Earth Day Reads: Cli-Fi

Earth Day is both a celebration of our planet and a reminder that we all have a role in shaping our future. As conversations about climate change grow more urgent, climate fiction (Cli-Fi) offers us a way to imagine possible futures. These stories serve as reminders of how our actions in the present are the basis for the health of our planet.

Through compelling narratives, Cli-Fi authors explore themes like environmental justice, resilience, innovation, and the human impact of a changing world. These books invite readers to see what kind of future they want to help create.

 

The Southern Reach series – which include Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution – are a haunting exploration of what happens when the natural world stops accommodating human logic and begins writing its own story instead. At the center of the series is Area X, a quarantined coastal region where something inexplicable has occurred. Nature has overtaken the landscape, but not in a benign, pastoral way. It is mutating, rewriting, and absorbing everything inside it. The fifth and final novel in the series, Abdication, will be published Spring 2027.
  • The Nonhuman World and Our Place In It: Climate Fiction’s Opportunities & Pitfalls
  • Memory, History, and Fantasy: The Transformative Power of The Imagination
  •  Annihilation: Book-to-Movie Behind the Scenes

Ruins follows archaeologist Ember Agni, whose failing marriage and stalled career push her to the brink, until a discovery hints at a lost empire shaped by climate collapse. Risking everything on a dangerous expedition, she must confront both the mystery before her and the life she’s left behind.
  • How to Feel Better While the World Ends
  • From Inspiration to Creation to Adaptation
  • The Journey of a Writer

A Guardian and a Thief unfolds over one tense week in a near-future Kolkata, where a stolen visa traps a mother, her daughter, and her father amid a worsening food crisis. As she searches for a way out, the story follows the thief driven by his own family’s survival, revealing how far each will go in a world under strain.

  • Writing Fiction about Climate Change
  • Nurturing a Creative Life
  • Right and Wrong: Living a Moral Life

All the Water in the World follows Nonie, a girl attuned to water, living with her family in a flooded, near-abandoned New York after the glaciers melt. Her family lives in a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History, and they work to save collections of human history and science. When a superstorm forces them to flee north, they carry the last records of a lost world, searching for safety and a future worth saving.
  • What We Save: Protecting Each Other in our Vulnerability in a Threatening World
  • Robust Hope for a Collapsing World: What We Mean When We Say We Believe in the Future
  • The Web That Has a Weaver: Crafting Complex Stories for a Complex Time

The Last Beekeeper follows Sasha Severn, who returns to her childhood farm in a broken world and discovers a honeybee thought extinct. As she searches for the truth behind it, and her father’s hidden research, she risks the fragile life she’s begun to rebuild.

  • The Celebration of Found Family in the Face of Despair
  • Truth vs. Power
  • Meditations on Forgiveness and Redemption in a Fragile World

Blackfish City is set in a floating Arctic city built after the climate wars, where inequality and disease threaten its survival. When a mysterious woman arrives with an orca and polar bear at her side, she draws four outsiders into a movement that could save their city, or expose the unsettling truths about the world around them.

  • Living on the Periphery of a Changing World
  • The Unexpected Consequences of Climate Change
  • The Unifying Power of Human Connection

 

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