A main concern of climate fiction, at least if you’re inclined to read academic essays or delve into an analysis of The Climate Fiction Writers League, is to build stories around how it may be that we address—even solve—climate change or portray worlds in which we’ve failed to solve climate change.
There’s an old Downeaster joke I know, but here’s what AI Summary says of it:
You can’t get there from here” is a classic Maine and New England saying used to humorously explain that a destination is actually very close but requires overly complicated, non-direct directions due to the area’s tricky roads, or that a far-off place is simply too difficult to reach efficiently, often baffling GPS devices too. It’s a sign of local dialect, meaning “it’s complicated” or “you’re nearby but I can’t explain easily.”
Here’s another AI Summary on the definition of hope, and gosh-darn it, but this starts off with a reference to Aristotle, and that is thrilling for me, since I used Aristotle’s definition as the epigraph in Kill Well, my first book in my literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet:
Aristotle viewed hope (elpis) as a neutral anticipation of the future, linked to imagination and motivation, but not a primary virtue; it’s a “dream of a waking man” that provides vision and drives action, requiring experience and the possibility of both good and bad outcomes for true hopefulness (euelpis). He connected it to courage, confidence, and ethical self-improvement, stating that hopefulness underpins deliberation, but warned against empty optimism, emphasizing experience as crucial for justified hopes, distinguishing it from mere youthful wishfulness.
Well, well, didn’t I pick my epigraph well?
As a writer of climate fiction, it’s understandable that I’m curious about the nature of the writing world into which I’ve thrust myself. Yes, this sort of curiosity is not mandatory, but what can I say? I was an English Major.
It turns out that understanding climate fiction is a more difficult task than it should seem. One problem straightaway is that there is no such genre as “climate fiction,” at least in any official sense. Look up books on Amazon, for example, and no such genre, or, more to the point, sub-genre. If you read through the sub-genres of science fiction that range from “Adventure” to “TV, Movie, and Video Gamer Adaptations,” with twenty-one others squeezed between, you won’t find climate fiction. The genre of climate fiction is missing within R.R. Bowker’s Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) too, nor does the Library of Congress’s Library of Congress Classification (LCC) acknowledge climate fiction as either genre or sub-genre. Who knows? Maybe overseas the Bliss Bibliographic Classification, a system known for its highly faceted structure that allows for great specificity, and primarily used in some British libraries, carries “climate fiction.”
Substack, Climate Fiction, and Thrutopia
These days what I’m more interested in is an emergent term, “thrutopia,” which AI Summary describes as follows:
Thrutopia is a concept and emerging genre, particularly in climate fiction, that describes a hopeful but realistic future where humanity overcomes immense challenges (like climate change) by “fighting through” obstacles, rather than falling into paralyzing dystopia or relying on unrealistic utopia. It’s about finding practical, grounded paths to a flourishing future through “bold and inspired pragmatism,” focusing on adaptation, community, and systemic change, not easy solutions.
The term is often credited to Prof. Rupert Read, from a 2017 article in Huffington Post, where his byline ran with “Philosopher working and writing at the University of East Anglia, Chair of Green House think tank, former Green Party of England and Wales councillor, spokesperson, MEP-candidate & MP-candidate.” Manda Scott, author of Any Human Power, added to the definition, suggesting that “a Thrutopia crucially needs to offer at least one plausible, inspiring, grounded route map through from exactly where we are to a future we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.” This quote is from her post on Substack’s Climate Fiction Writers League titled “Thrutopian Writing – a new genre for a new world,” published on May 28, 2024.
But what is the state of climate fiction? There are many dystopian and post-climate apocalyptic stories. If you do a quick search on Amazon Books using the phrase “climate fiction” in lieu of having the sub-genre available, you’ll get over 50,000 results. As applicable any and all critiques of Amazon’s search function may be, I was pleased to see two of the strongest climate fiction books present on the first page of results: The Ministry for the Future: A Novel, by Kim Stanley Robinson and The Deluge, by Stephen Markley, both of which I would hold up as great examples of Thrutopia. There were a number of short story anthologies, including Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, edited by Grist and adrienne maree brown and Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future, by Grist, which, by the way, is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change for the past twenty-five years.
There are now books about writing climate fiction. Appearing on the first page search results referenced above was Climate Fiction Futures: The Optimistic Writer’s Guide to Cli-Fi Success, by F. Cocentino and The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook, by Wren James; James runs the Climate Fiction Writers League. Of course, if your search phrase is “climate fiction optimism” you get twenty-six results in all. “Climate fiction thrutopia” gives you eight results.
Grounds for pessimism?
