Climate fiction meets reality

 

On the final day of The London Book Fair last week, a panel discussion featuring Lucy Stone, Founder and Executive Director of Climate Spring, and broadcaster and Climate Fiction Prize judge Simon Savidge offered a timely reflection on the state of climate fiction.

It came just ahead of the announcement (18 March) of the Climate Fiction Prize shortlist on – a moment that increasingly feels less like a niche literary event and more like a marker of where contemporary storytelling is heading.

What emerged from the discussion was not simply that climate fiction is growing, but that it is changing.

A decade ago, much of what we might have called climate fiction was rooted in warning – speculative futures designed to jolt readers into recognising the scale of the crisis. Those stories had a clear purpose and, arguably, played an important role in helping to translate abstract science into something more tangible and human.

But as both speakers made clear, that distance between fiction and reality has narrowed, perhaps to the point of disappearance.

Climate fiction is no longer primarily about imagining what might happen. It is increasingly about exploring what is already happening – and what it feels like to live through it.

This shift changes the tone as much as the subject matter. While there are still dystopian elements, the books being discussed from the longlist are not uniformly bleak. What stood out was their emotional range: anger, certainly, but also hope, resilience, even moments of humour and tenderness. These are not simply stories of collapse, but of people navigating systems under strain – social, environmental and technological.

That human focus is key. As Stone suggested, fiction has a unique capacity to answer a question many people are now asking, often implicitly: what does this mean for us? Not in terms of policy or targets, but in terms of daily life – relationships, communities, choices.

Savidge echoed this from a reader’s perspective, noting that many of the longlisted works resist being didactic. The most effective climate fiction does not preach. Instead, it reveals – drawing readers into situations where the implications of climate change are lived rather than explained.

Another striking aspect of the discussion was just how broad the field has become. Climate fiction is no longer a clearly bounded genre. It now cuts across literary fiction, speculative work, thrillers, even elements of romance and historical narrative. In that sense, it is less a category than a lens – one that increasingly shapes how stories are told, regardless of form.

Certain themes do recur. Questions of inequality and access – who is able to adapt, and who is left exposed – are central. So too is the idea of community: how people come together, or fragment, under pressure. Technology, particularly artificial intelligence, is beginning to intersect with these narratives in interesting ways, raising questions about control, agency and dependency.

And underpinning much of it is a shifting relationship with the natural world. Not nature as something separate, but as something we are inextricably part of – a perspective long understood in other traditions, now reasserting itself in contemporary fiction.

What is perhaps most significant is that none of this feels imposed. Many of the writers being discussed did not set out to write “climate novels” as such. Rather, as the conversation suggested, the climate crisis has become impossible to exclude. It sits within the fabric of storytelling, just as it now sits within the fabric of everyday life.

For those of us who have spent years writing about climate, science or technology in a journalistic context, this evolution feels both inevitable and necessary. Journalism remains essential in explaining what is happening and why. But fiction operates differently. It allows us to inhabit situations, to test emotional and ethical responses, to experience – however briefly – the texture of a changing world.

In that sense, the rise of climate fiction is not simply a literary trend. It is a cultural response to a shifting reality.

As the shortlist for the Climate Fiction Prize is announced, it offers a snapshot of that response – a set of stories attempting, in different ways, to make sense of where we are.

And perhaps that is the point. Not prediction, but recognition.

Because if there is one thing the discussion at the London Book Fair made clear, it is this: the future climate fiction once warned us about is no longer approaching. We are already inside it.

It is a perspective I’ve explored in my own forthcoming novel, Flood Waters Down, set in a flooded version of the English Fens – a landscape that, like many others, may be closer to that future than we would like to think.

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Climate Fiction Prize 2026 longlist

Dusk by Robbie Arnott (Chatto & Windus, Vintage); Every Version of You by Grace Chan (VERVE books); The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray Press, Hachette); Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber); Albion by Anna Hope (Fig Tree, Penguin Random House); Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Simon & Schuster); The Price of Everything by Jon McGoran (Solaris, Rebellion Publishing); Hum by Helen Phillips (Atlantic Books); Endling by Maria Reva (Virago, Little, Brown); The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (Granta Books); Juice by Tim Winton (Picador, Pan Macmillan); and Sunbirth by An Yu (Harvill, Penguin Random House).

Desert dreams - a fragile reality

Dubai beach scene.                                                              Photo: C Simpson

By day three in Dubai, I had developed the air-con cough. Not a virus  just the inevitable consequence of living inside a constant, refrigerated cocoon. Step outside and the heat hits like an opened furnace door. Step back in and your lungs tighten in protest at the mechanical chill. It is the rhythm of the place: scorch and soothe, glare and gloss.

UAE’s centrepiece city exists in defiance of its geography. In temperature terms alone, it is one of the least hospitable urban environments on Earth – and in a warming world, it will only become hotter. Yet the rate of construction is astonishing. Towers rise as fast as cranes can swing them into place; whole districts seem to materialise between breakfast and dinner.

Of course, it is built on extraordinary wealth and the dreamlike availability of oil. Dubai is an artificial oasis – a monument not merely to human ingenuity, but to humanity’s refusal to confront the climate problem of its own making. A glittering dystopia where the insidious power of hydrocarbons is rendered in glass, steel and relentless development.

