The start of the review nails it: “Over Brooklyn Hills is a story of people and climate.”

I mean, this sounds simple, but the reason I love seeing this sentence start the review is that my literary climate fiction series isn’t about some post-climate apocalypse but about how people today and in the near future live with climate change, with the emphasis on how people live. Too often climate fiction turns fantastic, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. Our very real struggle with climate change is hard enough for people to identify with, which in turn makes taking meaningful action in our troubled Anthropocene that much harder for many of us to pursue. We must pursue effective change that will help moderate the severity of climate change consequences; this is essential if there’s much chance to keep our world safe… or safer, anyway.

The review continues this way:

It’s the third book in David Guenette’s future-based The Steep Climes Quartet. This installment centers around two different plot lines: the lives of some of the notable citizens of Great Barrington, a small town in the Berkshires; and the missions of an ecoterrorist. The overarching theme is the politics of climate change, and that theme receives detailed discussion. The weather is a character by itself, with a severe heat wave and a tornado driving some of the main action in Great Barrington.

In terms of the political overtones, Guenette has taken the events and legislation of the last half-decade and extrapolated them through to their plausible outcome by 2035. Likewise, current technological hardware and software have been advanced ten years. Political and tech nerds will be at home with all the plentiful details in those areas.

The post Reader Views says “Five Stars”! first appeared on David Guenette.

Here’s a quick post about my guest blog entry and long essay appearing in ClimateCultures, where I discuss what should define climate fiction. Big surprise: I also talk about The Steep Climes Quartet, my literary climate fiction series.

What is ClimateCultures?

“Creative Responses to Our Nature & Climate Predicaments”

ClimateCultures is an online space that Mark Goldthorpe launched in 2017 for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments .“We are a growing network of artists, researchers and curators across the UK and around the world working across many practices, disciplines and spaces,” is how he describes the effort.

Who’s involved? ClimateCultures casts widely, including within the community of novelists, short story writers, performers, poets, playwrights, painters, composers, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, sculptors, designers, digital artists, multimedia artists, gallery owners, online curators, creative producers, cultural activists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, geographers, environmental technologists, and climate researchers. Designed as an online space for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments. ClimateCultures is an approach to building creative conversations between and beyond different appreciations of what these predicaments mean, and of what they offer us as ways forward. It’s also a continuation of some of Goldthorpe’s encounters when working with the charity TippingPoint a few years back, where he helped bring artists and scientists together for creative climate change events.

Here’s more about ClimateCultures and Goldthorpe’s motivation in creating the publication and group, taken from the site’s “Welcome” page:

I’d always been interested in artistic responses to the problems but this was my first deep exposure to such a number and range of perspectives, enquiries and works-in-progress. Those events left a strong impression — with me, and with the artists and scientists who took part. ClimateCultures builds on this legacy, exploring the power of an environmental imagination to help us develop a sense of agency in challenging times, as I discuss in a short article I wrote in February 2019.

The post I’m in ClimateCultures Talking about Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

Over Brooklyn Hills has been garnering pretty good reviews, as I’ve written here, here, and here. I describe this book as “Literary Climate Fiction,” which may be of little utility in the ongoing development of fiction taxonomies, but it should suggest the book is not a hyper-genre formula of action and plot but rather a work of “storytelling that prioritizes character development, psychological depth, and thematic exploration over plot-driven action.” Feel free to look up your own definition of “literary fiction” on the web and see if I’m wrong.

One of the aims of The Steep Climes Quartet is to write away from the easy tropes of apocalypse and instead attempt to imagine people’s reactions to the odd and pressing conditions collectively known as climate change. But how do you get your book reviewed—or, even, found—if there’s not widely applied category for it?

The Editorial Review Biz

An author wants to have the world say something about a published book. Reviews can help a book but a lack of reviews will hurt a book. Self-publishers know it. Big trade publishers know it. Even the neophyte struggling with a first book on KDP knows it.

Basically, the trade book business is largely sold through social media these days, and that’s true even for the big boys. If a book shows up on Amazon and there are no Amazon reviews of it, the chances of getting the browser to buy the book when it looks like no one else has is slim to none. If you have editorial reviews such as Publishers’ Weekly, The New York Times, or Kirkus, that’s a big help. Even book blurbs help, that odd practice of saying far too little about a book by someone who carries reputational value or relevant association, encouraging people to believe the book being considered for purchase may, in fact, be a worthwhile bet. But a book will need the best editorial accolades to escape the black spot of no or few customer reviews. Frankly, a book without reviews—editorial and customer—looks downright naked, just sitting there shivering, waiting to get picked up for Christmas Holiday with all the luggage packed, but no one is coming, boo-hoo.