Climate Fiction, Optimism, and Realism
In a recent post of mine, titled “Climate Fiction, Optimism, and Realism” I explore the role of climate fiction in fostering hope and action (you’ll find parts of that post cannibalized in this post). That post was inspired by this Literary Hub roundtable on the new anthology Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, from MIT Press. The Literary Hub essay is titled “On the Urgency of Climate Change, Creating Hope in a Crisis, and the Limits of Western Storytelling: A Roundtable on Our Climate Futures with Libia Brenda, Vandana Singh, Gu Shi, and Hannah Onoguwe.” The essay was written by Joey Eschrich, who is the co-editor of the above-mentioned anthology collection of speculative fiction, essays, and artworks, just publishing on December 2. Here’s how the anthology is described by Eschrich:
We challenged our contributors, who represent 17 countries around the world, to envision hopeful futures shaped by climate action. These visions of the future are grounded in the scientific consensus about the severity and urgency of the climate crisis, but also in the cultural and geographic complexities of real places across the globe, and real communities on the ground.
There’s a lot I like in the essay, and the anthology’s focus on local, culturally specific stories especially resonated. Among the global contributors, such as Hannah Onoguwe (Nigeria) and Gu Shi (China), there’s a common argument that hope is found in resilience and the “unwavering courage to never give up.”
I now have the anthology in hand, and so I have the sense of how far into the future the stories are chronologically, including excellent works set decades or even centuries down the road. Still, I’m wondering if true optimism better rests in “realistic” stories set in the near-term, through narratives that show how we get from our current crisis to a cleaner future. Of course, I better believe this, since my own series, The Steep Climes Quartet, which has books set between 2026 and 2047, is an example of fiction that grounds climate progress in the recognizable political and economic realities of the present day. It could just be that I’m obsessed with how we get there from here, to misquote the proverbial Downeaster.
And then another paragraph I liked from the essay by Eschrich:
It [climate change] kicks up chaos in disparate forms everywhere—a wildfire here, catastrophic flooding there; crop failures here, migration crises there—but it’s also a protean, or perhaps a tentacular thing. We’re all dealing with it locally, on our home turf, with our friends and neighbors. Climate stress and climate action are multifarious, which makes it easy to forget that we’re all in the same struggle together.
One of the contributors, Hannah Onoguwe, who has ties to West Africa, raises an interesting point:
I’ve found that with readers, when a story is rooted where they are, then it morphs into something that could be happening to someone they might have bumped into recently. When it actually resonates and the issues are close to home, they are more likely to be moved to action. It ceases to just be science fiction, something “out there” from the West created and consumed purely for entertainment.
Climate Imagination carries a subtitle: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures. Gu Shi, who contributed two short stories, caught my eye in this regard. “City of Choice” presents a world where, “due to climate change, an annual ‘Flood Season’ arrives each summer, submerging the city’s roads, plazas, green spaces, and the lower floors of buildings. The protagonist, a mother who works as an urban planner, uses her professional knowledge to enhance the city’s resilience while repeatedly escaping crises with her three children, aided by artificial intelligence.” Shi’s take on optimism is that things can get worse, but we can take action. “I believe that this unwavering courage to never give up in the face of disaster is perhaps the greatest form of hope.”
Well, amen.
For Onoguwe, her novelette “Death is Not an Ornament” conjures up another Nigerian civil war for a hopeful climate future, because “much has to change besides the mindsets of stakeholders—it will require policies and institutions that ensure that countries are actually keeping their word when they make environmental commitments.” She continues:
To catalyze change, we will need people fueled by this radical passion who are also able to communicate in the local languages and proffer little everyday practices and manageable changes that work. I think if we turn away from purely economic considerations to a more nurturing outlook, then it won’t seem like we’re losing too many of the benefits and conveniences of the current status quo.
Overall, the thing I was most curious about is not only the grounding aspects of the anthology’s story settings, but whether or not these stories are temporally local, by which I mean near- and mid-futures that reflect the reader’s world. Writing future worlds is challenging, but therein lies a common problem with climate fiction: worlds decades and centuries past our own time may reflect consequences of climate change and even offer optimistic new worlds that have overcome or adapted to climate change, but such stories miss the thread from where we are today and these future worlds. In the end, I’m more inclined to consider that the most optimistic climate fiction is grounded in the world we recognize as our own but also shows how we can deal with climate change.
There’s a solid basis for optimism as many other countries find themselves leapfrogging fossil fuel infrastructure into clean energy, although, arguably, America under Trump is among the most pessimistic locales relative to climate change today. One can argue that Trump will prove little more than a speed bump in America’s path toward the clean energy transition, because legislation is the biggest driver of the clean energy transition, with Biden’s IIJA and IRA legislation making the point, at least before these acts got smothered in their cribs. Economics plays another essential role, although the American concept of “free markets” is tainted these days when the concept of hope can seem dim and dimmer.
