As I will say to anyone, my attention to this question is understandable, considering that I’m writing the final book of The Steep Climes Quartet, a series I describe as “literary climate fiction.” The series includes the third book, Over Brooklyn Hills, published this past spring, and the last book, Farm to Me, has a publication date of Spring 2027, if the good lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise. For the curious, there’s a guest blog post on ClimateCultures—not to mention many posts on my website—describing the series.

The aim of the series is to tell the story of people living with climate change—not with the crisis as the sole focus of their lives, but rather as an everyday part of their world. This positioning mimics what we—that is, Americans—experience and so the story is one with which readers can identify. My hope is that readers come to consider a wider spectrum of issues of climate change within their own lived experiences and thus are more likely to consider and act on climate progress.

The series falls within the category of speculative fiction, especially considering the four books take place in the same locale over a period of twenty-plus years, with the first, Kill Well, occurring in 2026. Dear Josephine, the second title, takes place in 2029. Over Brooklyn Hills is set in 2035 and the final book, Farm to Me, is in 2047. The series runs from the present to nearly 2050. We can expect progress to be made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions along with the continuing consequences from climate change already in play. While plot points can span the world and extreme weather consequences show up here, there, and everywhere, the main characters of the series are grounded in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with the worst consequences from climate change mostly seen at a remove, just like today, when reports of flooding disasters or heatwaves killing thousands is mediated through news and social media. The characters’ lives remain largely focused on the more quotidian concerns of life that may be or at least seem unconnected with climate change.

In other words, I’m speculating what our lives with climate change look like today and how this changes over time as we better understand how climate change affects us, including the growing cost to our personal economics.

Fiction is Speculation

“Speculative fiction, leaning into the dystopic, how else to write about climate change?” writes Brit Griffin in a recent guest post on ClimateCultures. She’s the author of The Wintermen, a three-book series that started in 2014. The series portrays a Canadian North in a guerrilla conflict as society breaks down under the pressure of climate change. Griffin has a new book out titled The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien, and her post is titled “The Call of the Gothic: Storytelling During Climate Catastrophe,” outlining her shift toward gothic writing. She says:

But then, between the first book and the last (released during Covid), the still-yet-unimaginable became too plausible, too ordinary in its believability. At that point, for me, the dystopic frame lost something of its power as a narrative device. Took on a sort of tepid register.

…

And there was a peculiar listlessness emerging, all the alarms and harbingers crowded out, the once looming, sky-darkening grims becoming more of a ho hum. All that urgency and momentum gone, simply dissipated. This wasn’t dystopia, it was the day in, day out… the time for speculation seemed to have passed.

Griffin describes her latest novel as a Gothic tale:

I considered what I was seeing, what I was understanding, about current climate catastrophe. Odd the disconnect, because as familiar as it had become it was anything but normal. Fantastical floodings washing away bridges and mountainsides and cows and chickens. Fires like giants, towering infernos burning and burrowing and still smouldering even through the cold of winters. It put me in the mind of monsters, of supernatural beings, of large dark forces wailing and tearing their way across the landscape, driven by the diabolical disinterest of the tech bros and the fossil fuel magnates. I was beginning to see Gothic.

Fiction is speculation across any and every genre of the species, but what Griffin is talking about is her shift to speculating about climate change at a remove through the conventions of the Gothic genre. Gone is the “near-future” of Wintermen and her new work welcomes the 19^th century of the boom and bust of silver mining in various northern parts of Canada’s Provinces. I can’t adequately speak to the quality of Griffin’s new novel, although the sample I read of Wintermen, the first book in the series, shows she’s a solid writer, and the sample from her latest work is easy and enjoyable reading.

But is a Gothic novel that takes place over a hundred and fifty years ago fiction about climate? Since climate is part of every life and story, one could say yes, but what about climate change? There’s always allegory, of course, when writing about one subject is actually telling a story about something else. The Gothic genre mixes mystery, psychological tension, and terror. Coming out of the Romantic movement of the 18^th century, it is often described as a reaction against the order and rationality of the Enlightenment, even if the style takes its name from medieval Gothic buildings like castles, abbeys, and ruins that made up many scenes and settings. The Gothic genre is not my cup of tea, but I’ve got nothing against the genre and like any genre, whether a particular work is any good is up to the writer’s success or failure.

What I’m interested in is what distinguishes climate fiction from other types of fiction.

Climate Fiction: Premise or Subject of the Story?

I sometimes wonder if I have a John the Baptist complex, since my effort to understand what sets climate fiction apart from other categories of fiction seems one hell of a lot like crying in the wilderness for all the effect it engenders. I’ve tried to get discussions going, even to the point of my being willing to pick fights, although, raised as I was to be polite, I’m not inclined to fisticuffs. Nevertheless, responses have been crickets, although, on the other hand, there’s been a total absence of beheading.

