How Science Fiction Can Inspire Climate Activism

Climate change is by far the biggest story of our time, an existential threat that has already profoundly affected life on Earth and promises to change it even more radically in the coming centuries. As the most pressing issue, it has inspired a wealth of nonfiction: news articles, science journalism, documentaries, academic monographs, and popular science books (think Greta Thunberg). The Climate Book or Anri Snaer Magnason On time and in the water).

In mainstream fiction, climate change has been slow to emerge. In 2016, novelist Amitav Ghosh observed in his book The Great Disruption: Climate Change and the Unthinkable “It is striking that when novelists choose to write about climate change, it is almost always outside of fiction.”

Ghosh’s distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction implicitly dismisses the remarkable early treatments of climate catastrophe in science fiction – Laurence Manning The Man Who Woke UpAnd (1933), by JG Ballard The wind from nowhere(1962) and The drowned world (1962), by George Turner The sea and summer(1987) and Octavia E. Butler Parable series (1993-1998), to name a few.

Moreover, at least two “serious” novelists have recently addressed the subject: Margaret Atwood in her dystopian series MaddAddam (2003-2013) and Barbara Kingsolver in Flight behavior (2012). Yet by 2016, Ghosh’s point was largely true: climate change was not a very popular topic among mainstream literary novelists.

Since then, however, more and more stories and novels about climate change have been published and are gaining recognition. Ghosh himself marks the turning point in 2018, a year that saw a wave of extreme weather events and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded to Richard Powers for Forest cover (2018), a book that highlights the usually invisible world of trees.

What is Cli-Fi?

Cli-fi encompasses narratives about climate change. The term was coined by journalist and climate activist Dan Bloom, who used it in a written review of Jim Laughter’s 2012 novella. Red Polar City.

As the rhyme suggests, cli-fi is a subgenre of science fiction. It tends to be speculative, focusing on anthropogenic global warming, and examining the effects of climate change on human communities. Frequently, as in Atwood’s trilogy, it has a dystopian dimension.

Like the complexity of climate change itself, cli-fi is multifaceted, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thriller, magical realism, fable, satire, and everything in between.

Speculative works set in the future, in a world where climate change has already transformed the Earth, offer models of possibility and cautionary tales. Bangkok wakes up to rain (2020) by Pitchaya Sudbanthad is set in the Thai capital at the end of the 21st century, when the city is submerged by rising waters. American WarOmar el Akkad’s film is set in 2074, when the ban on the sale of fossil fuels triggers a new American civil war. Similarly, Paolo Bacigalupi’s film The water knife (2016) imagines a near future in which the drying up of the Colorado River would lead to bloodshed.

Many books focus on the human cost of climate change rather than explaining its scientific basis. Collect the bones (2011) by Jesmyn Ward, for example, describes a family drama in the run-up to Hurricane Katrina, a storm whose intensity foreshadowed the increasingly destructive storms caused by climate change. How beautiful we were (2021) by Imbolo Imbue takes a different approach, showing African villagers standing up against a major American oil company, and The Book of Fire (2023) by Christy Leftieri traces the tragic aftermath of a forest fire in present-day Greece.

Some novels offer elegiac descriptions of the costs of climate change to other species. Migrations (2020) and Once upon a time there were wolves (2021) by Charlotte McConaghy, The effort (2021) by Claire Holroyde, and Hummingbird Salamander(2021) by Jeff VanderMeer. Science historian Daisy Hildyard favors the perspective of nature in Emergency (2024), his novel about the interdependence of life.

An increasingly recurring theme is familiar to many of us: climate anxiety, the psychological cost of waiting for the end of the world as we know it. Weather report by Jenny Offill (2020) centers on the daily life of a Brooklyn woman who must go about her daily tasks with the threat of climate change ever present in the background.

Why We Need Climate Change Fiction

In an interview with author David Thorpe, Dan Bloom pointed out that fiction can express what facts cannot:

“We need to go beyond abstract scientific predictions and government statistics and try to show the cinematic or literary reality of a painful and possible future of the world of climate change. I believe that cli-fi is a true cultural prism, a powerful critical prism that we must cherish and nurture in our visionary artists and storytellers.”

