by Joel Armstrong
As humanity grapples with a warming world, Joel Armstrong finds himself drawn to science fiction that explores unique solutions to the climate crisis. Read on for some of Armstrong’s recent favorites in climate fiction, and check out his latest story, “Rememory,” in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]
My news app has learned my preference for headlines about climate change. They’re the articles I click on most often, scroll down the furthest.
Their tone seemed different this summer. Less equivocal. More present tense.
Or maybe that’s my own experience talking. Even in Michigan, in the northern United States, summer felt different. Two weeks of rainless, ninety-degree weather in early June baked suburban lawns brown—a sight not usually seen until August. Smoke from Canadian wildfires earned my hometown, Grand Rapids, the distinction of the worst air quality in the country.
We welcomed our first child in February, a decision itself fraught with questions about the wisdom of introducing another human to the planet. I blamed hospital bills for why I didn’t fix the air-conditioning in my car through the hottest months of the year—but that’s not actually fair to my baby. We had the money. But a part of me wanted to have to sit with the discomfort of rising global temperatures: the five o’clock asphalt and rush-hour traffic of my daily commute, the office-casual dress codes that no longer make any sense to me.
Unsurprisingly, climate fiction makes up a good chunk of my reading these days (or, more precisely, my listening while on my way to and from work). In a strange way, it’s reassuring to know many, many others are feeling the increasing urgency of the issue bleeding into their mental and creative spaces.
Not that everyone I’m reading is experiencing or even responding to climate change the same way I am. In fact, the breadth of recent climate fiction is something that’s stood out to me. In just a handful of favorite titles from the past couple years, I’ve found an eclectic range from surreal to hyperreal, from bleak to rosy hopepunk.
Take, for instance, Catherynne Valente’s The Past Is Red. On one level, it’s about as on the nose as you can get: Earth is literally destroyed, with remnants of humanity clinging to trash islands, surviving on the leftovers of a global capitalism so voracious it consumed itself. Yet Valente’s knack for phantasmagoria—the endless lists of discordant non-compostable objects, the endearingly naive yet sarcastic narrator—makes the novella so absurd that I couldn’t help laughing out loud through it. While the narrative seems to hold out the necessity of good humor and maybe even a little self-deception in the face of dire circumstances, the rage against the wastefulness and selfishness of the ultra rich and the reverence for Earth’s natural elements cut through the comedy.
A book like Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark is perhaps as on the nose as Valente’s—but it couldn’t be more different in tone. Rising global temperatures have unlocked a virus long frozen in the Russian tundra, which begins to decimate humanity. The agony is slow and grim and, for me, especially disturbing as the disease takes hold in children. The second part of the book follows a down-on-his-luck comedian who gets a job at an amusing park designed to help euthanize infected children. I probably shouldn’t admit I didn’t finish Nagamatsu’s beautifully crafted book, as I started listening to it shortly after my daughter’s birth, and while rocking her to sleep at three in the morning, I just couldn’t handle the book’s stark realism about what the future may hold for our children.
Contrast this with Nnedi Okorafor’s recent novel Noor. While not laser-focused on climate, surrounding the narrator’s personal questions about transhumanist identity are global themes of access, ownership, and privilege. In a world where “clean” energy is widely available and commercially successful, are the people who’re actually developing the technologies getting paid for their intellectual property? What about indigenous communities living on the land where wind turbines, dams, or solar fields are built? Rather than asking what happens when we reach a grim point of no return for our planet’s environment, Okorafor seems more interested in messy near-future issues of sustainability and equity that are immediately relatable to the world we know today.
Which predictions will come true? What technologies will we make real someday, and which will sound bizarrely antiquated to our grandchildren, like the less prescient parts of 1984?
Not all the climate fiction I’m reading dwells the negative, of course. In fact, I’ve noticed a collective sigh of relief from everyone I know who’s read Becky Chambers’s Monk & Robot books. On the distant (and charming) moon Panga, sustainability is a given, a hard lesson learned in the past. People have created a world beyond consumerism, excess, and exploitation, so they have margin to travel the world brewing tea for others and to entertain existential questions about what humans need beyond the material basics of life. While the Monk & Robot books don’t necessarily come out and say they’re climate fiction, the long, thoughtful descriptions of sustainable technologies and social practices, and the exploration of alternative economies that dominates the second book, seem like careful attempts to answer some of the questions underlying our climate crisis.
Given the diverse visions and even contradictions between the futures in these books, one question that’s tempting to ask is, Who’s right? Which predictions will come true? What technologies will we make real someday, and which will sound bizarrely antiquated to our grandchildren, like the less prescient parts of 1984?
As fun as it can be to speculate, to divide things into true and untrue, on-track and off-track, I think there are better approaches to the multiplicity of climate fiction. We don’t have to dissect and compete. While the Monk & Robot books and How High We Go in the Dark may seem entirely divergent, both are reflecting on the same choices readers have today, outlining possible outcomes to the same problems of human behavior and desire. The technicolor absurdism of The Past Is Red and the clear-eyed examination of inequity in Noor may seem incompatible, but both in their own way help us imagine how disparities in wealth will only become more destructive as climate change becomes more severe.
That said, it’s true and not at all surprising that different authors from different places have different perspectives and different concerns when it comes to global climate change. But I think that actually points to the need for more climate fiction, and more diverse climate fiction. We will all be better equipped to get our arms around the vast, interconnected implications of this problem if we can see it from lots of other perspectives. The urgency of the issue will only be amplified as more and more stories are written about it. And we will be better able to imagine both the horrifying consequences of poisoning our environment and the hopeful futures possible if we make the necessary changes as we read both the grim and optimistic, the absurd and the down-to-earth.
I’ve been feeling the need to write more climate stories myself. The ideas I’ve had are small. A flash piece exploring a Western world where formal men’s clothes aren’t necessarily long-sleeved and multilayered. A story about people who stop long enough to learn from wild animals. It feels like an inadequate response to something as huge as global climate destruction. But maybe if we all write all the stories swirling around in our brains, it will help us imagine all the possibilities—the ones we’re afraid of, and the ones we want to live in. Maybe it will help us take the steps we know we need to take to make those better futures real.
Right now, I think we need all the climate fiction.
The Astounding Analog Companion 