Over Brooklyn Hills is my third novel in a four-book series, The Steep Climes Quartet, and it is coming out on June 15.

My interest was piqued by the recent post Neurodivergence as a Blueprint for a Solarpunk Future by N.E. McMorran, on Climate Fiction Writers League, published on June 2, 2026. I’ve been wrestling with the question of what climate fiction is and how climate fiction is different from other forms of fiction. Just a couple of weeks ago, I posted a long piece on my website titled “A Fantastic Essay about Climate Fiction but Still a Lot of Fantasy,” with a shorter Substack version called “Why Fantasy Climate Fiction is Lazy (And Why Realism is Harder), and this is hardly the first such effort on my part. I’ve posted many comments about climate fiction on Substack’s Climate Fiction Writers League, for example. My quick glance back shows I’ve penned a dozen articles about climate fiction, and then there’s even more in the way of reviews of climate fiction.

The guest poster is introduced thusly:

Today we have an essay by N.E. McMorran, the author of the children’s adventure trilogy Moojag, a quirky mystery for readers 10 years and up. When Nema and her friends discover a hidden sugar-hooked society holding lost kids, they find their perfect world in danger.

In the first paragraph of the post, the reader finds out that the author experienced a “late autism diagnosis.” The first sentence of the second paragraph notes that it was this revelation that became “the heartbeat of my cli-fi trilogy.”

So, yeah, the question of what is climate fiction is of interest to me.

What is Climate Fiction?

I’ve long followed Climate Fiction Writers League (CFWL) and I look at most every post. I’ve studied this Substack looking for trends and opinions and theories of climate fiction. Unfortunately for me, all my attention to CFWL has produced greater confusion rather than clarity on the issue of climate fiction.

This recent post by N. E. McMorran is a good example of this confusion-generating effect. I’ve been making the argument that using some reference to climate change as a story premise is not the same thing as climate fiction. A premise is a foundational statement or assumption used as the starting point for a conclusion, argument, or story (yes, I just cribbed this).

A premise is not what the story is about. For example, a good number of apocalypse stories work from a premise that merely set the stage or conditions of the story. Consider the vast majority of post-EMP survival stories that were rampant for a few years. These stories use the event of wide-scale electromagnetic pulses—typically from some sort of attack by enemy countries or terrorists or extreme solar storms that crash the world’s power grids and destroy advanced electronics, overthrowing modern civilization and bringing chaos. These stories don’t have much to do with power grids or the nature of digital devices based on today’s endemic integrated chips that are particularly prone to burnout from EMP. Typically, the stories are survivalist in nature and don’t revolve around larger issues such as fragile supply chains, lack of infrastructure redundancy or resilience, or what happens to the weak or vulnerable in times of crisis—you know, real world questions—but instead concentrate of the hero getting guns and ammo and the girl. Throughout the 1970s and into Reagan’s years of the 1980s, the version of the “guy-gets-gun-and-girl” stories were often post-nuclear holocaust stories. The death of hundreds of millions or even billions of individuals from nuclear weapon exchanges was the premise(!), with the story subject being lone-wolf survival. Most of such stories weren’t concerned with the consequences of the premise, instead treating potential human extinction as a story’s starting point, in what has always struck me as a bit cavalier.

My argument is that 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 climate change. This definition reflects one of the trends in climate fiction that is sometimes called “Thrutopia,” where readers not only better realize the climate crisis but also wrestle with how we may get to solutions from where we are today. Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future” is perhaps the prime example of this type of climate fiction.

Like all categories, Thrutopia tends to broaden toward uselessness. For some authors, Thrutopia can mean more simply a rejection of climate apocalypse stories. For me, I use the old Downeaster joke “You can’t get there from here” and apply it 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 is the subject of climate fiction. Note that I’m not arguing that climate fiction, in this definition, must be about getting to 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.