Approaching the oasis
Even before descending to Dubai International Airport, the contradictions are visible from 35,000 feet. On my flight we passed over Iraq near Baghdad and skirted the precarious artery of the Suez Canal — two names that, in recent days, have once again featured heavily in global news bulletins. As dawn broke, I peered down at oil fields and flares burning defiantly against the coming heat, flames licking at the pale sky as if to underline the point.

And then – unmistakably – Dubai itself. The city rises almost obscenely from the desert. Outlying villas and settlements sit marooned in seas of sand, encompassed by dunes that quietly remind you who truly rules this landscape. For now, oil tames it. But it still feels conjured rather than grown – summoned by capital and climate control.

If I had to describe Dubai in a poetic turn of phrase, I might conjure up something like “a mirage of permanence”. It's a place where even the coastline is engineered, where the palm-shaped archipelago of Palm Jumeirah is pressed into existence at immense environmental cost. From space, it forms a striking geometric flourish. On the ground, the artifice is harder to ignore.

City of paradox
Dubai must be one of the sunniest and hottest cities on Earth. It has enough sunshine hours to power its economy many times over. And yet, flying in, I saw remarkably few solar panels. Why harness the free energy raining from the sky when oil still flows so readily beneath the sand?

Everything here depends on energy abundance –desalinated water, chilled interiors, illuminated towers, indoor ski slopes. Oil facilitates life at scale in a landscape most species wisely abandoned long ago. But that reliance lends the city an unsettling fragility. It feels as though, should the flow falter, the desert would patiently reclaim its territory.

That fragility now feels sharper after the geopolitical events (to out it politely) of recent days. The Middle East is once again in turmoil. Conflict ripples outward from long-contested fault lines. Airspace closures, missile exchanges, diplomatic brinkmanship – each development carries implications for a city and region where prosperity depends on seamless global connectivity.

Dubai’s success is inseparable from its role as a transport hub. Emirates has built a global network that stitches Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia together through a single desert crossroads. Freight, finance, tourism and conferences all converge here. When regional tensions rise, flight paths bend, insurance premiums spike, and the choreography of global movement becomes more complicated.

So far, Dubai remains outwardly calm – insulated by wealth, diplomacy and careful positioning. The malls are full, the hotels busy, the cranes still turning. But the very geography that made it strategically valuable also places it within reach of instability. Its gleaming airport terminals are both gateway and vulnerability.

Inside the mirage
From street level, the high-rises form a relentless backdrop. Development continues at breakneck speed in every direction. For now it dazzles – attracting holidaymakers, entrepreneurs, influencers and conference-goers. Yet scratch the surface and Dubai can feel like a glossy façade stretched over one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth.

Step outside too long and the heat drains you. Even the sea feels languid, as if exhausted by the thermal burden it absorbs each summer. The beaches are artificially immaculate, the interiors plush, the service seamless – but always mediated by machinery humming out of sight.

In that sense, Dubai is less a city than a controlled environment. And perhaps that is why the current geopolitical tremors feel symbolically resonant. A metropolis built on the assumption of perpetual growth, stable trade routes and uninterrupted energy flows suddenly exists in a region where none of those can ever be fully guaranteed. A hub in turmoil

The contradictions of Dubai’s engineered calm feel especially stark against the backdrop of the current geopolitical shockwaves. In the past week, airspace over the United Arab Emirates has been temporarily shut down, and flights to and from Dubai International Airport – one of the busiest aviation hubs in the world – have been repeatedly suspended as regional military tensions escalate.

The result has been chaotic for thousands of travellers: tourists, business visitors and long-term residents, who used Dubai as a tax-free home, are now stuck in the city with no clear way out. Transit passengers whose flight plans relied on smooth connections through the Gulf are stranded in terminals or hotels while airlines and air authorities scramble to adjust schedules.

Governments from Europe to Australia are urging their nationals to register with embassies and “shelter in place”, while some are planning mass repatriation operations – not for tourists alone, but for expatriates and workers who had chosen to make this glittering hub their base.

In some cases, officials have even resorted to military flights to bring home ministers and citizens caught up in the disruption, a stark reminder that Dubai’s global connectivity can become a vulnerability when that connectivity falters

Questions under the gloss
Development continues apace. More towers, more malls, more artificial islands. For now, Dubai thrives precisely because it is so curated – a place where appearances matter more than origins, where the environment is conditioned, cooled and conquered.

But beneath it all lies a deeper contradiction. We know the planet is heating. We know deserts are expanding. We know fossil fuels both enable and imperil modern civilisation. And yet here, in one of the most extreme climates on Earth, humanity builds ever higher as if the future were simply a longer version of the present.

Current events in the Middle East are a reminder that energy, geography and politics are inseparable. Oil does not merely power air-conditioning; it shapes alliances, conflicts and vulnerabilities. Dubai is both beneficiary and symbol of that system – its skyline a physical manifestation of hydrocarbon modernity.

Last October, from my hotel balcony at dusk, the city shimmered under a haze of heat and humidity. At dusk the lights came on, one tower after another, defying darkness and desert alike.

Whether Dubai represents our boldest ingenuity or our most extravagant denial may ultimately depend on forces far beyond its immaculate highways – on geopolitics, on energy transitions and on climate trajectories.

And, perhaps most immediately, on how long the air-conditioning keeps purring.

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Editor’s note: this edition re-published due to a link error on original (2 March 2023)