A long review appears on Goodreads recently and, if I do say so myself, this review is yet another that speaks well for the latest The Steep Climes Quartet title, Over Brooklyn Hills.

Here the Goodreads review, by Katie Meyers, just published and in full:

Over Brooklyn Hills is an ambitious and thought provoking installment in The Steep Climes Quartet, offering readers a vivid vision of a near future world grappling with the ongoing realities of climate change. David Guenette skillfully combines environmental, political, and personal narratives to create a story that is both intimate and expansive.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its realism. Rather than depicting climate change as a distant catastrophe, the story explores its gradual but relentless effects on daily life, public policy, migration, housing, infrastructure, and community relationships. This approach makes the future portrayed in the novel feel plausible and deeply relevant.

The character of Davin Caine serves as an effective anchor for the narrative. Through his work, creative pursuits, and evolving personal relationships, readers experience the human side of a changing world. His life reflects both the challenges and adaptations required in a society navigating environmental uncertainty.

The heatwave that drives large numbers of people into the Berkshires creates a particularly compelling conflict. The resulting tensions between residents and newcomers highlight issues of scarcity, housing, social cohesion, and community resilience. These local struggles mirror larger global challenges unfolding throughout the novel.

What makes the book especially engaging is its ability to connect personal stories with global developments. Climate migration, geopolitical instability, energy transitions, and environmental activism all intersect within a narrative that remains focused on individual lives and relationships. The result is a novel that feels both expansive in scope and emotionally grounded.

The worldbuilding is detailed and thoughtful, presenting a future shaped not by sudden collapse but by ongoing adaptation, compromise, and conflict. This nuanced perspective distinguishes the novel from more conventional dystopian narratives.

Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet, is now available. You can find Over Brooklyn Hills—Kindle and paperback—of The Steep Climes Quartet through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

Learn more about Over Brooklyn Hills here.

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

Here’s a quote from the review that captures, I think, what I’m trying to do with the series The Steep climes Quartet:

I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.

I’ve been writing a lot about climate fiction and what makes a story or novel climate fiction, and the reviews coming in are helpful articulations of this question. Of course, my pending interview with them will force me to articulate my view on this question of what makes fiction climate fiction.

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.

This review copied below is from Literary Titans, which describes itself as “an organization of professional editors, writers, and professors passionate about the written word. We review fiction and non-fiction books in different genres, conduct author interviews, and recognize talented authors with our monthly Literary Titan Book Award. We are privileged to work with so many creative authors around the world and help them promote their work.” 

With the advent of independent publishing, there’s been a slew of such services, but Literary Titan has managed to be early in and is well regarded. Plus, their review is quite good of my recently published Over Brooklyn Hills, the third book of The Steep climes Quartet, so that speaks well of them, I’d say. Well, of course I would say this, but you can read what they say about my newest book in the four-book series:

Over Brooklyn Hills by David Guenette is a literary climate fiction thriller set in 2035, where climate change is no longer a warning on the horizon but a daily pressure shaping politics, money, migration, housing, violence, and ordinary private life. The story follows Davin Caine, now seventy, as he moves through a Berkshire County strained by rising costs, climate migration, and civic unease, while larger threats involving fossil fuel interests, international tensions, and the climate terrorist group No One is Safe push the novel into darker territory.

Guenette isn’t just interested in disaster as spectacle. He’s interested in the way disaster becomes routine. A hot spell, a housing meeting, a town budget, a person trying to keep a home, a young worker needing air conditioning, a local government trying to respond without losing its soul. These details give the novel its weight. I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.

The writing has a restless, observant quality that I found both engaging and, at times, intentionally uncomfortable. Guenette moves between characters with a wide lens, and his choices make the book feel crowded in the way real life is crowded. Davin’s reflective passages slow the story down in useful ways, giving the thriller elements more moral texture. Then the violence and conspiracy threads cut back in, sharp and ugly, reminding me that this is still a thriller with real stakes. I appreciated that balance. The book doesn’t let anyone stay clean for long, not activists, not politicians, not industries, not regular people trying to get through the week.

I would recommend Over Brooklyn Hills to readers who like climate fiction with a political pulse, especially those who want a thriller that thinks as much as it moves. It will appeal to readers who enjoy near-future stories grounded in realistic social consequences rather than end-of-the-world spectacle. If you like fiction that blends suspense, civic anxiety, personal reflection, and big-picture questions about responsibility, this book has plenty to offer.

Rating: 5

The post Another Editorial Review of 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.

The Steep Climes Quartet is a literary climate fiction series.

Why “literary”? Because the emphasis is on deeply drawn characters with which readers can identify across the many aspects of their own lives.

Why “climate fiction?” The series’ local characters live in a world with a changing climate across a two-decade-plus timeframe:

• Kill Well takes place in 2026
• Dear Josephine takes place in 2029
• Over Brooklyn Hills takes place in 2035
• Farm to Me takes place in 2047

Is climate a primary concern for the characters? Like most of us today, many of the characters aren’t thinking all that much about climate change. We know about climate change and see that this is a problem, but we mostly go about our quotidian lives focused on work, family, friends, and paying the next bill. But climate change is happening and affecting the whole world, just in different degrees of vulnerability and challenge. We don’t escape its effects entirely now, even in the relatively resource-rich part of the world in which we live.

Here in the developed world—the series’ through characters live in Berkshire County, Massachusetts—climate change remains more abstract: reports in the news, connection to political issues, and cautionary stories about extreme weather, such as droughts, deluges. storms and hurricanes, diseases, and heat. Climate change is a real problem that is catching up with us all, and actions that combat climate change early on—today!—helps reduce the devastating problems later. Within this infosphere that is today’s pervasive static, unsettling studies on the problems and hope-engendering developing solutions leak through. Of course, working toward progress creates ever-shifting forms of opposition from entrenched interests. 

Each book carries one or more specific themes.

In Kill Well, that theme is the malfeasance of the fossil fuel industry that infiltrates every aspect of society, even seeping into quiet places and small towns. There’s a thriller subplot, welcome humor, and a wide range of characters, including a killer for hire. In 2026, most people are aware of climate change, but it remains abstract and far off seeming, and household economic concerns get the greater attention. But people, knowing or not, are already experiencing the fact that climate change is expensive and the re-ascension of Trump itself extracts a cost.

Dear Josephine looks at the carry-over consequences of extreme weather in the form of a massively destructive hurricane that hits Florida’s Gold Coast, devastating Miami. This book imagines the emotional effects of such an event even at remove, while also following a nefarious scheme by monied interests trying to shape an act coming up in post-2028 Congress in order gain control of the potentially staggering large budget, even while American society further frays under the carryover effects Trump, Big Oil, and the billionaires who have become the target for one or more people going around the country, murder list in hand.