While we are on the subject of climate fiction definitions, a mention of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement must be made. Ghosh argues that all fiction is effectively climate fiction because the defining reality of the Anthropocene shapes every setting, economy, and human experience. He also argues “…that contemporary literary fiction suffers from an imaginative failure. Historically, serious novels have dismissed unpredictable, catastrophic climate events as too “improbable” for realistic fiction. Because our modern literary traditions were built during an era of stable, predictable weather, authors have struggled to conceptualize humans as planetary forces.” Basically, Ghosh believes that any fiction of today must consider climate change when addressing contemporary stories. I like to point to Weather, by Jenny Offill—a product of the MFA Writing-Industrial Complex—as a sold example of a literary climate fiction work, and I recommend her book highly.

Why am I Grumpy about What Gets Called Climate Fiction?

If you’ve noticed the pedagogical use of the Socratic Method in the above heading, you may already understand why I find fiction that uses climate change simply as a premise not to be climate fiction. Take the example of Moojag, as described the author:

The seeds of Moojag were planted during a period of intense climate anxiety…. My manuscript began as an environmentally charged fantasy but quickly transformed into a neurodivergent Solarpunk “dystopia-versus-utopia” that asked: What if we got it right? What if we could live together peacefully as ourselves, accepted and celebrated for who we are?

In the post-climate-catastrophe Surrey Isles, technology is an extension of the ecosystem. Cephalopod-inspired, full-bodied electronic sensory-powered skins allow the “Real World” community to live outdoors, protected from all weathers, danger, and disease. No more buildings, no homelessness, no money, no disease, no refined sugar. The characters live in a state of high-tech harmony with nature….

If you think “Thrutopia” is vague, I see “solarpunk” as being another too-broad category, and one also often used to define a story as climate fiction. Please note that I’m not judging the quality or value of any particular work of “solarpunk” fiction, but I am trying to explore what makes a short story or novel climate fiction.

By the way, N.E. McMorran’s climate anxiety is a perfectly fine reason to write a book, and “Cephalopod-inspired, full-bodied electronic sensory-powered skins” may be a nifty concept and the idea of everyone living in “a state of high-tech harmony with nature” is a good one on general principle. But what does this have to do with climate fiction? It seems to me that climate change is little more than premise, and a bit like writing a book about paradise regained but not mentioning somewhere in the book that once paradise was lost and not referencing all the juicy details of the matter. Moojag is set in a post-climate-catastrophe, so there might be lessons to be learned, but the starting point already literarily distances the readers from the world within which they live, which is the one within which readers are most likely to identify themselves. Please note that I’m not suggesting Moojag is not interesting or will fail to engage readers, or that there cannot be readers who identify with characters or drama in the book.

But what I am wondering is whether Moojag is climate fiction. I am wondering if there’s any practical difference between climate fiction and other kinds of fiction.

Why I Write Climate Fiction

The reason why I’m writing climate fiction is that I’m interested in living in and understanding the world today and exploring how we humans might keep this world from turning more hellish. I could, of course, write a non-fiction book that explains the contributing factors of climate change and the various ways to reduce carbon emissions and slow—even eventually correct—climate change. I do write about this and related topics on my website, in large part because writing about a subject is the best way of learning about a subject, at least short of teaching a subject. There are many excellent books, Substacks, videos, and magazine explainers published about climate change and the methods and strategies and technologies to ameliorate it.

But fiction does something for many people that non-fiction often fails at. Fiction has the greater capacity to make people identify with the subject through narrative—story—and therefore more likely engage readers more directly in actions that might address the subject. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is a famous example of this potential effect: There were thousands upon thousands of nineteenth century Americans who thought slavery evil, but Uncle Tom’s Cabin, not abolitionist pamphlets, helped more readers feel the insult of slavery and motivated significant political will against it.

I’m not concerned that people—let’s use Americans, even, since I am one—are unaware of climate change. There’s plenty of polling that shows large majorities of people across many countries are concerned about climate change. But what percentage of Americans believe that they can do something about climate change? What do people believe are the actions that they might take? I asked Gemini AI:

According to long-running polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) and George Mason University, public sentiment centers around a few core metrics regarding agency and action.

The Percentage: Can We Do Something?

To understand if Americans think they can combat climate change, researchers look at two distinct dimensions of agency: collective efficacy (what we can do together) and individual efficacy (what I can do alone).

