#1 Victorian uni for graduate employment1
#1 in the world for sport science2
#1 Victorian uni for course satisfaction3
NEXT UP ON this.
In today’s world, there is much to reckon with: persistent conflict, widening economic divides and the growing challenge of predicting, preventing and treating emerging infectious diseases. Yet beneath these crises and, more than likely, any other that comes to mind, runs a deeper current: climate change.
It’s been a topic at the top of global agendas for decades, but with nations disagreeing on how best to address its impacts, the scale and speed of action isn’t matching the severity of the crisis. Yet there is one area in which, arguably, attention and engagement around climate change have steadily intensified, and that’s storytelling.
Climate change may be seen primarily as a scientific or political issue, but it’s also a cultural one. The shelves of libraries and bookstores are increasingly packed with a genre coined ‘cli-fi’, or climate fiction. To bridge the gap between knowledge and action, authors are taking pen to paper and, by addressing climate change in literature, are inviting readers to imagine what may lie ahead.
We’ve asked Emily Potter, a professor of literary studies at Deakin whose areas of expertise include climate change, Australian literature, and the environmental humanities, to share her thoughts on how storytelling, and climate fiction in particular, are shaping everything from our imaginations to public discourse and collective action.
The Cambridge University Press defines climate fiction, also known as cli-fi, as a ‘category of fiction that addresses the challenges of climate change and its impacts on human and nonhuman life, in the present and in the future, on Earth and in more fantastical settings.’
The term was coined in the late 2000s, but its roots go as far back as the 19th century. According to Potter, some stand outs in the genre include Kim Stanley Robinson’s Capitol Trilogy and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam series.
‘These are classic “eco-catastrophe” climate fictions that hold up a critical mirror to Western capitalist culture and explore its undoing,’ says Potter. ‘These are often referenced as showing a version of our likely future.’
She also references other novels, such as Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour and Richard Powers’ The Overstory as examples of climate change in literature that engages directly with issues of species loss and deforestation.
Without even realising it at the time, it’s likely that you’ve consumed some form of media that could be categorised as climate fiction.
A popular contemporary example is The Hunger Games, which is set in a post-apocalyptic North America that’s been wrought by climate disasters like floods, droughts and rising seas. These issues are the catalyst for the myriad issues seen in the series, including resource scarcity, political collapse and societal inequality.
Looking closer to home, Australian fiction has been deeply engaged with the realities of climate change.
‘[This] is likely a result of its very visible manifestation here which culminated in the Black Summer fires of 2019 and 2020,’ says Potter. ‘James Bradley’s Ghost Species, Jennifer Mills’ Dyschronia and Alice Robinson’s The Glad Shout are all examples of this.’
In Potter’s view, one of the most important novelists engaging with climate change in literature in Australia is Waanyi author Alexis Wright.
‘Her novels The Swan Book and Praiseworthy go way beyond the eco-catastrophe genre and engage with climate change as a consequence of colonisation, and deeply entangled in the daily realities of contemporary Australian society,’ says Potter. ‘Her books explore climate crisis as an opportunity to break away from limited way of thinking and living in the world; for her, these are grounded in First Nations culture and history.’
So, why is it so important to hear from authors like Wright? According to Potter, these voices are hugely important because they often write from outside the Western capitalist system that is responsible for climate crisis.
‘They write from perspectives that normalise more-than-human worlds, where humans are not separate from nature,’ says Potter. ‘This allows us to see that the kind of dominant society and way of living we have created in the West is not inevitable.’
Now that we’ve defined climate fiction, it’s time to unpack why climate change in literature matters and how it shapes the way we imagine the future.
Storytelling has long been a powerful way of humanising abstract issues, and this extends well beyond climate-related concerns.
Stories give shapes to complex ideas, grounding them in relatable characters and emotions in ways that data and policy cannot. This is one of the reasons climate change in literature has become a powerful way to explore what a warming world might actually look like.
‘Fiction doesn’t deal in certainties or facts, and the whole point of creative work is that it can imagine and explore possibilities,’ says Potter. ‘We need to be able to critically reflect on how we live and the way we relate to the non-human world. Fiction enables us to do that by creating a space for denaturalising the things that we take for granted, such as science itself, which is its own system of thought, and it allows us to imagine alternatives to the way we live now.’
From the examples we’ve cited so far, you’d be forgiven for thinking cli-fi is always painting a dystopian picture. However, there are some books within the genre that aren’t ringing the doom gong, so to speak.
Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built is set in a utopian future and offers a more hopeful vision of the future. The novel follows the journey of a tea monk, which is a kind of travelling merchant who serves people tea tailored to their needs. In this world, humans once relied heavily on advanced technology, with robots serving human society, until the robots chose to abandon their posts and retreat into the wilderness.
Without robots and technology to lean on, humans were left with no choice but to work better with the constraints of the natural world, meaning the wilderness was able to grow back and ecosystems could regain balance. So, when the monk unexpectedly encounters one of these long-unseen robots, the pair form an unlikely friendship, discovering meaning and connection across the differences between their kind.
From the examples shared, it’s clear that climate change in literature is a powerful tool for drawing attention to the potential consequences of environmental inaction.
‘It enables us to have lots of conversations about what kind of society and world we have created, what damage it is doing and how we can do things differently. It is a space for reorienting the discussion and imagining possible futures,’ says Potter.
But beyond capturing the imagination, how has cli-fi influenced collective thinking and action? And can it offer anything that activism, policy and science cannot?
Science helps us to understand the ‘what’, while policy debates the ‘how’ and activism often articulates the ‘why’. Cli-fi packages these factors into a narrative framework and creates space for reflection. It invites readers to question the systems, values and assumptions that underpin the climate crisis, shaping how the problem is understood in the first place.
A qualitative survey found that readers of climate fiction are more concerned about climate change than nonreaders of climate change. Comments from surveyed readers included:
From these comments, it can be argued that one of the biggest cultural impacts of climate change in literature is its ability to shift what was once abstract in the reader’s eyes into something more tangible.
While scientists have been sounding the alarm about climate change for decades, global emissions continue to rise, and key temperature thresholds have already been crossed, meaning some changes to Earth’s climate are now considered irreversible.
If we understand that the consequences of continuing on this path could be catastrophic, why aren’t we doing more to change course while action is still possible?
Part of the answer lies in scale and complexity. Securing agreement among 194 nations on how best to respond is a challenge in itself.
At the same time, many of the largest contributors to climate change, such as the fossil fuel industry, wield significant political and economic influence, and benefit most from systems built on industrialisation and extraction, making them resistant to change.
That might all sound quite bleak, but it’s also the reason why addressing climate change in literature is more important now than ever before. By helping readers understand the crisis at an individual, human level, stories can foster empathy and connection. This, in turn, lays the groundwork for a stronger collective voice that is better equipped to demand meaningful action from those in power.
Professor, Writing and Literature
Faculty of Arts and Education/School of Communication and Creative Arts
Deakin University
Read profile