Over Brooklyn Hills looks at climate migration, and for Berkshire County it is climate migration writ small as young people from New York City seek relief in the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires from a socked-in urban heatwave, even as on the international stage large-scale climate migrations develop. The main through-character Davin, at 70 years of age, has finally become an active supporter of climate change politics and the proud owner of solar panels and batteries and his membership in a VPP. And then there’s a domestic climate terrorist group in the news; No One is Safe, first introduced in Dear Josephine, now playing a far more dangerous game.

Farm to Me, an in-process manuscript of the 2047 story with a target publication date of Spring 2027, sees a world where rising average global temperatures are changing things consequentially, including food yields, with expanding Northeast farms taking on more agricultural production as Western farmers suffer chronic droughts. There’s a local murder mystery, too, in which the main through character Davin, now 82 and fixating on getting older, finds himself in the middle.

You can find the first three books—Kindle and paperback—of The Steep Climes Quartet through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

The post Over Brooklyn Hills is Now Available first appeared on David Guenette.

Austin and Clare Aslan, the authors of the post “Climate Fiction Writing as the ‘Slow Blade that Penetrates the Shield’,” published on  Climate Fiction Writers League Substack on May 19, 2026,  raise some good questions about climate fiction. They are co-authors of The Crystal Halo, which is described as “an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the ‘Chosen One’ myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature.” One of the authors is the director of the School of Earth and Sustainability at Northern Arizona University; the other serves on the Flagstaff City Council, “first winning a seat and then re-elected on a carbon-zero-by-2030 platform.”

So, serious people. They describe how their professional roles rely on “clarity and directness…[where] every action is directly and tangibly tied to evidence and outcomes. Our arsenal is our professional knowledge and our armor is facts.” They then go on to make the safe claim that storytelling is different than their day jobs… “not the same as policy, white papers, or climate action plans.”

Well, yes.

The two Aslans argue that “Fundamentally, fiction is about entertainment; there is a contract between writer and reader that the latter will enjoy themselves through the former’s work. When we invent stories that pontificate or proselytize, that sense of enjoyment is dulled or lost. No one wants to feel coerced by a novel.”

Well, right. So far, so good. This may be an overly stark distinction, though, especially thinking of Horace, the 19 BC poet famous for his Ars Poetica and many still lively phrases, including aut prodesse aut delectare, typically put as “Poetry should either entertain or edify.” The modern consensus is that literature can do both.

Hey, really, I just wanted to quote Horace in a post.

Their argument continues, basically claiming that people connect with “…stories [that] have a unique power to speak directly to hearts and souls, to get under the skin and to topple defensive front lines. People have long understood the world through myth, parable, and narrative—not climate models and temperature graphs.”

So we’re still in safe territory. We all understand, one hopes, that there is a big difference between fiction and policy statements, white papers, or climate action plans.

“Stories teach us to envision new possibilities, to sympathize with others, and to experience new or emerging obstacles. They ignite our imagination and allow us to conceptualize alternative futures and to consider their ramifications and anticipate our own responses,” the Aslans state, but here’s where the question about climate fiction gets interesting. The authors of the post go on to describe The Crystal Halo, the first novel in their Prophecies of Fathom series, where they “grappled with the seduction of trying too hard to make a case—to convey a moral lesson… There is no exposition presenting the problem and how to fix it. There is no straightforward lesson.”

Is Dune Climate Fiction?

While their phrasing shows their rejection of didactic or pedantic reporting on climate change in climate fiction, I question how this fantasy series becomes climate fiction rather than simply a fantasy series, albeit one where issues of “environmental collapse is present as background pressure, a deviation from normal, something characters plan around rather than solve. In this way, the disruption to climate in the world of Fathom is much like we experience it today, on Earth.”

But is it? The answer, of course, will be found in the reading of this work.

By the way, the “slow blade that penetrates the shield” is a story element in Frank Herbert’s Dune, where firearms and other fast kinetic weaponry are annulled by personal force fields, making knife fights based on slow(ish) movement the main form of close combat. Because the story revolves around the planet Arrakis, a virtually waterless place defined by vast stretches of bone-dry desert, severe windstorms, and extreme temperatures, the series is often cited as an early or proto-climate fiction series. A nifty enough if a bit bloody metaphor for how climate fiction must tread.

But let’s get back to the Aslans’ post and the question of “What is climate fiction?”

Unlike white papers and scientific lectures, they argue that “fiction can show us how people live during a crisis, but should be set before the complex problem has been resolved. To remain authentic, it ought to dwell in the long middle, where adaptation is uneven and life stubbornly continues…. Most human experience does not take place at the edge of extinction. It takes place in the in-between, charting a winding path through daycares and deadlines, bills and bedtime. When climate fiction doesn’t account for this real life, it risks becoming spectacle—harrowing, yes, but disconnected from how change actually unfolds.”

I think their view here is spot on. The problem with most apocalyptic or fantasy climate fiction is that these stories do not represent real life. Readers may very much enjoy such stories, but close identification between the reader’s life and the settings and characters in such stories, set as they are in alien worlds—whether post-apocalyptic here or on some distant planet or an entirely fantastical world—makes it less likely for us to identify the books closely with our own situation. Even if the setting is Earth, the situation is alien.

Today, we may be heading toward an apocalypse, but we ain’t there yet, although we might be setting up an unavoidable conclusion of disaster locked in, albeit slow motion. Of course, we’re getting ever closer to such disasters in some places more than others. Bill McKibben writes a particularly sobering post in his Substack, The Crucial Years,” titled “A Question of Margin: And there’s so very little,” about the Somali humanitarian crisis, with some Ebola and India and Pakistan heatwaves thrown in, and a sound ass-kicking of Elon Musk, to boot.

Finally, a Solid, Working Definition of Climate Change

But let’s get back to the Aslans’ post:

In The Crystal Halo, the stakes are real, but they are often unspoken. The moment of disaster passes without drama, and challenge emerges from how characters negotiate meaning in a world that no longer behaves as expected. What do you hold onto when the future crumbles? What counts as success when progress is redefined as nothing more than survival?

These are not questions with tidy answers, and fiction should resist providing them. Advocacy, in story, does not come from instruction but from proximity. Readers must be allowed to inhabit uncertainty without being rescued by didactic answers. They need room to wrestle, to disagree, and perhaps to come to a different conclusion from the one the writer would reach. This is where storytelling enters a realm that policy cannot.

Amen, I say. The above quote may be one of the best definitions of climate fiction I’ve seen.

Still, there seems to be something of an allergy to stories set in the real world of today and the near-future, which is the most important time when climate amelioration will or won’t happen. The Fathom series’ description is “an epic high fantasy series,” but I haven’t read the first book in the series, so I can’t fully judge the series alignment with our reality. As author of my own series, The Steep Climes Quartet, the first book is set in 2026, the second in 2029, the third in 2035 (this one, Over Brooklyn Hills, is on pre-order, with a publishing date of June 15, if I may so report!), and the last book is set in 2047. I want to tell the story of our contemporaries in the developed world, where resources to cope with climate consequences are plentiful—certainly in contrast to today’s Somalia, for example—and where political actions hold the best hope for climate progress.

