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.