Climate Fiction Grows More Realistic

Terms like “heat dome” and “atmospheric river,” once the province of scientific journals, have entered the vocabularies of everyday Americans contending with extreme weather events. Meanwhile, a similar mainstreaming is playing out across publishing. While “climate fiction” was once nearly synonymous with speculative or science fiction, climate anxiety is increasingly taking root in more realistic fiction as well.

PW spoke with authors whose forthcoming novels document a changing world.

Clear and present danger

“I didn’t purposely set out to write climate fiction,” says Eric Puchner, who describes his next book, Dream State (Doubleday, Feb. 2025), as “psychological fiction that projects into the future.” It opens in 2004 and follows two marriages over 50 years, beginning with a betrayal among friends that reverberates into the next generation.

Puchner has spent the past 25 summers at a lake house built by his wife’s great-grandfather in northwest Montana. As he unfurled his characters’ lives against a similar backdrop, he thought of the changes he’s witnessed over the years: the smaze (smoke and haze) from wildfires that blankets the valley with increasing frequency, and the lake’s diminished water levels, which stem from reduced snowpacks in the surrounding mountains and are compounded by years of drought.

“I wanted to write a marriage novel and watch the characters age,” Puchner says. “You can’t write a novel whose antagonist is time without writing about what’s happening in the environment.”

Madeleine Watts set her debut novel, 2021’s The Inland Sea, in a contemporary Australia wracked by floods and wildfires. Her forthcoming Elegy, Southwest (Simon & Schuster, Feb. 2025) is narrated by Eloise, who recounts a road trip she and her husband, Lewis, took several years earlier across the U.S. desert Southwest. She was researching her doctoral thesis on climate change and he was grieving the loss of his mother, and their trip unspooled in the context of wildfires and a dangerously low Colorado River.

“To tell a story about the American Southwest right now is to think about climate change,” says Watts, who rejects the idea that climate fiction is a fad. She likens the climate-focused lit classes she’s taught to seminars on Victorian-era literature: “If you asked writers in the 19th century, ‘Do you think you belong on the same syllabus?,’ they may object,” Watts says. “But we recognize them now as having had similar concerns. Whether you want to engage with it or not, we’re living in the climate change era.”

Bad Nature (Holt, Apr. 2025), Ariel Courage’s dark debut, follows Hester, a New York City lawyer on a cross-country quest to kill her estranged father in California. Along the way, she picks up an environmental activist secretly documenting Superfund sites, who lectures the sybaritic Hester about carbon emissions and alludes to his outstanding warrants for “ecotage,” or acts of sabotage against polluting projects.

As they meander west through a landscape pockmarked with ecological time bombs, the imagery parallels the metastasizing tumor on her breast. This foreboding doom of personal and ecological crisis, Courage says, deepens Hester’s nihilism. “She’s emboldened by the sense that everything is collapsing, which is what gives her permission to embark on this quest for revenge.”

In The Float Test (Mariner, Apr. 2025), Lynn Steger Strong, who grew up in Florida, weaves the region’s suffocating heat and endangered ecosystems into the narrative of four estranged siblings who gather at their family home after their mother’s death. The novel is both love letter and lament for Strong’s home state.

“You can’t write a Florida novel set in 2023 and not acknowledge that everything is changing,” she says. “It’s my job to take in the world and transmute that back into my fiction.”

Time and place

Climate anxiety is, by its nature, global, and as Franziska Gänsler devised her debut novel, she was informed by images of people trapped indoors in smoke-filled cities from the U.S. to Thailand. In Eternal Summer (Other Press, May 2025), translated from the German by Imogen Taylor, a woman with a small child in tow lands in a once-thriving German spa town where wildfires have made visitors scarce and ashes now rain from the sky. Her unexpected appearance in such an inhospitable place leads a local hotel owner to wonder whether she’s a threat.

It’s a work of psychological suspense, but Gänsler also wanted German readers who escape en masse each year to the “good air” of their southern mountains to imagine a world that no longer offered such respite. “I’m thinking about these things all the time,” she says. “And the way I think is through writing.”

Argentine author Agustina Bazterrica says that the signs of climate change across Latin American and particularly in her hometown of Buenos Aires, which recently experienced an explosion of mosquito-borne diseases triggered by irregular weather, prompted her to imagine potential social consequences of ecological crises. “Water is drying up in the Amazon, and ash was raining down on us while I was in Quito. It already feels like a dystopia,” Bazterrica says. “It’s not a big stretch to imagine these things getting even worse.”

In Bazterrica’s The Unworthy (Scribner, Mar. 2025), translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, a group of women live sealed within a religious compound where punishment for failing to meet the order’s rules is swift and severe. Outside, violence reigns among survivors of floods that have wiped out entire cities. An intruder slips past the cloister’s walls, forcing the narrator to reckon with how she arrived at the Sisterhood in the first place.

Susanna Kwan set her debut novel, Awake in the Floating City (Pantheon, May 2025), in a near-future San Francisco rendered nearly uninhabitable by nonstop rains. Bo, a frustrated young artist unmoored by the disappearance of her mother, is on the verge of evacuating the city when Mia, her 130-year-old neighbor, asks her to stay on as her caregiver. As Mia, who immigrated to the Bay Area from China after WWII, shares stories from her past, the two forge a bond, sparking new creativity in Bo, who’s determined to honor what’s been lost under the flood waters.

For Kwan, who lived through deadly flooding in Nashville in 2010 and later developed asthma from smoke produced by Northern California’s historic cluster of wildfires in 2020, the real-life impact of climate change is inseparable from the creative process. “It’s hard to know what to do as an individual with a crisis this big,” she says. “I see this novel as a contribution to climate work. It isn’t only about climate but climate is completely entangled with all of the concerns and questions in this book.”

Florida native Karen Russell was unfamiliar with the term “climate fiction” when she wrote the Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! (2011), in which a family’s financial ruin is tied to the destruction of the Everglades. But, she says, having lived through Hurricane Andrew as a child—one of the most destructive storms in the state’s history—she’s acutely conscious of how ecological fragility relates to economic precarity.

She revisits these themes in The Antidote (Knopf, Mar. 2025), in which a fictional 1930s Nebraska town is devastated by a Dust Bowl storm. Through a cast of characters that includes an orphaned teenage girl, a woman whose body serves as a repository for people’s memories, and a photographer with a time-traveling camera, Russell shows how the land was primed for disaster by "American settler colonialism that dispossessed Native nations of their lands and imposed industrial agriculture and a profit-above-all ethos on the prairie ecosystem," she says. While unearthing the past, Russell’s characters discover alternatives to a brutal status quo, offering a glimmer of hope that readers might take heart in as well.

“It’s frightening the ease with which we can conjure a dystopia,” Russell says. “We also need to help each other to make visions of a functioning, caring, and caretaking society feel plausible.”

Climate Fiction Grows More Realistic

As the facts of climate change manifest in real life, authors are finding that the future is all too present