The main point in my series is that while we live in a time of significant climate crisis we are human and that even in a climate crisis, our daily lives typically trump (sorry) our attention. Such lives are filled with many priorities, and mostly of the personal and immediate sorts, but one question to be asked is how climate change subtly intrudes into our lives. Here in the developed world, climate change is mainly in the static of news and the noise of weather around us and in our daily home economies, too. Unless you happen to live in the wrong spot at the wrong time, of course, such as with Helene and Asheville, North Carolina, back in September 26, 2024, and there are many more examples of acute crises by the minute.

Climate fiction makes readers witnesses, as the Aslans say, and bring into greater relief the experiences within “the consequences of our collective decisions [and] granted the authority to decide for themselves how their new experiences within this world will impact their perspective.” With fantasy books, are we reading of a world where our collective decisions are manifest? If only there was an AI called Gandalf the White we could query.

The Aslans’ also rightly state that “Fiction… can hold and expose contradictions without resolving them. It can show characters who make imperfect choices for understandable reasons. It can honor the reality that people care about climate change and still drive, fly, consume, and contradict themselves daily.”

They continue:

That contradiction is human. It captures all the daily complexity we must each balance, the easy and the difficult, the joy and the pain, and the tiny decisions that add up to a real life.

Too often, climate narratives reduce people into caricatures: villains of extraction, heroes of resistance, victims of circumstance. But real people are much more complex and also much more relatable. They resist change not because they are evil or because they deny science, but because change threatens identity, memory, and belonging. Stories that ignore this complexity may feel righteous, but they rarely feel true.

A climate story that refuses to simplify, that aims to show its characters as whole people with tangled and contradictory values, can reveal that truth. Characters can be complicit and caring, fearful and hopeful, informed and overwhelmed all at once. Characters can want to do the right thing, but can face many axes of rightness, constrained by the challenges of social ties, health, finances, and dreams.

When readers recognize themselves in a story, they are more likely to carry that story with them. Stories that linger shape perception. This is why narrative must come before message. A reader who would instinctively reject a manifesto or moral may be captivated by a character, haunted by a choice, or quietly changed by a narrative conflict.

Okay, maybe this is the best description of climate fiction.

Giving Austin and Clare Aslan the Final Word… Well, Until My Final Word, Anyway

If The Crystal Halo succeeds at all, we hope it succeeds in this way—immersing readers in a world where climate change is neither abstract nor theatrical, but intimate—a world where environmental collapse is a force that shapes relationships, ambition, hopes, and dreams. This is a world where climate change is a presence that cannot be ignored, but also cannot be reduced to a slogan.

The future will not be saved by stories alone. Policy matters. Infrastructure matters. Science matters. Our day jobs allow us to tackle environmental problems directly. But stories can shape the cultural ground on which society stands. Our shared artistic passion allows us to play a role in shifting the landscape under people’s feet. Storytelling prepares us—not by telling us what to do, but by helping us imagine who we might be and the world we might shape.

The Aslan post is impressive overall, as are the concluding paragraphs quoted above, in what I see as the continuation of a useful definition for climate fiction. I’ve been struggling with what the intrinsic elements of stories called “climate fiction” are, and it’s not easy. In fact, when I read this post, I was in the early stages of writing a post titled “What is Climate Fiction? As a Genre, It’s a Fiction,” so I was pleased to see that the Aslan post goes far in defining key concepts of what I think are the necessary elements of fiction to be “climate fiction.” Debates, no doubt, will ensue.

There’s an odd tension, however, between what the Aslans’ post says about climate fiction and the climate fiction they write. When I saw that the series is described as “an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the ‘Chosen One’ myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature,” I thought The Crystal Halo was going to be yet another post-climate change future or alternate world when what we are facing today is ancient history or worse yet, the real world supplanted by allegory. One of my critiques of many books that get labelled as climate fiction is that such books are fantasies or stories beyond our time or otherwise some sort of dystopian tale. There are also books that incorporate magic and special beings or evolved humans, but that sure as heck isn’t the world I see around me.

First though,  I haven’t read the first book, The Crystal Halo, so there nothing like a review or critique of the novel itself here. I know well enough that writing quality is as important as anything else in terms of a book’s value, as are the vividness of characters and compelling scenes and intriguing actions and situations. I well know that I can’t critique the book, not having read it. What I’ve done is studied The Crystal Halo’s Amazon page and the book’s descriptive copy. I’ve also read through the start of the book that’s provided through the book’s Amazon page, and I’ve gained a sense of the book. What is clear is that the book is fantasy, the locale and people quite different from today, at least in the developed world. It reads, at the start, like a scene from the Middle Ages, although as previously confessed, I haven’t read any further than the first six pages of Chapter One as provided by the “Read Sample” and that’s not even the full chapter that is, according to the Table of Contents, eight pages.

Why a fantasy series as climate fiction? This is a question I think a lot about. For example, I wrote “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction” a week or two ago, and the subtitle is “Why are so many novels about climate change pursuing myth and fantasy instead of actual solutions?” Here’s the first paragraph of this post:

I am a student of climate fiction, and not surprisingly so, since I write climate fiction. I’ve long rejected the easy story of apocalypse, and not because such stories are uninteresting or a failure as a fun read, but because such stories most often have little to do with the subject of climate other than as a premise for the story. Likewise, I’m not a big fan of far-future climate fiction stories that show mankind changed in response to the climate crisis, even while the stories don’t bother to do the work of showing how the change comes about.

Yes, I’ve been researching the differences between the words snarky, snide, and sardonic, and you might see why when you read a paragraph that comes later in the “Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction” post:

What sticks in my craw is the propensity of novels calling themselves climate fiction that focus on fantasy, and that includes altered species or fairies or demi-gods, or far-future distant or dystopian worlds, or radical changes in human nature often focused on gender issues or BIPOC, all the while too often fitting into hyper-genre writing markets instead of having climate change the central focus. There are many fantasy, romance, thriller, or science fiction novels that have some “climate” orientation or other, but that clearly don’t address the clear issues of climate change, either in cause or solution. We’re burning fossil fuels and heating the planet. Isn’t this time and place of crucial threat to the world an interesting enough story? Who needs allegory when the menace and what needs doing to address it is staring us right in the face?

If you look at at recent posts on Climate Fiction Writers League, you’ll note that at least six out of the most recent eight posts on there involve climate fiction with fantasy or fantastic characteristics (book descriptions below from the posts), as follows:

Climate Fiction Writing as the “Slow Blade that Penetrates the Shield,” by high fantasy co-authors Austin and Clare Aslan, May 19, 2026

Today we have an essay by Austin and Clare Aslan, authors of The Crystal Halo, an epic high fantasy series opener with a non-European setting that turns the “Chosen One” myth on its head amidst a disintegrating nature

Magick & High-Tech Augmentations in YA Fiction, a discussion between Kenechi Udogu and Ray Star, Mar 10, 2026

Today’s discussion explores climate fiction dystopian concepts in YA Sci-fi and Fantasy novels, by up-and-coming authors Kenechi Udogu and Ray Star.

