No novelist should ignore the climate emergency, Paul Murray, author of the bestselling novel The Bee Sting, told the Observer last year: “It is the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.” In recognition of the vital role of literature in responding to the Anthropocene moment, this week the inaugural shortlist was announced for the Climate Fiction prize.
The five novels include Orbital by Samantha Harvey, set during one day on the International Space Station and the winner of last year’s Booker prize; time-travelling romcom The Ministry of Time from debut novelist Kaliane Bradley; eco-thriller Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen; And So I Roar, about a young girl in Nigeria, by Abi Daré; and a story of migrants in an abandoned city in Téa Obreht’s The Morningside. All the shortlisted authors are women.
Climate fiction is not new. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam dystopian trilogy, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour and Richard Power’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Overstory are just some of the landmark literary novels to have taken on the crisis. Science fiction, inevitably, has become the genre of ecological catastrophe, with hits like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (Barack Obama was a fan), which opens in 2025 with all the inhabitants of a small Indian town dying in a heatwave.
The late Ursula K Le Guin wrote that the job of sci-fi was “to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire”. The job of the realist novel is to reflect the world in which we live. For a long time, the possibilities of environmental breakdown were largely considered too wild for the realism. As a result, climate fiction hasn’t been taken seriously enough. In The Great Derangement in 2016, Amitav Gosh argued that the failure of so many novelists, including himself, to address the most urgent issue of the age was part of a broader cultural failure at the heart of the climate crisis itself.
Freakish weather events are no longer the stuff of speculative fiction – “global weirding” is upon us. What was once dubbed “cli-fi” is simply contemporary fiction. Ecological anxiety is as much a part of the fictional worlds of a young generation of novelists like Sally Rooney as the internet and mobile phones.
The novels on the Climate Fiction prize shortlist do not conform to dystopian stereotypes. Some aren’t explicitly about the crisis. Some are even hopeful. Far from being a portrait of a world ravaged by disasters, Orbital, for example, is a hymn to the awe-inspiring beauty of our planet.
It could be argued that having a Booker prize winner on the shortlist suggests there is no need for a specific award, which might marginalise climate fiction as a niche genre. There is no shortage of literary gongs. The Wainwright prize, set up in 2014 to celebrate the best nature books, now includes an award for writing on global conservation.
Yet awards amplify the message and reach of books that might otherwise be overlooked. Scientists have been warning about global heating’s dire consequences for decades. Governments and industry haven’t listened. Now novelists are taking up the challenge. Stories can create an impact far greater than data alone. They can inspire change. In a world where reality has become stranger than fiction, this new prize is necessary and important. There is no bigger story.
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