I’ve written many posts on my website and on Substack on the subject of what distinguishes climate fiction from other forms of fiction. I’ve reached out to Fiction Climate Writers’ League, corresponded with writers and publishers, cited—and reviewed—books and discussed authors as examples of climate fiction or fiction that only claims to be climate fiction. I’ve made my case on ClimateCultures, where Mark Goldthorpe introduced my long essay “Telling Stories About Climate Change” this way:

In this original piece, novelist and essayist David Guenette suggests that, too often, “climate fiction” fails to bridge the planetary-scale climate crisis with human-scale everyday life. Climate fiction should focus on human stories that connect readers directly to our present challenges: more stories we can identify with may relieve suppressive social silence on climate change.

So why does Griffin shift to Gothic? She quotes Ann Radcliffe as “one of the greatest authors of romantic gothic literature,” saying that terror “expands the soul” and thus, in the hope of Griffin, allows the reader to “process the weird, the unfathomable; they assist us in exploring upheaval and community breakdown. Hopefully Radcliffe is right, and stories can help to awaken and move us to act.” This attribute of Gothic novels may be as Griffin states, but the weird and unfathomable of climate change realities are at best at a remove. Perhaps the book is a response to climate change, but it isn’t climate fiction, unless the definition of “climate fiction” is so broad as to be meaningless.

Grist Magazine (“25 Years on the Climate Beat”) has a climate fiction initiative called Imagine 2200, where Tory Stephens, Climate Fiction Creative Manager, collects and publishes short stories and periodically sends them out via a signup email. Grist has also published a couple of anthologies drawn from such published stories. As the name of the initiative suggests, the stories tend toward more far-future settings, although there are some that reflect near-future scenarios (“Sandbag Squidward” is a notable recent example).

The most recent Imagine 2200 short story, published October 15, 2026, is “The Re-Rememberings of Bee Bishop,” by AriDy Nox. It is a solid, captivating story. The story is also situated 400 years in the future, when humans have undergone ReUnification, something that involves genetic manipulation that incorporates Earth aspects into the human genome, reflecting a radical shift in human culture that better aligns humans with the world.

I typically question such premises as climate fiction, but I’m more inclined to accept “The Re-Rememberings of Bee Bishop” as climate fiction in that the story represents the aftermath of human culture’s efforts to correct what humans are doing to the climate, even while raising the question of our tendency to revert to the view of humans as separate from and superior to the Earth. Still, I’m less sure how this story and many of the others in Imagine 2200 help bring readers to an understanding of where we are today and how we might try to get to where we need to be as best we can, but I’m sure the argument would be that a story that helps shift peoples’ perspective on their relationship with the Earth can only help. My concern, though, is that we’re in a time of necessary and specific action that includes political choices in support of climate progress legislation, right along with a better understanding of the options those of us in economic positions to act, and so undertake any and all of the household electrification actions now available to us. I’m all for mankind improving itself to form a healthier relationship with the environment, but there are actions needed today that could ameliorate the worst climate change consequences tomorrow. Failing to do so means the world becomes more inhospitable. Reducing carbon emissions can’t wait for the next stage of human culture’s evolution. People are dying today because of climate change, and more will die tomorrow.

Climate Fiction as Call to Action, Including Understanding Climate Change

As I argue in my ClimateCultures essay, there are now many thousands of novels that describe themselves or are otherwise provided the mantle of “climate fiction.” Add to that the poems about climate change, or short stories, paintings, drawings, prints, songs, and videos, and the question arises: Are any of these creative expressions helping in any significant way to shift the course of the Anthropocene away from dire climate consequences?

Unfortunately, the vast number of “climate fiction” stories use global warming and climate change as a story premise. Climate change’s potential for a flooded world, desert wasteland, burning forests, life-denying temperatures, or terrible storms often contributes to an action-adventure or survivalist tale, often without much concern about accuracy of the climate science or much discussion of how such terrible worlds could be avoided. Worse yet, many of these apocalyptic tales breeze past the human and ecological costs the premise demands, skipping directly to some form of “guy-gets-gun-and-girl” story or something otherwise not about climate change and what it does to us or what we might do about it.

Many other novels and short stories use the premise of climate change to present magical realism, evolved humans in distant futures, aliens, or fantasy. Can a story of a person who can speak to mushrooms help people address the climate crisis today? Depends on the story, I guess. You can judge one instance for yourself by reading “The Case of the Missing Lake,” by Colby Devitt, published in the Grist Imagine 2200 program on November 6, 2025; the subtitle is “Lake Ballona goes missing, and only the mushrooms can help.” To be fair to Grist’s climate fiction initiative, their aim is to “celebrate stories that invite us to imagine the future we want—futures in which climate solutions flourish and we all thrive.”

There are other approaches to climate fiction, including as a sub-category of science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future, which I consider the gold standard of climate fiction, insists that he’s a science fiction writer. The problem I have with a lot of what gets called climate fiction is that many such novels deal with serious problems of today and tomorrow in unserious ways, but The Ministry for the Future is informative, well-written, entertaining, and regards climate change very seriously.