• • The Optimistic Majority (Collective Action): Roughly 63% of Americans explicitly reject the idea that “it’s already too late to do anything about global warming.” The vast majority believe that humanity still possesses the window and capability to change the trajectory of the crisis.
  • The Personal Sense of Responsibility: About 59% to 62% of Americans state that they feel a personal sense of responsibility to help reduce global warming.
  • The Individual Skepticism Gap: Despite feeling a personal responsibility, Americans are split right down the middle when it comes to their own impact. 53% disagree with the statement “the actions of a single individual won’t make any difference,” meaning just over half believe their solo choices matter. Conversely, a massive 47% feel paralyzed by individual insignificance, agreeing that one person’s actions ultimately make no difference.

For me, the “paralyzed by individual insignificance” result is the most interesting, and I suspect the 47% figure represents a large undercount (you know, polls and the way they ask questions and all that). The same Yale program also looks at the actions people believe they can take to address climate change, and the AI Summary to the query reports that action categories break into three areas: “personal lifestyle adjustments, consumer behavior, and civic/political action.” Here’s another interesting quote from the Summary: “…there is a massive gap between the actions people support conceptually versus the actions they actually take.”

Is that gap a gap of imagination? Can climate fiction stories help close the gap?

Consumer activism ranks high on the list of actions supporting climate progress, and this includes buying from eco-friendly businesses and boycotting companies that deny or oppose climate change, and then there’s the enthusiasm for political efforts like 2022’s IRA and energy efficiency-related and tax rebates. Still, Trump’s gutting of these programs illustrates, through falling EV sales to name only one example, that the just mentioned enthusiasm may be in large part because of good deals and less about being driven to address climate change. People may still want to be more energy efficient and less carbon polluting, but we’re typically more immediately concerned with today’s bottom line in our household economics.

On the other hand, according to the Yale program, political and civic actions have even lower follow-through. Supporting solar and wind projects ranks high and large majorities believe corporations should do more, but less than half take any targeted consumer activity, and boycotts and favored climate-friendly goods don’t seem all that effective. Of course, Yale also reports that while 64% of those polled report that they are worried about climate change, of this set only 20% discuss climate change with friends and family regularly. “44% of Americans report that they never discuss [climate change] with family or friends” and assume others care less about the subject, “leading to social silence.”

I believe that political action is the best and bigger lever for moving climate progress forward, and the IIJA and IRA of 2021 and 2022 support this belief despite the setbacks. I believe that more talk, more news, and more stories about climate change may relieve people of suppressive social silence, and the more stories about climate change that people can identify with the better. Fiction, with compelling and identifiable characters, builds connections, empathy, relatability.

That’s why I write climate fiction. Moving stories help break such silence and sense of isolation.

Of course, potential effect is not the same as achieved outcome.

Fiction is Fun or Entertaining or Mesmerizing Stories Told, Right?

Another big topic in climate fiction is the dreaded “info-dump” or dragging a story into service of pedagogical goals. “There will be a quiz” presentation undoes reader enthusiasm, I’m pretty sure.

The point is that fiction about climate change is climate fiction that describes the days we’re living and seeing the world heating up and resulting extreme weather events, droughts, fires, and floods, and increasingly, the migration of humans (and fauna, flora, and diseases) due to the changing climate. There are tipping points galore, too, like a horror movie setting up for any number of sequels: Drought!, Fire!, Flood!, Run Amoc!, The Invasion of the Clathrates!, The Rising Seas! We know that there are solutions, including the switch to clean electricity for buildings and transportation. We know there are competing economic interests and clashes of empires. We read about various policy fights and politicians and corporations caught up in political dance. Heck, the Pope weighs in.

Climate change—and what we should do—is confusing, and part of the story is murkier and more confusing, as dark money sloshes about buying regulatory agencies, lawmakers, Trump, and even SCOTUS. And all this time, for most of us in the developed world, mostly all we hear about climate change is in the news. Unless, of course, it is your house that gets washed away in a hurricane or your city that burns in a wildfire.

