These days, climate change is on all our minds and in our stories. Whether you call it climate fiction or ecological fiction, speculative fiction focused on humanity’s impact on the earth is on the rise—and the stories are good. Really good. Just look at N.K. Jemisin’s dystopian fantasy series, The Broken Earth, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel New York 2140. Climate fiction isn’t just trendy. It’s unputdownable.
But stories exploring humanity’s impact on nature have existed for as long as literature has been written—especially when our effect on the climate is in the political eye. Before the Green New Deal made waves in the United States in 2019, and before the Paris Agreement in 2015, there was the Climate Change Convention in Rio in 1992 to establish an agreement stabilizing the use of greenhouse gases while allowing ecosystems to adapt to climate change and ensuring sustainable economic development.
[Enter Elizabeth Ann Scarborough and Anne McCaffrey’s with Powers That Be]
