8 of the Best Novels About Environmental Disasters

Written by Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright, The Swan Book depicts a future ripe with suffering, following the story of Oblivia, a mute and isolated Aboriginal girl. The story tackles the devastation and isolation she experiences as an Aboriginal girl in the far future, where the world has reached its breaking point. Floods, droughts, and blizzards have become the norm because of the devastating effects of climate change. It’s an allegorical story, with hints of magical realism along with climate fiction.

The most frightening thing about novels like American War is just how probable they seem. Investigative journalist Omar El Akkad penned this novel set in 2074. A second civil war rages between the north and south over fossil fuel while climate changes transforms America, wiping out coastal cities, the west, and the south. Not to mention, there’s a plague. You see this all through an unlikely female protagonist who makes some questionable choices just to survive. This isn’t a fantasy novel; the world here feels too close to our own. You can easily imagine tensions rising between the north and the south, imagine the damage we’ve done to the environment finally coming to a heel. This feels more like a cautionary tale than a work of fiction.

A true sci-fi feat (and winner of the coveted Hugo Award), the Broken Earth series takes place in a far future, on an Earth that’s completely unrecognizable. The change between seasons no longer means transitioning to a light jacket; seasons in this world are massive apocalyptic level events that last decades. The world that N.K. Jemisin builds is unique, unlike anything I’ve ever seen, drawing on science fiction, fantasy, and plain old science. The magical world that she builds pulls in elements of geology, with characters who draw their powers from the Earth. There are also the massive cataclysmic events that reshape the face of the Earth itself. The complexity of this trilogy, starting with The Fifth Season, is hard to capture in a neat summary—it’s better to dig in yourself.

It’s hard to imagine that a novel addressing climate change could be described as “charming,” but Charlie Jane Anders manages to bring some charm to a bleak future. Raging epidemics, starvation, and climate change may provide a grim backdrop but Anders uses her two central characters, Lawrence Armstead and Patricia Delfine, to bring some lightness and romance to the genre. Childhood friends who reconnect as adults, Patricia and Lawrence use all the skills at their disposal (magic for her, science for him) to try and save the world around them. It’s hard to strike a balance with humor, romance, and devastation, but Anders does it well.

The idea of humanity taking to the stars has been done countless times before. Similar to familiar stories like Snowpiercer or Battlestar Galactica, the survivors of an ecological disaster board a ship to find a new home. But like it often does, society fails to evolve along with the technology that makes space travel possible. It seems like society abroad this ship has repeated history, organized like a plantation in space, regulating darker Black and brown skin individuals to the lower decks and wealthy white folk to the very top. This story focuses on outsider and healer Aster, and her journey navigating the cruel ship and the secrets it holds.

Rebecca Roanhorse is part of a wave of new voices that are putting BIPOC characters in science fiction front and center. In her debut novel, Trail of Lightning, Roanhorse presents a world that has undergone drastic environmental change. With North America covered in water, crime and poverty are rampant. This book follows a Native American woman, Maggie, who lives in what once was known as Southwest America, isolated from the rest of the world. The end of the world reawakened the old ancient gods, bringing magic and monsters back. With a female protagonist with a knack for monster hunting and getting into trouble, parts of the story are reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except replace white girl with an Indigenous female lead.

The solarpunk genre offers a slightly different take on ecological and environmental catastrophes than its darker cousins, cli-fi or eco-disaster lit. It’s a more optimistic sci-fi that imagines a world that relies on green, sustainable energy. This anthology is great for those interested in the genre, with seventeen stories that bring ecological prosperity to the forefront. That’s not to say that they don’t wrestle with the real world, they do, but in a way that focuses on progress and ingenuity. If you’re tired of reading about the inevitable apocalypse, at least these stories provide a more hopeful look at humanity’s future.

You’ll find elements of solar punk in this story about a sustainable community enclosed inside a giant dome, but it quickly becomes clear that not everything is what it seems—and that’s when the story takes a strong left turn into dystopian territory. Told for 150 years that the world outside the dome was uninhabitable because of the deadly sun. Enter one plucky teen, Sempra, dark government secrets, and savage outsides—and you have the makings of an unforgettable story.