Climate change is complicated, too, and expensive, and, it goes without saying, we’re still primarily worried about paying next month’s power bill or car payment or rent. For me, this is the climate story to tell today: a snapshot of where we are in regard to climate change, even as we’re mostly thinking about that odd comment the wife made at breakfast, or the kid’s soccer game this afternoon, or whether you can stand your boss for another day, or worrying about your best friend’s recent diagnosis. You know, climate change as subject within the days of our lives.

If we want the challenge of climate change to be real for people—and we do, since that makes it more likely more people vote for the right candidates to fight the mega-wealthy and corporate self-interests—then we need stories that show real people (well, fiction’s substitute of compelling “real” characters) living with the issues of climate change today. The problem with apocalyptic fiction and stories featuring magical creatures or new-and-improved humans in the future is that such stories are escapist. Sure, I was an English Major, and I know about metaphor, allegory, parables, and the Hero’s Journey. I’ve studied Norman Friedman’s 14 types of stories he believed all literary works are shaped by. I know that stories come in all forms and sizes, and that applies to climate fiction, too.

But the premise of climate change—the “what if”—is not the same as the subject of climate change. The subject of climate fiction is climate change and how we got to where we are and how we can do what needs doing to get to where we’d rather be. These days, where we’d rather be is a world where our changing climate is less destructive rather than more destructive.

Isn’t that an interesting story?

The post What is Climate Fiction? first appeared on David Guenette.

From the very first sentence she had my interest:

There is a reason so many people can imagine ecological collapse more easily than regenerative economies. A reason burnout feels more believable than collective care. A reason dystopian futures dominate films, books, media narratives and political discourse, while genuinely transformative futures are often dismissed as naive, unrealistic or impossible before they are even fully articulated.

I’m the author of The Steep Climes Quartet, what I call a literary climate fiction series. The definition of “climate fiction” obsesses me, understandably.

Vasileva posits that dystopian literature is ascendant in today’s world because of social conditioning that she refers to as “the colonisation of imagination.” She writes that happens when dominant systems become so embedded in everyday life that their logic starts to feel inseparable from reality itself. Economic systems, technological systems, educational systems and cultural narratives do not only organise institutions. They also shape perception. They influence what people expect from the future, what kinds of change feel achievable, and which possibilities appear serious enough to pursue collectively.

She describes herself in her Substack’s “About” information this way: “I guide people and organizations through transitions. By uncovering the stories and patterns shaping them, I help them let go of what no longer serves, imagine alternatives, and design practices that bring their next chapter to life.” Sounds like intriguing and difficult work.

The colonization of imagination is an interesting concept, and she makes a good argument for this as a factor in our difficulty in imagining different collective futures. A look at much of what falls into climate fiction supports her argument, what with the storylines of desert landscapes, or boundless deadly storms, or flooded worlds where suffering, scarcity, and strife abound. But the answer to this question may be answered far more simply: disaster stories—at least the form most common in the climate fiction literature—are easier to write.

The World is Complicated and so are Social and Economic Relationships

One of my pet peeves is climate fiction stories that imagine futures that are so discordant from today’s world and thus prove difficult to relate to.

I’m a big fan of Grist, and for those of you who don’t know, this organization describes itself as:

…a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change. Since 1999, we have used the power of journalism to engage the public about the perils of one of the most existential threats we face. We seek to document the often unequal impacts of climate change on communities in the United States and globally—as well as to show the promise of equitable climate solutions.

Supporting Grist makes a lot of sense.

One of the draws I have toward Grist is their ongoing “Imagine 2200” contest, which publishes climate fiction short stories. The last couple stories recently published were both entertaining and provoking. “Forty-Seven Vacant Floors of Ur,” by T. K. Rex, extrapolates San Francisco a few years ahead, when AI has pushed many people in the former high tech land of opportunity into a universal basic income world of homelessness; no grand climate solutions to the climate crisis are offered here, but what’s on tap is an effective human story that makes one think. The other story, “Sandbag Squid,” by Ashlee Lhamon, offers some similarities, including the near-future setting—a recognizable future—and like “Forty-Seven Vacant Floors of Ur,” this story presents the perspective of a single character: “On a cold, damp beach in Louisiana, Henry Block is counting down the days until his Conservation Corps work ends and he can get back to building his digital world.“ Other stories offer more fantastical premises: an android, a spirit in a field, an urban planning group communicating with mycelium. Still, my sense is that Tory Stephens, Grist’s Climate Fiction Creative & Brand Partnerships Manager, who runs the short story contest, has been growing more inclined to real world near-future stories and away from the allegorical or fantasy stories.

