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).

A year of reading dangerously

BOOKS it seems have been more popular than ever during 2020 as many people re-discovered reading during the lockdown and restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic of the year. And so here is my own top ten of the year just past.

I haven’t rated them in any order, other than alphabetically by author surname, as that would seem a bit unfair because they are quite a disparate collection and I have enjoyed them all equally but for different reasons.

It is, however, appropriate that Sir David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet heads the list as this is probably the most important statement about our future if we are to do anything to avoid a catastrophic future.

I’d also like to point out that, part from those I received direct from publishers for review purposes as part of my work, the others were purchased from  local independent bookstores.

For each of the books listed below I’ve given a brief summary taken from a longer review and, if there is one, a link to the online review.

A Life on Our Planet - David Attenborough
The fascinating life- journey of  Sir David Attenborough unfolds chapter by chapter in ‘A Life on Our Planet'. It's an accessible, timely nicely written book, full of the wisdom and optimism for both now and the future against the backdrop of his own life adventures.

Dark Skies  -Tiffany Francis
Francis explores nocturnal landscapes and investigates how our experiences of the night-time world have permeated our history, folklore, science, geography, art and literature. I love the fact too that she brings to life many familiar and beautiful parts of the UK, not least when she writes about Buster Hill in Hampshire, still one of my favourite walking locations.   

The Mission of a Lifetime - Basil Hero
A thought-provoking book chronicling the lives and lessons of the 12 Apollo astronauts whom Hero calls ‘The Eagles’. In sharing their wisdom he urges us to reframe our view of Earth: no identifiable nations, borders or races. Each chapter begins with key life lessons that readers can gain from the moon walkers, from overcoming fear to finding gratitude and practising humility in all that you do.“What all Eagles agree on is that, when viewed from the deadness of the Moon, life on Earth is a miracle, a living paradise that much of humanity has failed to respect and care for.”

The Wall - John Lancaster
A middle England dystopia for our fractured and uncertain times, and the only novel in my top ten. A thrillingly apposite allegory of broken Britain that asks key questions about the choice between personal freedom and national interest. A hypnotic work about a broken world you might recognise and about what might be found when all is lost. 

Incandescent - Anne Levin
The thrust of Levin’s book is that natural light (and dark) is fundamental to almost every aspect of life on Earth, interacting with humans and animals in profound yet subtle ways. “We mess with the eternal rhythm of dawn-day-dusk-night at our peril,” she writes. “But mess with it we have, and we still don't truly understand the consequences.” Click here for my longer review.

Our Final Warning - Mark Lynas
Along with Attenborough and Wallis-Wells, this was my third book of the year looking at different aspects of climate change and how we might deal with it if not already too late. In essence, it is a digest version of enormous amounts of climate science papers published in the world’s best journals over recent years. Lynas tries to be hopeful at the end, arguing that everyone should now be fighting against climate change, much like we have done for Covid-19.
    
Limitless - Tim Peake
As a journalist writing about space, I've been fortunate enough to have followed closely his rise into the world of astronauts and space stations, so I was unsure what I might make of this latest astronaut tome. But I need not have worried. A captivating read and eloquently told. It also turned out that for six months or so in the late 1990s I actually worked alongside Tim Peake’s Dad, Nigel, who was Features Editor at the Portsmouth Evening News. Such a small world, isn't it?

The Fens - Francis Pryor
A fascinating account of a complex landscape by archaeologist Francis Pryor who has dug and worked its soil for almost 40 years. Weaving together strands of archaeology, history and personal experience, he paints an intimate portrait of the East of England's marshy and mysterious Fenland. Particularly interesting for someone who grew up in The Fens and now lives along the western edge close to Roman King Street.   

The Uninhabitable Earth - David Wallis-Wells  
A grim book which expands on a viral article of the same name, published in New York in the summer of 2017 and which frightened the life out of everyone who read it. It’s essentially about the harsh realities and impacts of climate change and, as Wallace-Wells points out, the bigger problem is the vast number of people (and governments) who acknowledge the true scale of the problem but continue to act as if it’s not happening.

The Salt Path - Raynor Winn
An honest and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world. Ultimately, it is a portrayal of home, and how it can be lost, rebuilt and rediscovered in the most unexpected ways. I enjoyed every page of this remarkable and very human journey around the coast of Cornwall. 

Happy reading!

PS - by late 2023, the Lighthouse Keeper plans to have completed and published his own first novel - for a sneak preview see the webpage Flood Waters Down