Remember crowd-sourcing? That’s what Amazon customer reviews are, and Goodread’s, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and BookBub, to name only some. In theory, such customer reviews help the would-be book buyer lessen the anxiety of being played the fool. Such reviews provide the affirmation of the crowd, but as many readers discover, customer reviews are written by all sorts of readers and one reader’s literary treasure is another reader’s genre trash. You might also keep in mind that “crowd-sourcing,” like the social media platforms that engender it, is falling into enshittification, and these days typically in the form of grade inflation where most books or products seem to have close high scores that can, with infuriating frequency, not match your actual experience with the book or product. These days, the crowds may be saying less than you think, and the sourcing more the result of algorithms and platform customer management, but let’s leave that for another day.

Still, it’s a weird number game. The necessary numbers of customer reviews vary across opinions, and the presence of other types of affirmations factor in too. You have the coveted The New York Times Best-Seller flag? Terrific. Pulitzer, Booker, Calidcott, or any of the other big literature awards? Hurray! Publishers Weekly tells the world that your book is brilliant? Wonderful. The problem is that the main stream validators of books like Publishers Weekly can only review so many books and the chances of your book getting a slot is slim to none, especially if you lack the backing of one of the major trade publishers. What’s rising to meet the needs of the vast majority of books left standing in the cold is the editorial review business.

The landscape of editorial reviews is confusing. Publishers Weekly can also review your book for a fee, but even here the magazine’s bandwidth remains small, so Booklife, a part of the Publisher Weekly enterprise, was created and is designed to provide editorial reviews for a fee—somewhere, typically, in the $400-$500 range—and the volume of reviews—the bandwith—is much larger than the original Publishers Weekly pipeline. Kirkus is another such service, on par, some say, with Publisher Weekly reviews, but with a bigger pipeline for fee-based reviews. Some similar traditional review services focus on other segments of book publishing, such as Foreword Reviews, for indie and university presses; Library Journal, which is sometimes described as essential for getting your book in front of library acquisition buyers; and Booklist, which is published by the American Library Association and, not surprisingly, aimed at library collection development librarians and educators.

There’s been something of a complementary explosion in the number of these services as self-publishing has exploded. There’s Independent Book Review, Self-Publishing Review, Book Sirens, IndieAuthors, Booksprout, NetGalley, BlueInk, Book Raid, BookBub, Books Go Social, and the list goes on. Many of these review services not only provide reviews but also marketing and promotion addenda including awards and badge displays, social media promotion packages, ARC (advanced reader copy) distribution management, and interview and podcast features. Many of these organizations have feeder mechanisms to editorial and book production services, too. And an author can always look up on Reedsy for any and all such services from independent contractors.

About Those Amazon Reviews

As mentioned earlier, many online potential book buyers look to online reviews whatever the sales channel. What I didn’t mention before—mostly because it’s an indisputable fact—is that Amazon is the largest online bookseller, and actually the largest bookseller online or off, which is why I’m talking about Amazon customer reviews.

One reason why customer reviews are important for online sales is that the informational feedback is thin online, unlike the experience in a physical bookstore where the potential book buyer has the book in hand. Ironically, online bookstores often have far more information about the book than a would-be buyer would see in the real-life experience standing among the shelves, but how many people even know about Amazon’s Author-Plus pages that a publisher or author can provide about any particular book, and Amazon also provides the infrastructure for what they call A+ Content, another specific book-related pile of all kinds of information about the book in question. Heck, it looks like a lot of publishers and authors remain ignorant about these additional information features, but then no one ever said Amazon makes marketing books easy.

On the other hand, the visceral experience of holding a physical book goes a long way for informing potential buyers about the book being held. Heft, graphics, book cover copy, frontmatter, and, of course, the ability to thumb through the pages and take a gander at the actual writing. Sure, you can virtually do much of this online too, although the available “Read Me” sample is constrained to publisher-selected spots through the book, and, often, simply the frontmatter and first chapter. Besides, in the physical world there’s that new book smell and that bookstore employee you can’t help thinking will conclude you’re a bum if you don’t buy something.

