Maybe this is a stupid question, but is climate change as a premise for climate fiction enough, or is climate change as subject the essence of climate fiction?

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

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

The guest poster is introduced thusly:

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

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

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

What is Climate Fiction?

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

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

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

My argument is that climate fiction is fiction that carries useful knowledge of the issue of climate change in the hope that readers will be more conscious of the circumstances of climate change and more thoughtful and engaged toward solutions to ameliorate climate change. This definition reflects one of the trends in climate fiction that is sometimes called “Thrutopia,” where readers not only better realize the climate crisis but also wrestle with how we may get to solutions from where we are today. Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future” is perhaps the prime example of this type of climate fiction.

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

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

Why am I Grumpy about What Gets Called Climate Fiction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Write Climate Fiction

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

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

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

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

The Percentage: Can We Do Something?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t that an interesting story?