Anyway, why do I mention Grist climate fiction, or the work of many writers  on Substack’s Climate Fiction Writers League, and my disappointment with climate fantasy and apocalypse stories? It’s simple: I want to see, by way of a writer’s imagination, how we get to where we need to be in relation to the climate from where we are. You might be interested in checking out a couple other of my posts about climate fiction: “A Fantastic Essay about Climate Fiction but Still a Lot of Fantasy” and “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction.”

Simple Climate Fiction versus Complex Climate Fiction

Just to establish a metric, I think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as complex climate fiction. First, the scope of the book is worldwide, and second, the book incorporates a wide range of characters and subjects, including the bureaucratic maneuverings of the United Nations, international monetary policy bodies, and major banks. This book also includes factors like politics and elections, technological developments, glaciology, and throws in a major extreme weather event, along with a climate action terrorist group that grows out of it. The novel begins more or less in the present (albeit pre-Trump the Second) and extends for decades beyond. Some readers don’t care for the book, in part because it delves into things like fiscal policies, but the strength of the book—besides Robinson being an excellent writer—is that the story wrestles with real world issues, and wrestles well, entertainingly, and effectively. The Ministry for the Future has been referenced among many climate working groups and policy groups because many of the climate proposals and solutions in the novel are so well thought out that the book provides a starting point for serious people trying to think through real solutions.

Of course I love The Ministry for the Future. That book does what I’m trying to do with The Steep Climes Quartet, although my series focuses on the issues of climate change challenges and solutions from what can be described as the hyper-local and hyper-personal fronts. Kill Well, the first book, takes place in 2026; Dear Josephine in 2029; Over Brooklyn Hills—now on pre-order, with a publication date of June 15, 2026—takes place in 2035; and the final book, Farm to Me, is set in 2047, although at this point in the manuscript’s writing, it is anybody’s guess as to publication date. In this final book of the series, I am exploring regenerative agriculture and its emergence in the Northeast as some of the major agriculture areas in the U.S. and elsewhere suffer productivity losses because of chronic droughts tied to climate change.

While I love bandying about terms like “hyper-local” and hyper-personal,” all I really mean is that the through characters of the series live in Berkshire County in Massachusetts and that readers experience how these characters think or don’t think about the climate crisis. One big shocker is that even those dedicated to fighting climate change more often think about crushes or ponder therapy-valid thoughts, or worry about paying bills or getting a job, or focus on problems of aging. For those not dedicated to the fight, climate mostly appears as a creature of the news and infosphere, unless, of course, a specific character happens to have, for example, his vegetable garden brought down by a big storm. There are a range of themes throughout the series, including the malfeasance of Big Oil and how dark money works behind the scenes. There is a fair amount of climate change information, including on policies and politics, but this is mainly from characters caught up in the fight, but even with such characters, their inner lives and personal challenges are forward.

It would have been easier to write a climate disaster book where the hero gains guns and gals amid the floods or heat, but I don’t find that as interesting as imagining what our society and culture can do to make things better in terms of the climate challenge and how people may come to join such efforts. Hint: joining in is less typically marching under banners and more in the choices—political, economic, and social—we make.

Solutions R Us

We have met the climate crisis solutions and they are us.

Heather Cox Richardson often makes the point that the United States of America doesn’t need new laws to combat Trump and Trumpism (i.e., corruption, racism, anti-democracy), but rather we need to enforce the laws that already exist (one example is the Emoluments Clause, but the Republicans, in their blind obsequious posture toward Trump, continue to shirk their Constitutional Oaths). Likewise, when it comes to climate change there are already laws passed and regulations that help, but, again, with Trump allowed to be lawlessly corrupt, such laws—like IIJA and IRA—have been nullified and climate-positive budgets withheld. And then there are also laws of the marketplace which should tilt our economy toward clean energy because the existing suite of technologies now represent the cheapest and quickest energy sources to build, right along the digital revolutions that can more efficiently harness the existing grid, but, alas, Trump has his thumb on the scale. In the end, the biggest law Americans can uphold right now for the sake of climate progress is the Constitution, and we’ll see where the midterms lead us, but that’s another story.