But on Amazon a book can look awfully lonesome without an army of customer reviews. There are some services that provide customer reviews for fee, and what proud papa of a brand new novel doesn’t want to advantage his or her new book? There’s a company called Book Award Pro that has recently added such a service, along with its bread-and-butter offerings of access to book award databases and the ability—for a fee—to submit your new darling novel to such award opportunities, and let me tell you, there are many, many such opportunities, for good or ill.

Their Amazon review program is tempting, especially if you don’t have a big publisher with a solid PR and promotion department behind you, or if you don’t come from a particularly large family or hold solid blackmail threats against the whole church choir.

And, hey, I didn’t want to see Over Brooklyn Hills looking naked, right?

So I tried the Book Award Pro Amazon customer review service out. I wasn’t optimistic, plus I hate spending money. The service is relatively inexpensive and part of the fee goes toward the reviewer buying the ebook version, a nice little sales pop, although one that makes no economic sense in and of itself. But, indeed, the Amazon customer reviews are “verified purchase” reviews, and thus kosher. In fact, this is one of the attractive elements of this specific service—it  won’t run you foul of Amazon’s review policies that can end up getting you kicked off the platform if you get caught gaming the customer reviews, such as by creating a bot to crank them out. The all-knowing algorithm, well, knows all, so I wouldn’t be surprised that the Book Award Pro customer review service ends up triggering a negative reviews review, especially if the company doesn’t up its standards.

My review of the Book Award Pro Amazon customer review service is that it is awful. In order to check it out I spent $199 for three such reviews and all three reviews focused on the same one character in the identically long two-sentence reviews. Mind you, the character they all focus on is a great character, but only one storyline of many, and so the reviews don’t give a good sense of the book overall. And then there is the problem of the reviewers all pretty much saying the same thing, making me wonder if the short reviews may very well have been AI-generated by the very same AI, and I can’t get the image out of my mind of a printer in a dark room somewhere cranking them out in sequence. I don’t know if the three reviews are AI generated, and my suspicion that one person did all three reviews has no evidence, but let me repeat, Book Award Pro’s Amazon customer reviews service is awful.

I’m sticking with the old-fashioned organic customer reviews, thanks.

To Publish is to Suffer

As with so many other tempting shortcuts to fame and fortune, the truth is that selling copies of a novel these days is hard. The signal-to-noise problem is excruciatingly difficult to overcome, there being all the noise of some three-to-four million trade books published each year. There’s some talk these days that print fiction reading may be in an all-time slump, or maybe it is book reading overall that happens less and less. Sure, I’ll produce audiobook versions of The Steep Climes Quartet series, since everyone tells me that this is the thing to do, but the production will be touched by resentment from this pro-text guy. I’ll try my best to hide my true feelings about audiobooks.

What purportedly sells are romances, thrillers, and horror, and most of such books are what I call hyper-genre that share the common traits of low character-to-action ratio. Or is that a shallow character-to bodice-ripping ratio? It’s all a matter of taste, said the lady as she kissed the cow (I’m still in search of the source of the second half of this cliché, but maybe my father came up with this addendum.)

As it so happens, sales of Over Brooklyn Hills are picking up despite not being a hyper genre work, but I’ll be hundreds of book sales short of making expenses back for a while and as likely as not, ever. After all, putting out a novel takes money—sure, not on the scale of producing an album or movie—but editors and proofreaders need paying and editorial reviews are rarely for free, especially for someone occupying my level of Dante’s book authorship Inferno.

It turns out that Over Brooklyn Hills has already won an award:

We are proud to present you with the Literary Titan Book Award. Following the recent review of your book through our Book Review Service, it was automatically entered into our Literary Book Award competition. Your book deserves extraordinary praise, and we are proud to acknowledge your hard work, dedication, and writing talent. Start telling the world that you’re an award-winning author because we will be!

You will find the book award image attached to this email. Display it proudly on your book’s cover or anywhere else that you want to display it.

Well, thanks, and better than a sharp stick in the eye, that’s for sure, and if this helps more people read my work, that’s great. One of the hellish aspects of writing is the author’s desire to see the work out and about in the world and the typical frustration of that desire and don’t let anyone tell you different. Sure, the driving force of writing must be the pleasure derived through the act of writing, but a writer having readers is kind of crucial too.

At least that’s what those hundreds of editing and publishing and marketing service companies, including reviewer and awards services, tell me they can help me with, for a price.

The post Reviewing Reviews, or The Strange Little Business of Feeding the Marketing of Novels first appeared on David Guenette.