Kenechi Udogu’s debut novel Augmented is set in a future where humans are enhanced to ensure the survival of society. Akaego fights to prevent her power to grow plants from being weaponized by a corrupt regime.

Earthlings by Ray Star is set on a remote island where the magick-born have the ability to control earth, air, fire, water and spirit. But elsewhere, humanity is enslaved, a cruel dictator rules the land, and an uprising is on the horizon.

Imagination, Mythology, and the Return to Earth, by Steve Stine, author of I, Enoch, May 5, 2026

Steve Stine talks about mythology in fiction. His sci-fi novel I, Enoch is about a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction. Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets.

The Balance Between Immersion and Believability, A conversation between authors Denise Robbins and Amy Lilwall, April 7, 2026

This year, Denise Robbins and Amy Lilwall published novels that address climate change sidelong. Through depictions of public reactions to pending disaster—and the turmoil that ensues—both novels seek to capture the panic of a world in the midst of wide-scale disruption.

Robbins’ novel, The Unmapping, bends the laws of physics in a city—New York—that ‘unmaps’, causing world-famous buildings and streets to move and displace overnight. Amy Lilwall’s The Water That May Come imagines UK citizens in the face of a megatsunami that threatens to engulf their homeland.

Mermaids & Sea Salvage in two oceanic sci-fi novels, A discussion between Timothy Chawanga and Susan Fletcher, February 24, 2026 [Note: this post seems to split between a near-future mystery and a fantasy YA book]

Today, we have a conversation with Timothy Chawanga, author of SALVAGIA, in which a diver searching for nostalgic salvage discovers the body of the most infamous man in flooded Florida and must avoid suspicion from both feds and corporate mafias.

Timothy is talking to Susan Fletcher, author of Sea Change, a YA retelling of The Little Mermaid set in a near-future where rogue gene editing has changed humanity.

Stop the World, I want to Get Off, Adam Connors interviews Alex Foster, Feb 10, 2026

Alex Foster’s debut novel, Circular Motion, explores how a new, high-speed travel network causes the Earth’s rotation to accelerate, not just by a few seconds, but by a minute, an hour, and more.

That’s a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but I’m not sure how many of these books are fictional works addressing or focused on climate change. And, no, I’m not talking about graphs and charts, but focus.

This question of what is climate fiction, I believe, also applies to the planned The Prophesies of Fathom series. I love how Austin and Clare Aslan talk about effective climate fiction, but their talk of climate fiction and their series seem to be opposite each other.

I guess I have a lot of would-be climate fiction reading ahead of me, but at this point I’m confused about the whole domain.

Learn more about The Prophesies of Fathom Book One: The Crystal Halo.

Learn more about The Steep Climes Quartet.

The post A Fantastic Essay about Climate Fiction but Still a Lot of Fantasy first appeared on David Guenette.

For the writer/production editor/publisher, the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) back in November 2007 changed the landscape of trade publishing for good and bad. Keep in mind that we are two decades into the real start of ebooks, even though, as an editor of digital publishing professional periodicals, I’d attended two earlier cycles of ebook conferences starting sometime in the late 1980s, and the idea of ebooks had been around for an even longer time. Ted Nelson and his book Hypertext, anyone?

As it turned out, it took Amazon’s commitment to this emerging marketplace to provide momentum out of the starting gate. Keep in mind that Amazon was still in early stages of its world domination and was a generally well-regarded corporation doing what many people thought were helpful things. Things like online shopping, fast shipping, competitive prices, and other sorts of attractive retail behavior. The common view of Amazon these days is negative, and for many good reasons. I won’t go into details here—they’re well-known. In fact, I’ve done my share of critiquing, including writing essays titled “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part One” and “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part Two.” If you want an excellent description of what’s going on with online platforms, read Cory Doctorow’s essays on “enshittification.”

What It Takes for Books to Gain “The Channels”

The third book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Over Brooklyn Hills, is on pre-order, with a publication date of June 15, 2026, but in order to make the book and the others in the series as widely available as possible, hoops must be jumped through.

Amazon is the single largest bookseller in the known universe, and the platform makes buying books easy (unlike the search function for most other goods available through Amazon), so there’s that. Get the book on Amazon and Bob‘s your uncle, that’s the thinking. But there’s also significant opposition to Amazon these days and, understandably, especially so from other booksellers and book buyers loyal to independent bookstores and those all-around anti-Amazon folks. Bookshop.org has done a decent job providing an Amazon alternative for online book-buying and has the anti-Amazon public’s support mainly because it directs the sales to independent bookstores.

If I want to sell my books in independent bookstores in addition to Amazon, I can. Well, I can if my book has a real ISBN and doesn’t use the one Amazon freely offers publishers, which isn’t a real ISBN, but an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) that is independent of the ISBN usage by other bookstores. The practical consequence is that other bookstores simply won’t sell ASIN-only books, and it is not merely pique on their part, but also logistical: the rest of the trade book selling world uses ISBN inventory and pricing for their stock, something Amazon has known to be the case for decades upon decades. I also need to make sure that my books are available through a book distributor so that independent bookstores can order them, which for the trade market in the U.S. means Ingram, and don’t you know they own Lightning Source, an online platform for publishing both print and ebooks.

So now I’m using two publishing platforms, both of which produce the books as print-on-demand.

Of course, there also is the issue of ebook production, format, and distribution. For KDP, that’s easy enough and the ingestion interface has gotten better over time, so there are fewer publishers now having strokes when trying to get an ebook—a Kindle—out into the world. Of course, when you publish through KDP you’re limited to selling the Kindle ebook through Amazon, unless, that is, you use an additional ebook publishing platform, where the real value is in its distribution, ebook production being relatively easy. Alternate ebook distribution makes the ebook—ePub—available through Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and many other channels, including into libraries. I’ve found Draft2Digital effective in this way.

So now I’m using three publishing platforms.

The Signal-to-Noise Challenge Loudly Continues

Of course, so are millions of other self-publishers, or whatever the actual number is, using publishing platforms. There are 3-4 million such books reportedly getting published annually these days, at least according to people who wish to break my spirit, as the sheer volume of new books creates a signal-to-noise problem for those searching for a particular book or ebook. I’m jumping through hoops making sure that my books are available through many channels, all in the hope that people will seek the books out and buy them. There’s the needle-in-a-haystack problem, something metadata and the right keywords were supposed to solve, but now there’s a humongous haystack that keeps discoverability difficult. AI search that adds context derived from the actual content of the book instead of relying just on metadata is the next great hope, but really, the search engines and social platforms want to sell ads, promising discoverability for a price.

Who knew that I wasn’t going to become rich by writing fiction?!

Well, as things stand today, my goal is to sell enough books to more or less cover my costs, so that my modest retirement funds don’t too rapidly disappear. And I haven’t yet included audiobooks to the equation, not because audiobooks are a bad idea, but because the main platform, Audible, is now owned by Amazon, and the whole royalty setup is downright terrible for authors. Also, I’m still annoyed that most people seem to like audiobooks more than print or ebooks, and, yes, I’m still sulking.