The fact is that while we’ve been slow to act and have fossil fuel interests combatting our efforts toward progress on climate change, we’ve already entered a time of peril. The story today is not that we can stop climate change and all its many negative consequences, but that we can continue moving forward and keep the very worst of climate change consequences at bay in the decades and centuries ahead. To me, this is the real exciting story about climate change.

Realism Itself Functions as a Political Force

I haven’t forgotten Elena Vasileva’s post. In fact, the title of this section directly quotes her.

Vasileva says, “The word ‘realistic’ is not neutral. It carries hidden assumptions about whose futures deserve legitimacy, which systems are allowed to continue unquestioned, and what forms of life are considered practical, responsible or mature.”

Really? Of course, but I’m writing climate fiction, not taking a seminar on deconstructivism.

She continues:

People start adapting to systems they no longer truly believe in, while struggling to envision coherent alternatives. Exhaustion becomes normalised. Endless growth becomes treated as inevitable. Competition becomes framed as human nature. Hyper-productivity becomes associated with value, morality and worth….

At the same time, radically different ways of organising society often appear emotionally or politically unintelligible, even when current conditions are visibly failing.

Right. Got it. The more interesting point Vasileva makes is that the colonized imagination collapses “collective imagination,” as she writes:

Imagination is often framed as something individual, almost decorative, as though it belongs mainly to artists, writers or children. In reality, imagination is deeply social. Every institution, economy, law, city and technological system first existed as an imagined possibility before it became material reality.

Societies require the capacity to imagine differently in order to evolve.

Or, as we used to say in the Counter-Culture, reality is a shared hallucination, man.

Imagination as Transformation

Vasileva argues that our current culture is aimed at optimization and away from transformation, and so people “become highly informed about collapse while feeling increasingly incapable of imagining transformation.”  She targets algorithms as a mechanism for the optimization slant today, and as a former Facebook user, I know what she’s talking about. She names narrative lock-in that not only supports misinformation but imaginative limitation.

But is “imaginative limitation” the cause of so many shallowly fanciful treatments of climate change in fiction? I consider that the scope of story can be responsible for imaginative limitation, because to imagine a whole world, with all its complications and contradictions, rather than a simple subset, is hard work. It is easier to imagine people who develop physic abilities to talk to plants or a class of humans who now have gills than it is to imagine the world with all its complexity moving forward toward climate progress, with all attendant set-backs, disagreements, mixed motives, and other confusing Hobbesian or Lockean beliefs about mankind.

Vasileva talks about “transformative futures” that ask more of people emotionally and culturally, and politics—as one example—is an important element in our culture, so perhaps we might say that political forces function as a shaper of reality.

In fact, we agree on a lot, although not on the use of the Oxford comma. She goes on in her post about Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler as examples of storytellers of speculative fiction that holds transformative potential:

Stories do far more than entertain. They shape emotional possibility. They influence what people perceive as imaginable, desirable, ethical and attainable. Stories rehearse worlds before societies build them materially.

Speculative storytelling creates enough distance from dominant assumptions for people to question systems that previously appeared fixed and permanent. Science fiction, speculative fiction and futures storytelling all expand perception by revealing that social structures are constructed rather than inevitable.

I agree, but her statement that “Reclaiming imagination requires more than individual creativity. It requires rebuilding cultural spaces where experimentation, uncertainty and alternative futures can be explored collectively,” seems like a restatement of what art and imagination does. It seems to me that this doesn’t have to get more complicated than that.

What is rightly complicated are stories that deal with the complex challenges, barriers, and human shortcomings that keep us from building our Eden.

But then again, living in Eden? What’s the fun, the challenge, the interest in that? I can’t imagine.

The post Climate Fiction Featuring Far Futures, Dystopia, Fantasies, and Other Simplified Worlds, is Simply Much Easier to Write first appeared on David Guenette.