Also, remember please that you can buy the latest title in The Steep Climes Quartet from many places, including through your local bookstore using Bookshop.org or by simply asking your favorite bookseller to order Over Brooklyn Hills. Or Amazon, too, Kindle or paperback. Or ePub format.

An Everyman

Over Brooklyn Hills follows a seventy-year-old man whose struggles with the painful realities of climate change parallel larger threats involving fossil fuel interests and a climate terrorist group. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Several things bother me about a lot of climate fiction, and one is that while climate change is an actual existential threat to the social and economic well-being of humans and our biosphere, climate fiction often puts climate change to be upfront acutely. Today—and into the near future—the danger of climate change is less on a human scale than most other of life’s challenges. Much of climate fiction has some apocalyptic quality to the story or presents a main character who is a climate scientist or activist trying to correct a wrong. Unfortunately, such approaches can fail to help readers identify with the issue of climate change within their own lives. Without such identification, the issue of climate change is more likely to remain abstract and all the more easily ignored.

One of the important threads in my writing of fiction and poetry is to make the attempt to capture characters’ feelings as they respond to circumstances. I love to write full-on action and plot-driven parts of stories too, but both as a reader and as a writer, I find that characters without some interiority seem only pawns in the puzzle master’s play, and no matter how compelling or cleverly built the plot may be, the story will feel empty. Raymond Chandler, as much as he’s pointed to as a master of private investigation pulp fiction, is a wonderful and effective writer because the reader gets to know Philip Marlowe, whether by actual reflection by the character, the way the character describes the world around him (including the famously odd and wonderful similes), or how he interacts with other characters.

Why did you want to tell this story through the perspective of Davin Caine at this stage of his life?

Davin Caine is something of an everyman—neither hero nor villain, not a genius with special knowledge nor someone lacking curiosity. Caine, like many other characters in the book, knows about climate change, but like most everyone else, his priorities are the bills to pay, work, friends, family, the next house repair….

By the time of the action of Over Brooklyn Hills in 2035, Caine is seeing a lot of change with the climate crisis and has gotten more involved. Climate migration—writ small and large—is one of the themes.

At the start of the series (in Kill Well, taking place in 2026), Caine is still recovering from a divorce, is worried about paying bills and the cost of energy, and is ambivalent about his paying job. All the chaos of the Trump regime overwhelms him. He’s frustrated that he can’t get into his art studio, and anxious, basically, about everything. Caine feels isolated, just like most people living in our culture today. One of the themes in this book is the difficulty of grasping in our daily lives the import of climate change; another theme is the malfeasance of entrenched interests such as the fossil fuel corporations and the countervailing forces obscuring, delaying, and denying climate action. Well, the malfeasance of moneyed interests and danger of income inequality carry throughout the series.

In Dear Josephine (which takes place in 2029), the climate situation worsens, but progress has a glimmer of hope in the U.S., post-2028 elections. Still, Caine and most everyone else tend to focus on mundane everyday concerns, but the climate crisis keeps creeping in, and acutely so with Hurricane Josephine. I didn’t want the hurricane to be experienced directly—that’s not how most of us would experience it. Caine is in the Berkshires, and the perspective on the hurricane is mediated by the news and by distance. A major theme is how climate change affects us, including economically, even when the consequence is not direct. Another theme is the previously referenced malfeasance, but in this book, the readers see bad actors emerging from different sides: pro-climate, pro-economic justice, and the big money interests.

As I age, I find myself interested in how aging fits into climate fiction, so Caine is set up to show us these effects. Farm to Me, the last book of the series and set in 2047, has Caine at 82. There’s plenty of climate progress, but the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the years before maintain a changing climate. There’s a distinct focus on young persons’ climate change struggles, in part contrasting with what we see with Caine.

I don’t think you can talk about climate change effectively without including it in daily lives.

Do you think fiction can help readers grapple with issues that often become polarized in public debate?

I believe so, but I can’t claim to know this. There have been some studies on the efficacy of climate fiction to get readers involved, but those studies are thin—small sample sizes—and there’s the lack of consideration in them about the characteristics of the specific climate fiction used in the studies. One easy conclusion? Apocalypse and dystopia may have the tendency to discourage people from acting, but I’m pretty sure there’s no need for a Ph.D. for this finding.

