Climate Change Fiction

Cli-fi has an important role to play in reaching thousands of readers, and perhaps motivating them to add their voice to much-needed international debate over carbon emissions.

Climate change fiction (cli-fi), also known as eco-fiction, is a relatively new literary genre, arising from the acknowledgement of global warming in the mid-twentieth century. Since then, many novels dealing with climate change and how it impacts on human life, now and in the future, have been published. The following is a selection of titles on this topic available at Dunedin Public Libraries:  

The Year of the Flood. Margaret Atwood
Book two of a trilogy, the first of which is called Oryx and Crake. A long-feared waterless flood has occurred, altering Earth as we know it and obliterating most human life. Ren and Toby have managed to avoid the catastrophe. Have others survived? And what of the future of the human race?

Arctic Rising. Tobias S Buckell
The Arctic ice cap has melted and oil is running low. Military agencies and corporations are fighting over the newly-uncovered resources of an ice-free Arctic. Anika Duncan is a pilot with the United Nations Polar Guard, who makes it her mission to capture a smuggled nuclear weapon that has reached the Polar Circle, and bring those responsible to justice.

Flight Behavior. Barbara Kingsolver
Dellarobia Turnbow, a young housewife on a rundown Appalachian farm, discovers a hillside covered in orange monarch butterflies wintering over, far from the heat of the south. There is only one explanation: global warming. Once the news is out about this unprecedented phenomenon, the small town is over-run with journalists, sightseers and a biologist with his own stake in the outcome.

Solar. Ian McEwan
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist who has become somewhat jaded in his career. His personal life is a shambles, due to his many infidelities. When an opportunity arises for Michael to sort out his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and thus save the world from environmental disaster, is he up for the challenge?

Liquid Gold. James Phelan
Simmering tensions between India and Pakistan reach boiling point. Water (liquid gold) is the commodity that everyone seeks to control and investigative journalist Lachlan Fox must ensure that control of a nation’s water supply doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

The Healer. Antti Tuomainen
Two days before Christmas Helsinki is battling a catastrophic weather event. Tapani Lehtinen is one of the few able and willing to remain in the city. When his journalist wife goes missing, Tapani believes her disappearance is linked to a story she was researching about a serial killer, ‘the Healer’. It seems that Johanna has some dark secrets from her past which connect her to the murders.

Arctic Drift. Clive Cussler
The Lightning Stones. Jack Du Brul
Drought. Graham Masterton
Sixty days and Counting. Kim Stanley Robinson
Far North. Marcel Theroux
The Stone Gods. Jeanette Winterson