“Storytelling is the essential human activity,” wrote American novelist Tim O’Brien. “The harder the situation, the more essential it is.”
Stories are now becoming a key part of humanity’s great existential crisis — the complexity of the climate emergency.
In another summer of historic weather events it can feel like the end times. Pakistan’s monster monsoon showed the world the wrath of climate change. England had one of its hottest summers on record, tying with 2018 in data stretching back to 1884. Spain, Germany, Portugal, France and the Netherlands endured severe droughts. Italy’s worst drought in decades reduced Lake Garda, the country’s largest, to near its lowest level ever recorded, warming the water to temperatures that approach the average in the Caribbean Sea.
Literature has always reflected our most pressing concerns, so it is not surprising that we are witnessing an upsurge of stories about social collapse and the other terrifying effects of climate change on human society and life in general.
Stories hold immense sway over us. In New Scientist, climate researcher Bill McGuire writes that “scientific papers, however well-written, rarely carry the emotional weight of a good story. Stories have been the prime means of imparting knowledge and warnings throughout human history. Even in today’s data-rich world, they hold a visceral clout that no amount of graphs, charts or figures can replace.”
Moving away from apathy-inducing dystopian cli-fi novels set in a radically changed, zombified world destroyed by scarcity, fires, floods and scorching temperatures, is a range of more recent writing that grounds climate fiction in the present and offers ways to think about the future as something other than a hellscape.
At a time when the world needs to be inspired to take immediate action, a novel like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, published in 2020, looks at how governments, citizens and international organisations would respond if a heatwave killed 20-million people in India. How is that not dystopian, you may ask. Because Robinson’s book also describes its characters’ quest for solutions.
Diplomat Mary Murphy runs the Ministry for the Future, an organisation formed by the UN when the Paris Climate Agreement’s signatories fail to meet their targets. Their mission is “to advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens, whose rights, as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are as valid as our own”.
In real terms, they are charged with doing everything they can to fight climate change and save humanity. And they have some success. Robinson achieves something different in a typically harrowing genre — he invites readers into a world where nothing is unthinkable and everything is possible, and where the answers are not all science fiction. He delves into new policies and innovations, all of which work together to avert disaster. The Ministry for the Future itself is most compelling; to address climate change, political institutions will have to do what the ministry does: act on behalf of future generations.
In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari spoke of how a simple story could save the planet: “What the young people are telling the world is that you are sacrificing us on the altar of your greed and irresponsibility. It’s no longer something hazy like CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s a human drama of the old sacrificing the young. That’s powerful.”
Cli-fi can provide hope by showing what actions people can take now to help tackle future disasters. Many people will learn about climate change through fiction and authors have a golden opportunity to present them with solutions and ideas.
In Lark Ascending, the new novel by American author Silas House, releasing on September 27, a young man heads across the Atlantic, seeking refuge on a rapidly disintegrating planet. Climate change has sparked devastating fires across the US, and aggressive, heavily armed militias enforce a hard-line religious doctrine that makes Lark a target as a gay man: “Grief has ravaged us all. We were the survivors, and we all had lived through nightmare days. I thought I was at my lowest place, but I didn’t know that things would soon get worse,” Lark says.
Evoking Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Lark sets off on a search for refuge and family. On the way, he befriends a stray dog, Seamus, and a rifle-toting widow, Helen, who is in search of her missing son. Love is central to the story. In an essay in Outside Magazine, Erica Berry writes: “Love isn’t a distraction from climate emergency — on the contrary, its existence is critical for helping us cope.”
Lark himself is filled with hope and wonder and fuelled by a desire to seek beauty in the natural world. He learns that survival depends on forging connections with strangers and cultivating compassion and hope within. Set in the not-too-distant future, this is an ultimately uplifting and inspiring read.
Stories that make climate change relatable draw on common experience and core human values. In Jessie Greengrass’s The High House (2021), four people attempt to make a home in the midst of environmental disaster. Set away from a small town by the sea, the High House has a tide pool and a mill, a vegetable garden and, most importantly, a barn full of supplies. A novel about parenthood, sacrifice, love and survival under the threat of extinction, The High House considers what can be salvaged at the end of the world, generating empathy and a sense of connection with readers.
“The best cli-fi seamlessly intertwines literary fabrication and science,” writes Ellen Szabo in Saving the World One Word at a Time: Writing Cli-Fi. “It’s a literary collaboration between the disciplines of science and the humanities.”
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