The biggest need for public action is to end the social silence suppressing conversations about climate change. In the U.S., nearly three-quarters of the population think climate change is a serious problem, but only something like 20 percent talk to others about it. Can the right fiction help encourage conversations? I hope so. Is my work that kind of climate fiction? I hope so, but this question can only be answered by readers. Climate change is a big problem, and big problems get addressed legislatively. Conversation is oxygen for political metabolisms.

One of the reasons why I pursued the topic of climate change through a series is to provide a sort of longitudinal study across the next two decades. Restricting the series through characters to the Berkshires helps, I hope, to keep the reader thinking about their own everyday lives in relation to climate change. The fact is that here in the developed nations, we aren’t on the verge of climate change-instigated societal collapse, even if the energy systems we’re participating in are laying the groundwork for longer-term problems that make the world a harder place for people to thrive.

What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?

I’m at work on Food to Me, which is the last book in The Steep Climes Quartet. I expect a Spring 2027 publication date. In this last book, food production is a theme, as is the consequence that the young will suffer. Like the other books in the series, there are thriller elements, although none of the books are simply thrillers, which is why I describe the series as “literary climate fiction.”

The post An Everyman: I Get to Think Further About Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

You can find Over Brooklyn Hills—Kindle and paperback—through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

For more information about The Steep Climes Quartet, see “Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet.”

Booklife Review:

The clear-eyed third entry in Guenette’s near-future series, set in the Berkshires in a 2035 of climate and refugee crises, stands out for Guenette’s singular blend of prognostication, rich characterization, slice-of-life scenecraft, process-oriented thriller elements, and deep interest in activism, journalism, governance, technological shifts, and the surprising ramifications of climate change. Guenette connects horrific global heatwaves to everyday existence around Great Barrington, Mass., which faces an escalating influx of transients, both the usual vacationers and desperate people seeking relief from the heat. In the midst of a housing crisis, the journalists and city administrators in Guenette’s sprawling cast fear—and will face—violence, but much of the novel explores, with keen understanding of interconnected systems, the practical challenges faced by the city, and changemakers on both sides of the law.

The cast, led by now-70-year-old artist/journalist Davin Caine, features a beleaguered town manager in a failing marriage; a freelance VR designer sleeping rough on Monument Mountain after Brooklyn becomes too hot; a climate activist building explosive devices for a domestic terror cell; and many more. Guenette writes convincing accounts of bomb-making, dealings with cartels, sniper assassinations, life on the run, and even the tracking of dark money political contributions, but the heart of the novel is in his detailed forecast of the world (and weather) to come. He builds a plausible 2035 with a light hand—offshore sea walls, news outlets charging micro-payments, drone deliveries on the Appalachian Trail—and welcome focus on people’s lived experience.

The novel is structurally ambitious but also diffusive, with many pages giving to rumination. The strongest narrative momentum comes in chapters about Allen Randolph, the bomb-maker, and town manager Fletch, while Davin’s macular degeneration and attraction to his house sharer, Be, inspires the warmest and funniest writing—“Oh, jeez,” he says, when Be presses into him. Threads converge slowly but with intelligence and power. Newcomers will struggle to keep up, but old-hands will be moved as Guenette balances humanity and tension, hope and warning.

Takeaway: Incisive, humane near-future novel of the Berkshires in the climate crisis.

Great for fans of: Julia Glass’s Vigil Harbor, Lauren Groff’s Florida.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-

The post Booklife Review of Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

Everybody tries to figure things out, although what is being figured out is hardly the same for everyone. Nor is the method for figuring things out the same for everyone, with academics a class of its own, and this applies to climate fiction, too.

Here’s how “Six books to help you explore the role of storytelling in the climate fight,” starts:

Humans are storytelling animals. 

That, at least, is one of the stories that humans tell about themselves. We are not logic machines or information processors; we need the tug of a narrative thread to carefully follow an argument. 

This poses a challenge for science, especially climate science, which has such a long timeframe, such a vast playing field, and way too many characters. But climate scientists, social scientists, reporters, and activists have tried, in permutating collaborations, to meet this challenge. And they have stories to tell about their efforts. (Or should we call them quests?) 

You have to love academics, and I mean this positively. Appearing in Yale Climate Connections, this article runs the deck, “This special selection includes books on storytelling, science, and climate change.” The article is found through an initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication. The article is written by Michael Svoboda and was published on January 30, 2026. Svoboda has been at George Washington University and teaching in the writing program there for two decades-plus, where “… he has pursued two very different research programs—on ancient Greek rhetoric and on communicating climate change. In 2010, he became a regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections. His current book project—and the focus of his year with GW’s Humanities Center—will further develop pieces he wrote for YCC on how climate change is depicted in advertising, in popular books and magazines, in documentaries and fictional movies, and in American political cartoons and commentary.”

