Showing up in my email inbox this morning was a Substack from Climate Fiction Writers League, on July 15, 2025, by Kate Woodworth. The title: “Does Climate Writing Lead to Climate Action?”

I’ve written a post on the subject back on July 27, 2023, titled “Can Climate Fiction Help with Climate Change?” In that post there’s something like a round of opinions on the topic, and especially from writers who are thought of as writers of climate fiction.

I’m not surprised to see within today’s above-mentioned Substack a reference to Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s 2020 survey project trying to answer this question, and, of course, I’m sure I’m among at least a handful who have long considered his work. I don’t think there’s much else that’s been undertaken exploring the question. The results from the project tell us that not much in the way of lasting effect in creating climate change action in readers can be seen, but the survey has severe limits, with interest based on anecdotal considerations. Still, nice to see the topic of climate fiction’s utility get attention.

And maybe Schneider-Mayerson’s basic inquiry is flawed, especially in considering climate fiction a monolithic category or genre, which, certainly, it is not. As my reviews of various works of climate fiction (or fiction that can justifiably considered climate fiction) indicate, the range within this genre/subject category is vast. Heck, I’m finishing up Ada Palmer’s Terra Inota series and can make the argument that this series is climate fiction, despite taking place in 2454 and only tangentially mentioning the climate change past. I won’t make that claim, but I could and not be damned to Dante’s eight circle of hell.

I’ve commented on the topic of climate fiction’s potential for helping people come to better understanding of climate change and for helping the reader to take on a more active stance. There was an interesting exchange via comments about Claudia Befu’s “The Economy of Collapse”  in her Story Voyager Substack, for May 18, 2025, from which useful conversation ensued, mainly focused on whether or how climate apocalypse fiction might work.

Woodworth’s essay raises some familiar questions regarding dystopian climate works, writing:

I wanted to point fingers at dystopian/post-apocalyptic climate fiction because those highly popular genres—in my opinion—allow readers the comfort of believing climate catastrophe isn’t happening now and perhaps never will. Climate journalist and fiction writer Emma Pattee posits that the disconnect lies in readers’ view that fiction is an escape from reality and not a way of connecting to it more strongly. Perhaps more alarming is Pulitzer Prize finalist Karen Russell’s concern, quoted in Pattee’s article, that “we’ve spent so much time envisioning precisely the future we least want to inhabit that it’s come to feel inevitable.”

Woodworth’s response is to hope that “[climate fiction] writers really can be agents of change…but how?” Great question, but her answer misses the original premise of her essay about the efficacy of climate fiction to help foster climate action and instead posits a generic solution: “I could invite readers of my climate novel, Little Great Island, to perform one small act or behavior change that will help mitigate climate change. Each person could choose the act that made sense in their own life.”

There’s nothing wrong with the sentiment, but it avoids the question of what climate fiction may be capable of, which, I argue, is to help readers identify with today’s issues on climate change by identifying themselves within fictional characters who experience the pains and pressures of today’s climate change experience and the decisions of these characters toward positive understanding and action. Yes, I know that I’ve included “today” twice in the preceding sentence, but that’s for emphasis. The story line missing in action among most climate fiction is the story of right now and the near future, and this means the story of our day-to-day lives, with all mundane and quotidian concerns expressed within the story.

Well, “quotidian” may not sound like the basis for a fun or entertaining or engaging story, but, of course, literary fiction has focused on this for decades, with the likes of Raymond Carver as demigods of such efforts. More relevant, perhaps, would be Jenny Offill’s Weather, which tells of the day-to-day concerns of a more or less normal young woman who’s less young than she used to be, and anxious as so many of us are, where climate change is in the background adding one more beat to the drum roll of dread and self-criticism. Weather is a great book, or so my review, “Climate Fiction Quicky: Weather, by Jenny Offill, is Terrific” argues.

Of course, I have a dog in this hunt, by which I mean my literary climate fiction series, The Steep Climes Quartet, of which the first two books are out and the third in process and the fourth and last mapped out. The series, which is across 22 years (2026-2047) centers in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, is America-focused, and for most of us climate change remains a matter of backdrop news, and political or cultural arguments, and amorphous worry about prices and expenses and home insurance, and, for most of us, in some sense, the future for our children and grandchildren. The fact is that there’s a huge level of activity combatting climate change today, and that further progress mostly comes down to elections, but one is hard-pressed to find much climate fiction looking at us as we are today and will be tomorrow.

Is a more contemporary focus more likely to help readers more clearly see themselves in the context of climate change? This seems axiomatic, but, really, the jury—or future surveys and studies answering this question—remain outstanding.