In 2019, climate author Dominic Hofstetter asked former European Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard what it would take for humanity to take our shared plight seriously. Hedegaard’s answer was simple: “We need compelling narratives.”

Simply put, storytelling is the best way, perhaps the only way, to inform, persuade, and inspire people to act. It helps us absorb facts, contextualize them, understand and share their meaning. A good story moves us emotionally, allowing us to register its meaning “in our guts.” As author and story coach Lisa Cron, author of History or death, says: “We don’t turn to history to escape reality; we turn to history to navigate reality.”

A compelling story isn’t just compelling: it also has the potential to build community. A Princeton University study found that when a group of people listened to an emotionally engaging story, their brain activity synchronized during the narration: as a group, they imagined the same world and felt the same emotions.

Barbara Kingsolver, talking about her book Flight behavior (2012) explained why fiction, in particular, is a valuable medium for communicating pressing environmental issues:

“Fiction has enormous power. It’s funny, people talk about political fiction or apolitical fiction. It’s absurd. I think all fiction has a point of view and it has the power to create empathy for the theoretical unknown. It has the power to take the reader into the mind of another person. Only fiction can do that.”

For author, psychologist and futurologist Dana Klisanin, author of the young adult novel Hack of the futureStories are a way to travel to a different universe:

“I was an avid reader as a child. Even when I was told to turn off the light and go to sleep, I would grab a flashlight and hide under the covers of the bed to finish a story. In other words, I was completely absorbed in the world of books.”

This experience, familiar to many of us, is known to scientists as “narrative transportation,” which occurs when readers adopt the thoughts and feelings of a character and mentally simulate a narrative world.

In Klisanin’s words:

“This deep engagement leads to greater absorption and enjoyment and can have a profound impact on the reader’s attitudes and behaviors, making the lessons of the story more likely to be internalized. High narrative transportation has also been shown to enhance empathy, fostering understanding and connection with the emotions and experiences of others.”

Given its influence on attitudes and actions, storytelling has the potential to have a huge impact on things like community engagement, and many governments and organizations are starting to pay attention.

In 2017, the American Public Health Association (APHA) launched an initiative encouraging people to share their personal stories about how climate-related events have affected their health and what they or their community have done to cope. The idea was to create a sense of community, resilience, and hope. According to an APHA guide on storytelling:

“Stories make climate change more accessible by drawing on shared experience and fundamental human values, such as health. Compelling stories create empathy and understanding. They take listeners on an emotional journey and offer a sense of hope that inspires positive change.”

Visions of hope

The most important emotion that fiction can inspire is a sense of hope, a necessary factor for climate activists working to achieve the best possible outcomes in the face of impending catastrophe.

In an interview with NPR, Imbue says she drew the optimistic aspect of her protagonist Tula from the writings of revolutionary figures like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“You have to have a whole other level of hope to believe that you can take an American oil company to court, an American oil company that has resources and lawyers and all kinds of power. But Tula believes it. And that’s something I’ve learned from reading, from watching their lives.”

Kim Stanley Robinson is another up-and-coming cli-fi writer who weaves scientific findings into a compelling narrative. His best-selling book is a perfect example. The Ministry of the Future (2020), which posits an organization whose political mission is to defend the interests of the peoples of the future. Responding to a description of the work as a utopian novel, he welcomes the judgment:

“You could probably name the most important utopian novels on the fingers of one hand. … But they remain in people’s memories and shape people’s conceptions of what is possible and what might be good in the future.”

Klisanin has an equally positive but realistic view. His novel Hack of the future features young characters who face climate-related issues with boundless energy and problem-solving spirit. Its intention is to reassure and inspire confidence. Klisanin wrote:

“I hope that Hack of the future “I will inspire readers with a sense of hope and possibility for the future and encourage them to take action to protect the environment and endangered species. Throughout the series, I also aim to help readers struggling with eco-anxiety by showing them that they are not alone and by introducing them to some coping strategies.”

The climate crisis has yet to generate a single piece of writing as powerful as Rachel Carson’s. Silent Spring (1962) helped mobilize the mid-20th-century public against DDT and other toxic chemicals. But we can at least rejoice in the number of talented writers who, in various ways and across many genres, are working to produce such a history.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.