Like I said, you got to love academics.

There’s a sub-industry on climate fiction these days and this recent Yale Climate Connections contribution is but one manifestation. Not that the books covered in this article are necessarily focused on climate fiction, but rather are books on the forms and values of storytelling about matters including climate change. I’ve read none of them, although I have looked a bit at We All Die in the End: Storytelling in the Climate Apocalypse and read the generous, albeit hopscotched, “Read sample.” I found myself impressed.

Not surprisingly, as a writer of what I call “literary climate fiction,” I have a dog in this hunt. I’ve reviewed quite a few cli-fi books, dived deep into such pools as Climate Fiction Writers League, and explored various academically-oriented programs looking at climate fiction or more generally the topic of storytelling associated with or applied to climate fiction.

Here’s a list of posts about climate fiction on my website published since September 2025:

• Climate Fiction, Climate Fantasy: What’s the right mix of hope and disappointment? 
• Let’s Talk About Climate Optimism and Hope That We Can Write About Doing Something About Climate Change
• Is Climate Hope Fiction Hopeless?
• Climate Fiction, Optimism, and Realism
• Fun with Apocalypse, Part 2
• Writing The Steep Climes Quartet, Part 2: Economics in Climate Fiction
• Climate Change and the Human Condition
• Writing Villains on Both Sides in Climate Fiction
• Democracy, Climate Action, Climate Fiction… and Criminality
• Why We Write: A look back at why the heck I’m writing a four-book climate fiction series

There are more, going back to mid-2023, too, back when the first book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Kill Well, was published, although I’m not sure what this tells me. Maybe that I’m a slow learner or that I still have questions about what kinds of climate fiction may be most efficacious?

Climate Fiction’s Scorecard

There are plenty of great climate fiction works out there. I place Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future in the top tier, although the scale is global and across many domains and the book carries a lot of policy wonkiness, but entertainingly so. The Deluge, by Stephen Markley, is another solid work along a similar scope as Ministry. Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver, places readers into the lives of everyday characters, encouraging readers to live alongside these characters in regular lives, even as the sublime aspects of climate change manifest. Weather, by Jenny Offill, accomplishes much the same, but at an even subtler level. Snowflake: A Novel, by Arthur Jeon, is a book I’ve greatly appreciated both for its form—journal entries by a climate/Trump obsessive high school senior with spectrum disorder—and its perspective, and there are a number of independently published works by others of note, but if you want to see more, look under “Other Writing” category on my website for reviews.

You’ll also see books that carry my complaint. One critical aspect is catastrophic climate occurrences that fall outside of known science. Another critique is focused on books that re-write human culture as climate solution or adaptation, pre-supposing either the passage of time or major human cultural shift, or both. These sorts of climate fiction can be engaging but represent what I term the “You can’t get there from here” problem.

What most concerns me is the question of how writers get people interested in climate change action, which for me seems mostly that of political action (i.e., voting) to affect legislation supporting the renewable energy transition. In America today, this has become part and parcel of the struggle to continue our democratic experiment, where today’s emerging authoritative threat bleeds into the fight between fossil fuel’s policy ascendancy and the anti-competitive market conditions being imposed on the clean energy transition. Traditional storytelling, such as the hero’s journey or a main focus on action plots or disaster stories, I argue, keep people from identifying with the current situation, even if such stories can be satisfying reads in and of themselves. Unfortunately, few of us are indeed heroes or survivalists or champions on the international stage. Most of us find our attention taken up with paying next month’s rent or mortgage payment, or current or dreamed of relationships, or the grocery or utility bill. An individual’s positive climate action takes place within the quotidian and having readers identify with characters’ experiences seems the way to bridge our everyday concerns with climate concerns, and not by making people into outsized heroes but rather by showing more informed citizens who realize the normal actions within which they participate can lead to better outcomes. Still, the range of concern varies from character to character, from intense climate action involvement to indifference or denial, and why? Because this is the world in which we live and so must be represented in climate fiction to support identification by the reader with the issue of climate change and what we can do about it.

Huh. Maybe I should write an academic paper about this.

The post Figuring Out Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

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.

The post Let’s Talk About Climate Optimism and Hope That We Can Write About Doing Something About Climate Change first appeared on David Guenette.