The post The World of Amazon Publishing and the Hoops a Publisher Jumps Through to Participate in the World of Amazon Publishing first appeared on David Guenette.

I am a student of climate fiction, and not surprisingly so, since I write climate fiction. I’ve long rejected the easy story of apocalypse, and not because such stories are uninteresting or a failure as a fun read, but because such stories most often have little to do with the subject of climate other than as a premise for the crisis. Likewise, I’m not a big fan of far-future stories that show mankind changed in response to the climate crisis, while the stories don’t bother to do the work of showing how the change comes about.

Let’s Set the Stage

Climate change is an astonishing event in our human culture. We have altered the climate of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and have already locked in more changes to the climate over the next many centuries. The reasons for our alteration of fundamental Earth systems make sense in that the fossil fuel-based energy provided to societies and their economies has pushed human development forward even as, supported by the energy abundance, the population numbers have exploded. The combination of huge energy use and ever-larger population numbers over the last two hundred years is the mechanism behind climate change.

It is an impressive achievement, really.

The problem is that the resulting change in the Earth’s climate is itself impressive, but darkly so, since we’re altering the stable climate of the last 10,000 years that supported the dominance of humans. The benefits of such a stable climate are now disappearing, increasingly being replaced by significant disadvantages. We’ve exhausted our species’ advantage from burning fossil fuels to power growth and population. In fact, we find ourselves facing a future that presents growing disadvantages for us in the form of horrendous heat waves, devastating deluges, deadly droughts, surging seas, damning diseases, and massive meteorological disasters.

Another important point to keep in mind is that we’ve known of these consequences for many decades. There’s a report titled The Greenhouse Effect, produced by J.F. Black, Scientific Advisor, Products Research Division, Exxon Research and Engineering Company, dated June 6, 1978. This report closely matches—scarily so—the rises in average global temperatures we’re now seeing and expect to see going forward. This is hardly the first such understanding of the greenhouse gas/global warming effect concluded by the fossil fuel corporations themselves in studies starting back nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

In fact, there are a shocking number of earlier studies on greenhouse gases and warming that began in the 1820s with Joseph Fourier identifying the atmosphere’s heat-trapping “greenhouse effect.” This was followed by Eunice Foote’s (1850s) experiments showing CO2’s powerful heat absorption, and John Tyndall’s (1859) confirmation of gases like CO2 and water vapor absorbing infrared heat. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius first calculated that human CO2 emissions could significantly raise Earth’s temperature, linking industrial activity to climate change, a concept later refined by Charles Keeling’s (1950s-60s) precise CO2 measurements.

Look up “Early 20th century newspaper stories about burning coal and the greenhouse effect.” Here’s the AI Search Summary you’ll find (I’ve left the links live):

Early 20th-century newspapers, notably in 1912, published short, syndicated articles linking coal combustion to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and future global warming. These reports, such as a famous August 1912 piece, accurately predicted that burning coal would act as a “blanket” to raise Earth’s temperature within a few centuries. [1, 2, 3]

Key Historical Clippings

• • 1912 Climate Change Article: Originally published in March 1912 in Popular Mechanics, and later in Australian/New Zealand newspapers (e.g., The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal and Rodney and Otamatea Times) in August 1912, this report was titled “Coal Consumption Affecting Climate” or similar.
  • What it Stated: The 67-word article noted that furnaces were burning 2 billion tons of coal annually, adding roughly 7 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere yearly. It explained that this CO2 acts as a “blanket” that raises temperature, predicting, “This effect may be considerable in a few centuries”.
  • Scientific Context: This was not the first instance of such reporting. It followed pioneering work by scientists like Svante Arrhenius, who predicted this effect in 1896, and earlier studies by H.A. Phillips in 1882. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

Keep in mind that a number of the big fossil fuel corporations had commissioned their own studies in the 1970s and 1980s, although we don’t know the exact count, and probably won’t until the discovery phases of liability cases against the fossil fuel corporations take place and are made public. Unless, of course, SCOTUS rules that fossil fuel companies are protected against liability lawsuits, and remember, SCOTUS has done this for the gun companies.

Climate Change is a Fantastic Story in the Real World

A recent Substack post in Climate Fiction Writers League, “Imagination, Mythology, and the Return to Earth, by Steve Stine, author of I, Enoch, May 05, 2026, is unfortunately typical of what is found in this Substack. The intro to the post is as follows:

Steve Stine talks about mythology in fiction. His sci-fi novel I, Enoch, is about a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction. Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets. 

The first thing that set me off is Stine’s use of the manned moon mission as an example of the age of science, setting Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon in opposition to mythic storytelling. “And yet, what we gained that day in the annals of space exploration, we lost in the age-old story-telling traditions that bestowed upon the moon a mythic quality. For countless generations and throughout the world, the moon played a lead role in shaping cultures, aligning belief systems, and influencing human behavior.”

Good to know, I guess. It turns out that the moon is made of straw, not cheese, and that it’s the old straw man in the moon. Stine waxes nostalgic on the role the moon once played in human imagination, and bemoans that now, somehow, we’ve lost what for the ancients was the understanding that “…not knowing [is] fertile ground for story-telling.” There’s mention of the Age of Reason, and Voltaire, David Hume, and Thomas Paine come up, along with their complaints about myths. Stine comments, “…[T]he substance and purpose of mythology suffered a full-frontal assault by those bent on placing science at the centre of our cultural transformation.” The straw man argument here is that “not knowing” and science are oppositional, and if not knowing” is essential for story-telling, then somehow, amid all the test tubes and data sets, we’ve lost the ability to tell a story. “Today, the word ‘myth’ is synonymous with a falsehood,” Stine then claims. Well, it can be, but myth has other meanings and hewing only to the falsehood definition is itself false. Let’s turn to a product of science (and imagination!) to test definitions. Here is the Google AI summary of the definition of myth:

A myth is a traditional, often sacred narrative explaining a culture’s worldview, beliefs, or natural phenomena, typically featuring gods or heroes in a remote era. While commonly misconstrued as a “false story,” a myth acts as a symbolic, foundational truth for a community, rather than a literal historical account. [1, 2, 3]

Key Definitions of Myth:

• • Sacred Narrative: A story of ostensibly historical events that explains a culture’s practices, beliefs, or natural phenomena (e.g., creation myths).
  • Cultural Worldview: A story that defines a group’s identity, often involving divine or supernatural beings, which is revered as true and authoritative within that culture.
  • Common Usage (False Belief): A popular but unsubstantiated belief or false notion (e.g., “the myth of racial superiority”). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Key Characteristics:

• • Anonymous Origin: Usually told without a known author, passed down through generations.
  • Symbolic Truth: Myths are often metaphorically or symbolically true, even if factually false.
  • Functions: They serve to answer fundamental questions (creation, death) and justify social systems and rites. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Myth vs. Related Terms:

• • Myth vs. Legend: Legends are usually based on historical figures or events, though often exaggerated, whereas myths operate in a, “primordial,” or non-specific time involving gods.
  • Myth vs. Folktale: Folktales are told for entertainment or moral instruction rather than being considered sacred or strictly true. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Myths, Storytelling, and the Modern Age of Climate Fiction

I understand Stine’s interest in supporting the concept of myth—his book, I, Enoch, presents the following description on Amazon:

I, Enoch is an enthralling journey into a world where ancient secrets and modern ambitions collide. Enoch, the protagonist, stands as a guardian of lost truths and protector of the marginalized, battling against forces that hold dominion over the planet. In a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction, Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets. As he delves deeper, Enoch confronts not only external adversaries but also internal dilemmas about justice, knowledge, and power. This tale weaves together mysticism with gritty realism, creating a tapestry rich with philosophical questions and the perennial quest for understanding one’s purpose. As Enoch wrestles with his responsibilities and the consequences of his actions, the reader is invited into a vividly crafted universe that challenges the conventional boundaries between history and myth, between what is known and what is imaginable. This book promises to leave readers pondering their own place in the history of humankind and the universe.

To be fair, I’ve not read the entire book, just samples from the book as well as descriptive copy, so maybe I’m using I, Enoch as my own straw man.

Storytelling exists across many modalities, where myth, in the word’s various connotations, is but one. I happen to like Carl Jung’s sense of archetypes within the human mind and Joseph Campbell does a great job tying the history of myths into literature. Heck, I took a course as an undergraduate called “Myth in Literature,” where I got to read Eric Neumann’s The History of Consciousness, for pete’s sake, so I’m no anti-myth guy, honest. I also don’t see myth and science as opposites, not when it comes to human imagination and storytelling. What sticks in my craw is the propensity of novels calling themselves climate fiction that focus on fantasy, and that includes altered species or fairies or demi-gods, or far-future distant or dystopian worlds, or radical changes in human nature often focused on gender issues or BIPOC, all the while too often fitting into hyper-genre writing markets instead of having climate change the central focus. There are many fantasy, romance, thriller, or science fiction novels that have some “climate” orientation or other, but that clearly don’t address the clear issues of climate change, either in cause or solution. We’re burning fossil fuels and heating the planet. Isn’t this time and place of crucial threat to the world an interesting enough story? Who needs allegory when the menace and what needs doing to address it is staring us right in the face?

To be clear, there are many excellent climate fiction works. Think Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future; Nicky Singer’s The Survival Game; Richard Powers’s The Overstory; Jenny Offill’s Weather; Omar El Akkad’s American War; Arthur Jeon’s Snowflake; Nick Fuller Goggin’s The Great Transition; Paul E. Hardisty’s The Forcing; Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife; Stephen Markely’s The Deluge; Chuck Colin’s Altar to an Erupting Sun; and J. Underwood’s The Bell Lap, to name some. But out of the 160-plus “climate fiction” novels I’d noted in building a Goodreads list (an effort I abandoned in late 2024 due to the sheer volume and size of the task), the sort of climate fiction I prefer remains a small minority.

And sure, it is a matter of taste, in part. But what sets climate fiction apart from other categories? Might it not be the topic and focus on where we are now and how we address climate change? Any category that is too inclusive ends up losing value as a category. Novels that turn to deus ex machina may be fun, but there’s not much of a real climate change solution being investigated in such stories. Fantasy can be a fun read and teach the reader about the human condition, but unless it is actively focused on climate change, does it fit into the category of climate fiction? Myths and allegories and social criticism can be edifying, and romances and thrillers and crime novels can be entertaining, but maybe climate fiction should directly address climate change and what we might imagine doing about the problem.

There’s this idea of “thrutopia” in climate fiction which I define as climate fiction that shows where we are in the world of changing climate and how we get to where we’re going. I like to quote the old Down Easter joke, “You can’t get there from here,” but getting from where we are today to the world we are heading to—solutions successful or not—seems likely the real focus for climate fiction.

The post Climate Fiction and Myth in Climate Fiction 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.

What I am talking about is the clear identification of the fossil fuel industry—I like the moniker “Big Oil”—as the enemy. Enemy to whom? How about those billions and billions of us alive today and those in the future who directly suffer because of the actions of Big Oil in denying, delaying, and actively opposing the benefits of energy sources and policies that reduce carbon emissions.

The main arguments for clean energy to be the only energy source going forward for electrical generation and transportation are:

1. Clean energy is the cheapest energy resource to build and implement compared to fossil fuel-based energy, making clean energy the affordability winner;
2. Clean energy is the fastest to build and implement compared to fossil fuel-based energy, making clean energy the best choice for meeting growing energy demands;
3. Clean energy significantly reduces health problems tied to fossil fuel use across the world in many ways, including declining asthma and premature deaths;
4. Clean energy reduces geopolitical conflicts based on energy resources, since solar and wind do not rely on scarce consumable commodities but derives energy from the sun and wind available to all.

Fossil Fuels Had Their Day

Every time I mention that Big Oil is bad there will be people ready to jump down my throat with some version or another of “Fossil fuel built our modern economy” or “If we stopped using fossil fuel today, millions would die from starvation.”

This kind of reaction is still all-too common, and my answer is, “Yeah, so stipulated.” An immediate full stop in our use of fossil fuels would be disaster for the world. But replacing fossil fuels with clean energy electricity as soon as possible will go a long way in dropping carbon emissions.

Solar, wind, and batteries are now so low in manufacturing and build out costs that fossil fuels can’t compete. Building out solar, wind, and batteries is the way to go if you want lower electricity bills. Clean energy now makes reducing our economy’s carbon footprint the best choice just on economic basis, never mind the health benefits and slowing climate change. Even if you are part of the small minority that doesn’t care about climate change or reducing environmental pollution, I’ll bet you’re interested in lower electricity bills.

You know who’s not interested in lowering your electricity bill? Big Oil. Big Oil’s business model is to keep selling you oil, gas, and coal for you—well, when it comes to electricity, your utility—to keep burning their products, replacing every volume used with new volume, and on and on until the generation plant gets decommissioned. How long do fossil fuel generator plants last?

Here’s a quick Google AI Overview:

Fossil fuel power plants typically operate for 30 to 50 years, with coal-fired units averaging around 45 years in the U.S. and some lasting over 60 years with maintenance. Natural gas combined-cycle plants generally have a 25 to 30-year design life, though they may operate longer. 

• • Coal-Fired Plants:Often designed for 50 years, many in the U.S. are approaching or exceeding 45 years of age.
  • Natural Gas Plants:Combined-cycle units typically last 25–30 years, while simpler, smaller generators might require major overhauls within 10–20 years.
  • Retirement Trends:While many plants last 30-50 years, environmental regulations and economic factors are leading to earlier shutdowns, with 28% of U.S. coal capacity planning to retire by 2035.
  • Replacement vs. Life Extension:Despite aging, some plants are granted extended lifespans to ensure grid reliability, particularly in areas with high energy demand, such as data centers. 