There are literary fiction novels that manage to address climate change as more than a dystopian premise. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is one great example, where characters are deeply developed to support the human story, but climate change is integrated into the story, with readers likely to come away with a clearer sense of urgency and—hopefully—agency. The only kind of magic there is in such books is the magic of portraying human lives vividly. Climate change is confidently and reasonably represented within the characters’ experiences.

Thrutopia, Another Name for Climate Fiction

As I put it in my ClimateCultures essay, climate fiction is fiction that carries useful knowledge of the issue of climate change in the hope that readers will be more conscious of the circumstances of climate change and more thoughtful and engaged toward solutions to ameliorate it. This definition reflects one of the trends in climate fiction that is sometimes called “Thrutopia,” although I’ve recently come across “Protopian,” too. Whatever your term of choice, the basic idea here is a story where readers not only better realize the climate crisis but also wrestle with how we may get to solutions—or fail to get to solutions—whether societal or personal.

Like all new categories, Thrutopia tends to broaden—like the current application of “climate fiction”—toward uselessness. For some authors, Thrutopia can simply mean a rejection of climate apocalypse stories. For me, I use the old Downeaster joke “You can’t get there from here” and apply this challenge to climate fiction, where paying attention to what we know about climate change and its causes and how we might indeed make our way toward climate progress and the trials therein are the relevant subjects. Note that I’m not arguing that climate fiction, in this definition, must be about successful solutions for climate change amelioration, but only that climate change is the pervasive subject of the story, not simply the premise or starting point that is too often ignored thereafter.

“Thrutopia” seems a growth industry on Substack these days. Here’s a (no doubt) partial list, and like the entries on most such Substack lists, some are brand new with not much to show and some have been active for some time, and some haven’t been active for a while:

1. Kate Evans
2. Bewilded Boomer
3. Welcome to Thrutopia
4. THRU
5. Bending The Arc (A Thrutopia Magazine)
6. Manda Scott
7. Secret Poetry Appreciators
8. Cypress Knees

A number of the above Substacks include serialized fiction, such as Kate Evan. Climate Fiction Writers League carries posts about Thrutopia writings. Sandy’s Substack offers Sandy W. Lawrence’s views on climate change science and policy, but also references his “trilogy of climate fiction—or cli-fi—novels explores disaster without descending into apocalypse, offering a thread of optimism rather than despair. Set in present-day Washington, D.C., the stories unfold in a world teetering on the edge of…”

There is also the category of “Solarpunk” that has a big crossover with Thrutopia. Examples from Substack include:

1. The Solarpunk Times
2. Solarpunk Words
3. London School of Solarpunk
4. SolarPunk Stories
5. The Aspiring Solarpunk

What I’ve found—although this view is hardly based on a comprehensive study—is that much of Thrutopia and Solarpunk also falls into fantasy and far-futurism. There are interesting things to learn and enjoyable stories to read, but without the near- and mid-term future focus on climate crisis solutions, these stories miss my definition of climate fiction.

Climate Fiction is the Story of Our Fight Against Climate Change

The fact is that our window is tight for putting into place solutions toward lessening the already unavoidable scourge of climate change, because if we don’t quickly reduce the damaging effects of high greenhouse gas emissions, we’re looking at living in a radically different world. The good news is that we have economically viable clean energy and electrification now, but that, of course, doesn’t mean we’ll manifest the electrotech revolution fast enough to make a big difference. We can do it, but will we?

Of course, some people already are living in that climate-distressed world, and while many of us who live in a developed country have social safety nets and the wealth to cushion bad effects, the death toll tied to this summer’s European heatwave is 50,000, and there’s the ever-increasing property damage for those more bothered by material loss than human lives destroyed.

Right now, the battle is to reduce the amount of suffering.

There’s value to writing about this radically different world, of course, especially if its effects on people—characters, in the case of fiction—are a main focus. As my own series progresses, the consequences of climate change are felt even in places like interior southern New England, even if these effects show up most often through higher everyday costs. In the final book of the series, Farm to Me, set in 2047, basic aspects of the economy of the Northeast are changing, including the resurrection of agriculture here as once productive agricultural areas in the States and other countries we import fresh food from suffer adverse chronic conditions such as drought and aquifer exhaustion. New England resumes its old business of farming to supply the cities and local areas; a plot line involving extortion to consolidate the growing food distribution business adds tension. Among the new characters is an ex-arbitrage professional who has lost his city life to AI and now has (literally) bought the farm in New Marlborough, hoping to thrive amidst the carbon-sequestration credits of his certified regenerative farm. The main through character, Davin, now 82, has his granddaughter visiting (or hiding) in his Housatonic House on the Hill as civil society feels the anger of the young responding to the darker future the previous generations have gifted them, and the crackdown underway threatens to birth greater civil unrest. I haven’t yet specified the carbon PPM in 2047, nor the rise in global average temperature, nor with precision the state of various tipping points. Studying is ongoing. I guess I’m still working out our level of success in our fight against climate change.

Still, rest assured. Climate change is very much a subject of the series, even if the novels are enjoyable to read.

That’s climate fiction, right?

The post Is It Climate Fiction? first appeared on David Guenette.