In 2024, the world recorded its hottest year yet, with global temperatures climbing beyond the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement. The UK, Japan and South Korea endured their hottest summers since records began. By mid-2025, the North Atlantic and North Pacific had reached unprecedented sea surface temperatures, fuelling stronger storms and faster sea-level rise.
The human toll has been immediate. A heatwave across Spain, Portugal and the UK killed more than 2,300 people in less than two weeks. Hundreds of wildfires swept the Iberian Peninsula during July and August. China experienced its longest rainy season since 1961, alongside its hottest summer. The World Meteorological Organisation reported more than 150 extreme weather disasters globally in 2024.
Once speculative, the latest climate fiction now mirrors this reality, its narratives drawn from headlines that feel all too frighteningly familiar. As denialist politicians align with fossil fuel interests to stall or dismantle climate action, the role of storytelling has never been more critical in holding power to account and keeping the crisis in view.
In Sarah Hall’s Helm, a collection of narratives spanning thousands of years, the central character is a sentient Cumbrian wind. The ferocious, mischievous Helm carries stories from Roman Britain through to a near-future battered by floods and storms. It howls across valleys, whispers over rooftops, and watches as villages are swallowed by water: “Of what fantastical, phenomenal and calculable things Helm is made! Maleficence and data and lore. Atmospheric principles and folktales, spirit and substance, opposites and inversions. So many identities and personalities; it makes Helm’s heads spin.” Hall presents climate change as slow violence, a story of erosion, memory, despair and endurance.
Where Hall’s vision is vast and mythic, Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore is intimate and urgent.
A family guards a seed vault on a remote island, their lives measured by storm seasons and the fragile hope that those seeds represent. The island is thawing; the seas are rising.
If McConaghy’s island is a refuge, Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City imagines a San Francisco partly submerged. “Below, streets transformed into rivers, and the rivers blew out windows, tore doors from their frames, widened into buildings through the new openings.
The water took down statues and levelled groves, carried entire families away. People fled or drowned — or moved to higher ground, where they relearned how to live in the city they’d known as home, a place the rain had claimed.” Here, an artist tends to a centenarian, recording fragments of memory while building fragile installations from salvaged wood. Kwan’s novel is quieter than its peers, meditative in its pacing.
Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know takes a broader historical view. Set in 2119, cathedrals stand half-drowned, archives rot in damp vaults, and the country itself becomes a record of loss.
A scholar searches for a great poem read aloud in 2014 and never heard again. Generations speculate about its meaning, but no copy has ever surfaced. Like Hall, McEwan treats climate change as unstoppable, but where Helm gives the storm a voice, What We Can Know portrays history’s cold, impersonal hand.
Japanese authors are coming from a different perspective, blending speculative imagination with sharp cultural commentary. Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird is the most startling. A novel-in-stories, it’s set far in the future and imagines humanity splintered into hybrid forms. Some are animal-like, others are spectral, all are watched over by the mysterious Big Bird — a cosmic witness to evolution and extinction. Deserts are littered with skeletal skyscrapers, genetic memory is carried in song, and the line between human and nonhuman is blurred. Kawakami’s novel feels both alien and unsettlingly familiar, a reflection on what might remain after humanity as we know it has gone.
Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World leans into satire. In her dystopia, natural childbirth has been outlawed. Children are produced in sterile laboratories, and intimacy or family bonds are treated as relics of the past. The clinical imagery of fluorescent birthing pods and antiseptic nurseries extends Murata’s earlier explorations of conformity and alienation. Here, the apocalypse is not environmental but personal.
Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback is not climate fiction in a strict sense, but it belongs in the conversation. The novella tells the story of a young disabled girl treated cruelly in a rigid society. Images of her bent back against the dawn light and weeds pushing through cracks point to a spirit of resilience that resonates with cli-fi more broadly. Where Kawakami and Murata imagine what humanity might become, Ichikawa highlights how fragile but determined survival is in the present.
Some authors are focusing on smaller, more human stories. Abi Daré’s And So I Roar brings together women’s voices against the backdrop of environmental collapse in Nigeria. Gender justice and climate justice are inseparable. Daré shows how drought, flood, displacement and silence hit women hardest, and how collective resistance can help them break through.
Téa Obreht’s The Morningside (2024) turns to a drowned city where families try to build lives in the shadow of disaster. Obreht blends magical realism with lived displacement, weaving together folklore told by candlelight with the stark image of high-rises jutting like broken teeth from the sea.
Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful (2024) is written in a diaristic style, reflecting on resilience amid ecological and emotional breakdown.
Taken together, these novels show that climate fiction has entered a new phase. Where the first wave centred on dystopia and spectacle, what has emerging now is more layered, and less about apocalypse than about endurance. Writers are recording how the costs of climate change are unevenly distributed and how the ability to adapt is deeply unequal.
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