For every new fossil fuel generator plant built, you and your utility are signing up for buying more natural gas or oil or coal for 25 years or more.

Want to know why Big Oil is fighting so hard to keep solar/wind/batteries from getting built? Big Oil, of course, wants to continue in the business they know and have invested in, which is selling you energy that you burn up and need to buy more of year after year after year. Do U.S. fossil fuel generator plants get to pass on increased costs of fuel?

Here’s another Google AI Overview:

Yes, in the United States, fossil fuel generator plants—specifically investor-owned utilities—are generally allowed to pass on increased fuel costs to customers, often with little to no risk to their own profits. This is accomplished through regulatory mechanisms known as Fuel Adjustment Clauses (FACs) or similar cost-recovery trackers, which are overseen by state-level Public Service Commissions. 

Here is how this process works and its implications:

• • How Fuel Costs Are Passed On:Utilities are permitted to adjust electricity rates outside of formal, lengthy rate cases to reflect fluctuations in the cost of fuel (coal, natural gas) used to generate electricity. If fuel prices rise, the cost is passed to consumers as a surcharge on their monthly bills.
  • “Dollar-for-Dollar” Recovery:In many regions, particularly the Southeast, 100% of these fuel costs are passed on to customers. This means that if a power plant pays more for natural gas, the utility does not absorb that expense; rather, customers pay it.
  • Regulatory Oversight:While these adjustments are often automatic, they are reviewed by state commissions for accuracy. Regulators may disallow charges if they find improper fuel procurement practices.
  • Impact on Utilities vs. Customers:Because these mechanisms exist, utility investors are often insulated from fuel price volatility. Critics argue this reduces the incentive for utilities to seek lower fuel costs or invest in more stable, renewable energy sources.
  • Incomplete Pass-Through:While many utilities pass on costs completely, studies suggest that across the industry, marginal cost pass-through is not always 100%, with consumers bearing between 25% and 75% of the cost increases in some scenarios.
  • Timing Differences:Fuel adjustment charges are often calculated monthly based on costs from previous months, which can lead to a lag in how quickly price increases or decreases are reflected in customer bills. 

Are power utilities motivated to seek the lowest energy cost? Public power utilities are notoriously conservative, not liking change. After all, one of their mandates is reliability of electricity. Of course, solar/wind/batteries are reliable suppliers of electricity and the application of digital management of grid balance and support of distributed energy resources such as demand flexibility make more of the overall capacity of the grid available meet peak demand loads.

According to “U.S. Spending Bill to Grant $40 Billion in Fossil Fuel Subsidies,” originally published in Wired in late 2025, fossil fuels still get billions of dollars in U. S. subsidies each year:

The Trump administration has already added nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal in 2025, a report released Tuesday finds, sending an additional $4 billion out the door each year for fossil fuels over the next decade. That new amount, created with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer, adds to $30.8 billion a year in preexisting subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The report finds that the amount of public money the U.S. will now spend on domestic fossil fuels stands at least $34.8 billion a year.

Keep in mind that the U.S. had already been subsidizing fossil fuels for a century or more. President Biden’s 2021 budget had called for ending tax breaks for oil companies, but these phaseouts were struck down in the Senate and now, with President Trump, new subsidies have been added, including for coal, a favorite fixation of the Trump Administration.

Why Big Oil is the Enemy

Quite simply, Big Oil puts profits over the common good and ignoring the common good in this case leads to disease, death, and the collapse of the climate environment of the last ten millennia that has fostered human development.

Big Oil isn’t doing this out of ignorance, but rather in willful disregard for the physics behind global warming. In short, those leading the corporations that make up Big Oil seem happy enough to forfeit our future and that of our children and their children, down the many generations. Here’s the right analogy: “Big Knives” has employees test the sharpness of their products by stabbing people and children in the street and since Big Knives get paid only when selling knives that are so tested, there are one hell of a lot of bleeding people in every neighborhood, although more so in poorer neighborhoods.

As absurd as the analogy sounds, the correlations are direct. Big Oil produces a product (the knife) that poisons the air we all breathe (people getting stabbed). The question becomes how we shift to clean energy in a way that supports the essential and pervasive energy benefits to people.

Keep in mind that Big Oil plays dirty. Big Oil—along with other big money interests—has purchased much of the federal government, from the Executive branch to many in Congress. What has Big Oil gotten? Here’s a very partial list:

• A DOJ attempting to repress court cases and many states’ legislation against Big Oil corporations, including, most recently, “polluters pay” bills that Trump calls “extortion.”
• The EPA’s recent removal of the endangerment finding that has been a central regulatory enforcement mechanism against greenhouse gases.
• The Executive branch’s overriding of massive Biden-era funding programs (such as IIJA and IRA) for clean energy.
• Outright market interference, such as Trump’s anti-offshore wind projects shutdowns.

Since Big Oil has clearly demonstrated it wishes to continue business as usual—the current efforts to build dozens and hundreds of new gas electricity generators are just the latest example—we see that these corporations stand in opposition to what needs to happen.

Al Gore is right when he says, “They [Big Oil] are much better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions… They are the enemies of progress.”

Bill McKibben is right, when he says, “We have a literal enemy in this fight… The fossil-fuel industry has played the most disgraceful role of any set of corporations in the history of the world. They are Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our civilization.”

George Monbiot, the journalist and activist, puts it this way, “We are not just fighting climate change; we are fighting the people who profit from it. The fossil fuel industry is the enemy of nature and the enemy of humanity.”

Kevin O’Brien, author and ethicist, In his 2024 book Meeting the Enemy, writes, “To make progress on climate change, we must recognize that the fossil-fueled industrial complex is a strategic enemy… treating them as such is a requirement for justice.”

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, said, “We are at war with nature, and the fossil fuel industry is the fuel for that fire. We must end this war on our planet… We are seeing a historic battle between those who want to protect life and those who want to protect profits.”

Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator, said, “We are in a battle for the survival of the planet. We are taking on the greed of the fossil fuel industry, and it is a war we cannot afford to lose.”

Jay Inslee, former Governor of Washington, during his presidential campaign, stated, “This is a world war… it is a war of survival against the carbon-industrial complex that has held our democracy hostage for decades.”

Why We Will Win

Despite the decades of Big Oil’s explicit effort to deny climate change and fossil fuel’s contribution to it and the political favors and market advantages bought with a small part of profits, Big Oil has the losing hand. The industry continues to expand its investments when fiduciary responsibilities dictate that a managed drawn down of production is called for to avoid creating stranded assets and further legal liability. Fossil fuels are, simply put, an increasingly bad investment that is now offering “last idiot in” conditions.