Nevertheless, lowering carbon emissions is the order of today in order to avoid a worse tomorrow, including those worse tomorrows that writers of climate apocalypse seem so overly fond. Lowered carbon emissions won’t happen at a significant level unless the nation transitions to low carbon power (and, yeah, a bunch of other stuff, but energy and transportation are main drivers of carbon emissions). This transition will happen faster with the right legislation that mandates or supports the work needed to embrace it. In America, today, that’s the basis for climate optimism. That’s how we get there from here.
The two books of the four in my series are published, and the third is due out soon. Kill Well takes place this year, while Dear Josephine (Book Two) is set in 2029 and the next book, Over Brooklyn Hills, takes place in 2035. The last book, Farm to Me, is set in 2047. The series through characters live in one locale, and climate change problems and progress are seen directly and primarily through the Berkshires (Massachusetts) perspective. It isn’t that there aren’t plenty of plot points and transient characters all over the series, or fossil fuel thinktanks and pro-climate progress actions in Washington D.C., but the perspective is local. And that is as it should be, considering that just like for the vast part of the American majority, the struggle is seen from where one sits and we mostly don’t sit in the labs and boardrooms and halls of power. For most fortunate Americans, climate change is mostly a matter of our drowning in news, the occasional deluge or smoky wildfire atmosphere or stretch of hot days notwithstanding.
Describing a path toward climate progress within a recognizable world for the reader is an act of hope, one grounded in today’s and tomorrow’s world where we live, with all the facts, political realities, societal struggles, business conflicts, household economic anxieties, personal relationships, and all the other big and small questions, just like in our very own lives. This is the story that needs believing. This is the story of actual thrutopia, the act of hope showing, with all our stuttering steps, how we will get there.
Why I Don’t Like Climate Fiction
“Why I Don’t Like Climate Fiction” is the title of a post by D. A Baden, founder of Green Stories and Habitat Press, published on Climate Fiction Writers League’s Substack on Oct 28, 2025. Refreshingly, she begins, “It’s a controversial title for an article for the Climate Fiction Writers League, and I admit it’s mostly an attention-grabbing ploy.”
Baden’s complaint is that much of climate fiction is “avoidance and distraction” by way of descriptive imagination of how bad things can become. But “if people were going to be scared green, then they already would be,” argues Baden early in her post. She cites studies about climate fiction’s efficacy—or, rather, as the data mounts, the lack of efficacy—in getting people acting for climate progress. She talks about how authoritative leaders use fear and suggests that freaking people out about climate change works in inaction’s favor, when raising alarm serves—as she’d done with her post’s title—to chase after people’s attention. Her conclusion is thrutopian:
What I’d really love to see are positive visions of what a flourishing future might look like if we did things right. A vision to give us something to aim towards rather than run away from. I like the thrutopian ideal championed by Manda Scott and Rupert Read and others of using fiction as a space to explore some of the steps by which we can get from where we are now to where we’d like to be.to
The problem I see is that facts today—yes, despite Trump—suggest a much different world than masses of people, including climate fiction readers, huddling in fear and paralysis. The dangers of climate change are widely known, as is known that most people want something done to relieve the danger. This is according to Yale University and the partners of the 89 Precent Project, which describes itself this way:
The “89 Percent Project” is a global journalism initiative by Covering Climate Now (CCN) highlighting that around 80% of people globally support strong climate action, with research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) confirming these widespread views on climate concern and desire for solutions. Yale’s research shows Americans’ opinions on climate change, including misconceptions and desire for more info, often aligning with the project’s findings, while Yale also runs its own Planetary Solutions initiatives supporting numerous climate projects.
Another counterfactual of climate fiction as doom is seen in the emergence of the “affordability” issue in today’s politics working in conjunction with what Ember calls The Electrotech Revolution. The transition to clean energy is accelerating. Over the next couple of years, and especially as the next American political cycle gears up, wider understanding that clean energy is both the least expensive and the quickest way to boost supply for growing electricity is likely to become widely understood. Add to this the digital grid management systems already being put in place (well, in some states more than others—care to choose a color?), and it’s hard to see how Big Oil wins this argument, at least long term. Of course, we may also see the courts—and I am imagining the Supreme Court getting set straight (impeachments, please)—deciding against Big Oil in many ways.
Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of climate fiction is not that the genre has alarmed people into inaction, but rather that too little climate fiction celebrates the advancements today that are dropping carbon emissions. But too many climate fiction stories, when dealing with near-future, present worlds where the IIJA and IRA hadn’t passed in 2021 and 2022, respectively, or that solar electricity generation isn’t now 90 percent lower in costs over the last decade or so, or that wind power works and is economically better (like solar) than natural gas electricity generation, or that batteries haven’t dropped in costs so radically—and aren’t done yet!—that the old bugaboo about “intermittency” has been pushed aside.
