Climate fiction—also called cli-fi rhyming with sci-fi—is one of the hottest literary and cinematic genres of the 21st century. First coined by blogger Dan Bloom in 2008, cli-fi is storytelling that explores potential scenarios on Earth and in human society as a result of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.
Although not intended to be prophetic, cli-fi novels increasingly feel like they’re works of non-fiction as the effects of the climate crisis intensify all over the world. Raging California and Canadian wildfires and 100 continuous days of 100℉ temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona are just two recent examples.
Cli-fi takes place in either the past, the present, or the future. It does not have to be dystopian—all about doom and gloom. A cli-fi novel could be utopian, presenting an optimistic future. Conceivably, climate fiction could be, to borrow the term coined by author Margaret Atwood, “ustopia”—works of art that are both utopian and dystopian.
But most cli-fi written to date imagines “dystopian and pre-/post-apocalyptic worlds…stricken by a myriad of climate change calamities,” writes Kübra Baysal in Apocalyptic Visions in the Anthropocene and the Rise of Climate Fiction.
Here’s an overview of climate fiction of Black writers, both established and new.
Black cli-fi
Among the hundreds of cli-fi novels, only a small subset has been written by Blacks. Here are a few Black voices in this space.
Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998)
Octavia E. Butler, known as the Mother of African Futurism, is one of the earliest and most influential voices in cli-fi. Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents tell the story of an 18-year-old Black woman, Lauren Olimina, as she navigates a post-apocalyptic, war-torn California wracked by the high sea levels and freshwater scarcity of climate change as well as economic instability in 2025. Eerily prescient of what the US is currently facing, the novels portray the rise of a Christo-fascist president who promises to “make America great again.” Tragically, Butler died in 2006 while working on the third novel in the series and never completed it.
The Fifth Season (2015) by N. K. Jemisin is the first in a trilogy of captivating books in her Broken Earth series about surviving in a world that repeatedly ends every few centuries accompanied by catastrophic climate change and mass species extinctions. All three won the prestigious Hugo Award, a first for any author. Jemisin’s work prominently highlights ecofeminist themes and wrestles with complex issues including race, gender, culture, and oppression. The Obelisk Gate (2016) and The Stone Sky (2017) are the other books in her series.
Salvage the Bones (2011) by Jesmyn Ward, recounts the experiences of four impoverished siblings confronted by the destructiveness of Hurricane Katrina. Ward draws on her own upbringing in small-town Mississippi. Although this book doesn’t deal directly with climate change, it discusses the human effects of a storm intensified by it. This novel, and a later one by Ward, won the National Book Award for Fiction. She is the only woman and only African American to win this prestigious honor twice.
Goliath (2022) by American author and civil rights lawyer Tochi Onyebuchi is a post-apocalyptic story of the marginalized people left on Earth in the 2050s after the 1% manage to escape. Touching on topics as pressing as racial history and gentrification, this cli-fi’s ultimate message is the lasting power of humans’ capacity to empathize with others facing societal and ecological collapse. Onyebuchi’s War Girls (2019) is another cli-fi thriller full of action and suspense. It features two Nigerian sisters trying to navigate a world devastated by climate change and nuclear war but willing to fight for a better world.
City of Dancing Gargoyles (2024) by Tara Campbell tells of the adventures of two stone gargoyles and two climate refugees on a journey to find a safer place with water after escaping a post-apocalyptic, war-ravaged West Coast in the 22nd century. They encounter strange animals along the way to a place where their arrival could result in its destruction.
Noor (2021) by Nigerian American (Naijamerican, as she prefers) author, Nnedi Okorafor, is named after the Ouarzazate Solar Power Station in Morocco. A novella about a cybernetic-heroine, AO (Artificial Organism), and a Fulani herder named DNA on the run from cyborg soldiers and tribal leaders because they’re accused of murder, the story unfolds among vast fields of genetically engineered crops, wind turbines, and AI-controlled solar farms. In the end, Noor may make readers feel a bit hopeful about the future.
Does cli-fi matter?
Presaging the vital importance of climate fiction in the face of the existential crisis brought about by climate change, environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote in 2005, “Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action. Otherwise, the only role left to us—noble, but also enraging in its impotence—is simply to pay witness.”
Nine years later, cli-fi popularizer Dan Bloom echoed McKibben when he said: “Literature has an important role to play in getting people (and especially our political leaders) to understand on an emotional and moral level just how important it to alter our plush, gas-guzzling, C02-emitting, coal-burning, slash-burn-consume lifestyles before it is too late.”
Who reads climate fiction?
According to a 2018 survey conducted by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson of 161 American cli-fi readers, people who read climate fiction are “younger, more liberal, and more concerned about climate change than nonreaders of climate fiction.” Roughly 62% of respondents were 18-34 years old, enabling Schneider-Mayerson to extrapolate that 38% of all cli-fi readers in the US are in that age group of Millennials and Gen Zers.
Schneider-Mayerson also noted that 72% percent of cli-fi readers were concerned about climate change either “a great deal” or “a fair amount.” After reading, many increased their level of concern from “Cautious” to the “Concerned” or the “Concerned” to the “Alarmed” according to the attitude scale known as the “six Americas” identified by researchers Maibach, Roser-Renouf, and Leiserowitz in their research on climate attitudes—the “Alarmed,” “Concerned,” “Cautious,” “Disengaged,” “Doubtful,” and “Dismissive.”
Schneider-Mayerston observed that climate fiction makes 74% of readers feel “intensely negative emotions” including feeling helpless, unsafe, angry, depressed, or guilty. Several relayed that cli-fi made climate change less abstract and vague and more concrete and detailed, allowing them to “deepen their imagination” and “think in the future.” A few readers used cli-fi to open up dialogs about the climate emergency with friends.
Does reading cli-fi lead to climate action?
Unfortunately, there is not much data to support the conclusion that reading climate fiction leads to climate action although research is ongoing.
A 2019 study by Schneider-Mayerson and colleagues found that “reading climate fiction had small but significant positive effects on several important beliefs and attitudes about global warming—observed immediately after participants read the stories. However, these effects diminished to statistical nonsignificance after a one-month interval.”
Cli-fi: Stories vs nonfiction
Brandi S. Morris et al in another 2019 study on the types of communication that promote climate action found that stories have a much greater impact on personal behavior than scientifically presented facts, like those in research articles. “Narratives structured as stories facilitate experiential processing, heightening affective engagement and emotional arousal, which serve as an impetus for action-taking.” Of course, all cli-fi stories must be rooted in the latest solid science about the climate crisis.
Possibly, a new wave of cli-fi stories with more positive endings—but still scientifically truthful about climate change—could better promote climate action.
