violence civil disobedience, when clearly history shows that non-violent protests are more effective more of the time when there is a violent alternative lurking in the wings. How to Blow Up a Pipeline is entertainingly vitriolic in tone, but then, given the existential stakes of climate change, how should it not be vitriolic? The book is a solid think piece and does what a good think piece must, which is to make the reader think.

The other big book that is often cited as an example of climate fiction is Omar El Akkad’s American War, published in 2017 by Knopf. Page-lengthwise this book is no The Overstory and unlike Power’s book, the action takes place some years from now, when the conflict between what we call Red States and Blue States mixed with a crackdown on fossil fuel use splinters America. El Akkad become well known for an essay about the dearth of climate change in contemporary fiction, writing:

It’s important for fictional representations of climate change not to misrepresent the science behind the phenomenon, but what is of most interest, at least to me, is not the science, it’s the human consequences.

I agree completely and will readily confess that this is a large part of my thinking with The Steep Climes Quartet series, although his action takes place further in time that the two-dozen year span of The Steep Climes Quartet. His book also includes an ersatz civil war, while my stories are more of day-to-day climate change consequences, albeit with some aspects of thriller. El Akkad got quite a lot of grief from his decrying genre fiction in his essay, arguing that genre fiction is dismissible before literary fiction, but this dichotomy was already outdated, with the blending of literary with genre fiction long accepted and praised. And the dichotomy was unnecessary to his argument: why, exactly, should this oddly outdated gerne vs. literary perspective make moot the need for climate change in genre fiction, especially considering the wider reach of genre fiction and, hence, a potential for greater climate change awareness effect?

Still, American War is an enjoyable read, yet thought-provoking, and the imagined world where oil is considered a contraband was fascinating. I would have liked to have some wider knowledge of the rest of the world, a fair point, I think, considering the interesting prospect of America now on the ropes, but a writer has to decide where the book finds its limits. There are many well-formed characters in this well-structured novel, and this book gets high marks from me, despite my tetchiness about his opinion regarding genre fiction.

Another book in something of a similar vein as American War is Camp Zero, by Michelle Min Sterling, published by Atria Books in 2023. Camp Zero is similar to American War in that it takes place some undetermined number of years hence, when climate change effects are pervasive. Unlike El Akkad’s book, the action in Camp Zero takes place in a relatively constrained part of Alaska (constrained area by Alaskan standards) and not across large regions of the United States, as found in American War. It is hot and hotter down in the lower States and ever northward is the likely destination for American climate refugees. The reader finds a limited set of characters and those characters are involved—mostly unknown to them—in a larger geopolitical game and hi-jinks in the snow ensue, except that “hi-jinks” sets the wrong tone, since the characters are good, plot snappy, and the climate change consequences played subtly but effectively. In other words, I liked reading this book a lot.

In “Climate Fiction, Part I,” I mentioned Paulo Bacigalupi, a reliable favorite of mine for the engaging quality of his writing but also for the well-imagined climate change ravaged world, and I wish I had included The Water Knife, published is 2016 by Vintage. One of the challenges of reading these days is the print book/ebook shelf conflict, where a reader needs not just a physical shelf for print, but also a digital bookshelf for ebooks, and in the case of The Water Knife my copy was digital and out of sight (I’d given away a paperback copy to recipients now unrecalled, but had wanted to re-read the book, so…).

Which gets me thinking about my climate fiction bookshelf on the digital side of things. Most of climate-related ebooks in my library are non-fiction, but one recent digital version of climate fiction I find notable is The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton, published in 2022 by Grand Central Publishing, part of Hachette Book Group. The story follows a young girl who lives in Florida, which is increasingly submerged, but her father is reluctant to leave despite all the Federal relocation offers. The reader watches the girl become a young woman over the course of the book, and, of course, an increasingly wet young woman. There is great handling of how infrastructure can collapse slowly (her father is a lineman intent on keeping the grid up) and how communities collapse. There is an element of magical realism in the novel, and I’m not a big fan of that (well, okay, Gabriel García Márquez and Gregory Rabassa, but magical realism is not a steady diet), and I finished the book thinking that the collapse of the town where the action takes place over some years was so well done that the magical realism element wasn’t needed and may undercut the climate change aspect of the story, but I really liked the book anyway, even with the magical realism in it, light as it was.