Clean energy progress is possible and happening at scale in a quickly growing number of countries. Plenty of challenges remain, but the path forward is clear and real.
What of these challenges? One, of course, is the power of Big Oil and its history of corruption and violence to maintain and expand their business of dumping poison into the world. What we’re seeing in the United States today is this power on full display, with Big Oil’s greasy thumb hard-pressed on the scales. Shouldn’t climate fiction stories look at such situations and suggest that Big Oil might keep its thumb greasy, but all the better for taking fingerprints down at the station?
So where is thrutopian climate fiction? I argue that climate fiction that takes us from where we are today toward a world that has made progress against climate change remains largely AWOL. There’s a lot of climate fiction that shows better futures, but somewhat hopelessly fail to make how we got there part of the story.
The good news is that there is some great thrutopian climate fiction, although I’m not sure these authors think of themselves as Thrutopians. First on my list is Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. This book does the hard work of showing the world and all the messy components of progress; that Robinson makes UN bureaucratic maneuvering and the meetings of the giants of finance captivating is a truly impressive accomplishment. Ministry for the Future has remarkable scale, both in the wide scope of locations and characters, but also in the book’s chronological span. This book, all on its own, has significantly advanced real-world conversations and arguments about new forms of financial instruments and currency designed to push investment into longer timeframes when carbon-reduction investments show attractive returns. Add compelling characters and a number of genre-like plotlines and you are on a riveting ride from where we are today to where we want to be tomorrow.
Another good example is The Deluge, by Stephen Markley, which is, similarly to Robinson’s Ministry, multi-decade, multi-locale, and multitudinous characters that all help to approximate the real world. And like Ministry, there’s a lot of attention to nuts-and-bolts issues of solving climate change. The Great Transition, by nick fuller goggins, is another good example, although one framing climate solutions in retrospect, looking back from a time of action that includes holding accountable climate guilty parties such as those in the C-Suites of energy corporations.
Take Hope: Here’s the Conclusion
The Steep Climes Quartet, according to the definitions, is clearly a thrutopian series. What differentiates this series from most other thrutopian works is in its grounding in the personal. Readers get to follow around people doing climate stuff, but the thrust is to build a world familiar to us, which means a world where climate change is not the number one concern of most characters, despite climate change’s grave dangers. I haven’t asked AI to analyse the stories, but I’d guess that for many of the series’ through characters, climate change is some spots behind paying the mortgage or figuring out what’s for dinner. This may come across as flippant, but I assure you that climate change plays a central role in the stories. That doesn’t mean, especially for those of us who aren’t activists or politicians or academics concentrating on the issue and challenges of climate change, that most people live and breath climate change. We may be assaulted by the topic in the news. We may experience flood damage from a terrifying deluge, or find ourselves gasping for a clean breath of air during a bout of wildfire season, but we’re more likely to grumble about our house insurance going up and up, and may not even understand the casual link with climate change.
In other words, despite climate change, we don’t stop being people and living our lives. (Well, unless you’ve been swept away in a flood, or burned out of your home, or see your kid get asthma from all the PPM.) Those of us who are paying attention—and that is a hell of a lot of us, these days—know climate change is a terrible challenge, but mostly we’re thinking about the next bill due, the car or dental appointment, the grocery list, our child’s birthday. Most of us likely give far more attention to why we keep getting swiped left on the dating app, or what exactly our best friend meant when he made that odd comment last week, or what the blood test results expected tomorrow might portend.
Readers of The Steep Climes Quartet could come away from reading with a better understanding of externalities or more prone to look carefully at just how close that small stream is to their house. But the books fail if the reader doesn’t see his or her own life reflected accurately in the pages and thus not identify with the characters who sometimes find themselves worrying about just what, exactly, they should be thinking about climate change and what to do about it (hint: vote!), but all within their own human experiences, because that’s where we all are today.
We live and we hope for a better world and we sometimes struggle a bit about it.
Well, that’s my hope.
Of course, the focus on characters is why I describe The Steep Climes Quartet as “literary climate fiction.” Just so you know that I am indeed an English Major, let me leave you with this very funny definition of literary fiction I came across the other day.
On her Substack, Shannan Mann posted a Note, as follows: “literary fiction means the protagonist makes bad decisions slowly,” which I find to be terrifically funny and shockingly apt. But I think myself in good company—her list of bona fides on her Substack profile includes Creative Director @ ONLY POEMS & Strange Pilgrims; Executive Editor @ Sub Club; writing a horror magic-realist novel; reading classics & poetry; researching literary publishing.
It is important to find other optimists in this world of ours.