Costs

Generating electricity from fossil fuels is more expensive. While the capital investment for solar farms and wind farms together with battery storage may have somewhat higher initial capital costs (i.e., to build), based on 2025 industry data, natural gas peaker plants are generally more expensive than solar plus battery storage systems when comparing the total cost of electricity generation (LCOE) over their lifetimes. While natural gas remains a cheaper option for instantaneous dispatchable power in some specific scenarios, newly build, unsubsidized solar-plus-storage often beats the cost of new-build natural gas, particularly when accounting for the volatility of fuel prices and lower maintenance costs.

Here’s a Google AI Overview:

Cost Breakdown (2025 Estimates)

Key Comparison Drivers

• • Fuel Costs:Solar and storage have zero fuel expenses, providing stable, long-term costs. Natural gas plants are subject to market volatility and rising, unpredictable fuel prices.
  • Capital Costs:Solar + storage has higher upfront capital costs (installing panels and batteries), but lower operating expenses (O&M) compared to the ongoing, high fuel and maintenance costs of gas plants.
  • Battery Advancements:Battery costs have fallen by roughly 89% between 2010 and 2023, making them highly competitive.
  • Subsidies:Even without tax credits, solar and wind are frequently more cost-effective than new-build gas plants. With subsidies, the cost advantage for renewables is even more significant. 

While gas plants are still used for reliable 24/7 baseload power, solar + storage is increasingly seen as a more economical choice for new capacity in many regions, especially as technology improves to handle grid intermittency. 

Legal Position

There are many bases for legal action against Big Oil, including causing harm (pollution and global warming), corruption (dark money and “lobbying” for market advantage), more expensive electricity (the issue of affordability), and many social justice offenses (local pollution and reduced quality of living conditions). There are, as of early 2026, 3,000 climate court cases worldwide, although active litigation targeting Big Oil is a subset.

Here’s what Google AI Overview has to report:

Global Active Cases

• • Total Against Fossil Fuel Corporations: Approximately 86 major lawsuits have been filed specifically against “Carbon Majors” (the world’s largest oil, gas, and coal producers) since 2005.
  • Active Status: As of recent reports (late 2024/2025), over 40 of these cases remain active and pending in courts.
  • Top Defendants: The most frequently targeted companies are ExxonMobil (43 cases), Shell (42 cases), BP, Chevron, and TotalEnergies. 

U.S. Active Cases

• • Concentration: The United States is the primary battleground, hosting approximately 50 of the 86 global cases filed against fossil fuel companies.
  • State & Local “Deception” Suits: There are over 32 active lawsuits brought specifically by state attorneys general (e.g., California, Massachusetts, Minnesota) and local governments (e.g., Honolulu, Boulder) seeking damages for alleged climate deception.
  • 2026 Developments: This number continues to grow. In January 2026, Michigan filed a new federal antitrust lawsuit against major oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute (API), accusing them of operating as a “cartel”. 

Summary of Case Types

The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law categorizes these active cases into three main buckets:

1. 1. Climate Damages (38%): Seeking compensation for infrastructure damage and health costs (e.g., the “Climate Superfund” cases).
   2. Misleading Advertising (16%): Alleging “greenwashing” or false claims about net-zero commitments.
   3. Emissions Reduction (12%): Attempting to force companies to align their business models with the Paris Agreement (e.g., the landmark Milieudefensie v. Shell case in the Netherlands). 

Context: While there are over 3,000 climate-related cases globally (1,900+ in the U.S.), the vast majority target governments over policy failures or permitting decisions, rather than private corporations.

There’s one case getting a lot of attention, since the legal argument is fundamental: conspiracy. In January 2026, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against four major oil companies—BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell—and the American Petroleum Institute (API). This case is groundbreaking because it shifts the legal strategy from “consumer deception” to “anticompetitive conspiracy.”

Here’s what Google AI Overview says about this case:

Core Allegations of the “Cartel” Strategy

The lawsuit explicitly labels these corporations a “cartel” that engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to maintain fossil fuel dominance by sabotaging renewable alternatives. Key claims include: 

• • Suppressing Innovation: The defendants allegedly “acted in concert” to dismantle their own early solar and renewable energy divisions to prevent those technologies from maturing and competing with oil.
  • Hobbling EVs: The suit claims the companies coordinated to block the installation of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructureat their brand-name gas stations to prolong consumer reliance on gasoline.
  • Market Manipulation: By using their collective power to withhold cleaner, cheaper energy options, the state argues the companies artificially inflated energy costs for Michigan households and businesses.
  • Coordinated Disinformation: The Michigan Department of Attorney Generalalleges the industry used trade associations (like API) to exchange sensitive information and coordinate the suppression of climate science as early as the 1950s. 

Legal Framework and Objectives

• • Statutes Cited: The case brings claims under the federal Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Michigan Antitrust Reform Act (MARA).
  • Damages Sought: Michigan is seeking triple damagesand the disgorgement of corporate profits obtained through these alleged anticompetitive practices.
  • Affordability Argument: Unlike previous climate suits focused purely on environmental damage, Nessel has framed this as an “affordability crisis” case, blaming corporate “greed” rather than market forces for high energy bills. 

Industry and Federal Response

• • Industry Denial: Defendants like ExxonMobiland Chevron have dismissed the suit as “baseless” and a “coordinated campaign” to regulate energy policy through the courts rather than through Congress.
  • Federal Opposition: The S. Department of Justice(under the Trump administration) attempted to block the filing, arguing it threatened national security and energy independence, but a federal judge dismissed the DOJ’s challenge in early 2026. 

Marching Off to War

The first shots of the war against Big Oil were fired many decades ago. For decades clean energy skirmishes were small, scattered, and largely ineffective. The clean energy transition has been marshalling an army, though. Significant majorities of Americans—and worldwide—place climate change among top priorities of concern. Costs of clean energy are competitive, thanks largely to all the benefits of scientific and manufacturing learning curves driving down the costs of technologies.

In the fight against Big Oil there are plenty of weapons to be wielded. Here are some of the most powerful actions that can be taken to push back against Big Oil’s power: carbon taxes, carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAM), cancellation of direct industry subsidies, and including the negative externalities that makes the true cost of fossil fuels more evident, thus making clean energy even more competitive.

Many countries in the Global South are accelerating implementation of clean energy, often leapfrogging the old grid-style model advanced nations have long enjoyed. China’s high production of clean energy material and tools are making inroads to the Global South, which not only supports clean energy implementation, but favors China’s domestic industrial base and builds markets. China’s diplomatic advantage, relative to the United States, grows stronger.

Americans are catching on that Big Oil want to keep customers buying their products, even though this raises costs for these customers. Americans are catching on that the higher energy prices can be put to Big Oil’s corruption and influence within the political realm. Affordability is likely to be a major battle ground for fossil fuels and clean energy in the upcoming elections and this is a winning plank for clean energy.

Big Oil’s tricks and lies are becoming transparent to more and more citizens.

The question isn’t whether this war will be won, but how long it will take and whether the world is lit aflame in a pyrrhic victory.

Consider me enlisted.

The post The War on Big Oil 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.