Tag Archive for: speculative fiction

,

Earth | David Brin

Decades from now, an artificial black hole has fallen into the Earth’s core. As scientists frantically work to prevent the ultimate disaster, they discover that the entire planet could be destroyed within a year.

But while they look for an answer, some claim that the only way to save Earth is to let its human inhabitants become extinct: to reset the evolutionary clock and start over.

‘This book is not just a green globe-trotting adventure; it is also a thoughtful mix of warnings and promise.” – The Guardian

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

, ,

The Carbon Diaries 2015 | Saci Lloyd

It’s January 1st, 2015, and the UK is the first nation to introduce carbon dioxide rationing, in a drastic bid to combat climate change. As her family spirals out of control, Laura Brown chronicles the first year of rationing with scathing abandon. Will her mother become one with her inner wolf? Will her sister give up her weekends in Ibiza? Does her father love the pig more than her? Can her band The Dirty Angels make it big? And will Ravi Datta ever notice her?

In these dark days, Laura deals with the issues that really matter: love, floods and pigs.

The Carbon Diaries 2015 is one girl’s drastic bid to stay sane in a world unravelling at the seams.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

,

The World According to Anna | Jostein Gaarder

When fifteen-year-old Anna begins receiving messages from another time, her parents take her to the doctor. But he can find nothing wrong; in fact he believes there may be some truth to what she is seeing. Anna is haunted by visions of the desolate world of 2082. She sees her great-granddaughter, Nova, roaming through wasteland with a band of survivors, after animals and plants have died out. The more Anna sees, the more she realises she must act to prevent the future in her visions becoming real.

But can she act quickly enough?

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

,

The Healer | Antti Tuomainen

It’s two days before Christmas and Helsinki is battling ruthless climate catastrophe: subway tunnels are flooded; abandoned vehicles are burning in the streets. People are fleeing to the far north where conditions are still tolerable. Social order is crumbling and private security firms have undermined the police force. Tapani Lehtinen, a struggling poet, is among the few still willing to live in the city.

When Tapani’s wife Johanna, a journalist, goes missing, he embarks on a frantic hunt for her. Johanna’s disappearance seems to be connected to a story she was researching about a serial killer known as ‘The Healer’. Determined to find Johanna, Tapani’s search leads him to uncover secrets from her past: secrets that connect her to the very murders she was investigating…

Atmospheric and moving, The Healer is a story of survival, loyalty and determination. Even when the world is coming to an end, love and hope endure.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

,

The Book of Dave | Will Self

What if a demented London cabbie called Dave Rudman wrote a book to his estranged son to give him some fatherly advice? And what if that book was buried in Hampstead and hundreds of years later, when rising sea levels have put London underwater, spawned a religion?

What if one man decided to question life according to Dave? And what if Dave had indeed made a mistake?Shuttling between the recent past and a far-off future where England is terribly altered, The Book of Dave is a strange and troubling mirror held up to our times: disturbing, satirising and vilifying who and what we think we are.

At once a meditation upon the nature of received religion, a love story, a caustic satire of contemporary urban life and a historical detective story set in the far future – this compulsive novel will be enjoyed by readers everywhere, including fans of Martin Amis and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

, ,

Odds Against Tomorrow | Nathaniel Rich

New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor works on the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming. A gifted mathematician, he spends his days in Manhattan calculating worst-case scenarios for FutureWorld, a consulting firm that indemnifies corporations against potential disasters. As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe, he exchanges letters with Elsa Bruner – a college crush with an apocalyptic secret of her own – and becomes obsessed by a culture’s fears. When his predictions culminate in a nightmarish crescendo, Mitchell realises he is uniquely prepared to profit from the disaster. But at what cost?

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

, ,

Flight Behaviour | Barbara Kingsolver

“The flames now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it is poked. The sparks spiralled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against grey sky.”

On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature: the monarch butterflies have not migrated south for the winter this year.

Is this a miraculous message from God, or a spectacular sign of climate change?

Entomology expert, Ovid Byron, certainly believes it is the latter.

He ropes in Dellarobia to help him decode the mystery of the monarch butterflies. Flight Behaviour has featured on the NY Times bestseller list and is Barbara Kingsolver’s most accessible novel yet.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

The Ministry for the Future | Kim Stanley Robinson

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organisation was simple: To advocate for the world’s future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.

From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined. Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us – and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face. It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

,

A Friend of the Earth | TC Boyle

It’s 2025, and 75-year-old environmentalist and retired eco-terrorist Ty Tierwater is eking out a bleak living managing a pop star’s private zoo. It is the last one in southern California, and vital for the cloning of its captive species.

Once, Ty was so serious about environmental causes that as a radical activist committed to Earth Forever! he endangered the lives of both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, when he’s just trying to survive in a world cursed by storm and drought, Andrea re-enters his life. Frightening, funny, surreal and gripping, T.C. Boyle’s story is both a modern morality tale, and a provocative vision of the future.

“Fiction about ecological disaster tends to be written in a tragic key. Boyle, by contrast, favours the darkly comic.”–Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

The Flood | Maggie Gee

President Bliss is handling a tricky situation with customary brio, but after months of ceaseless rain the city is sinking under the floods. The rich are safe on high ground, but the poor are getting damper in their packed tower blocks, and the fanatical ‘Last Days’ sect is recruiting thousands.

When at last the sun breaks through the clouds Lottie heads off to the opera, husband Harold listens to jazz and their ditsy teenage daughter Lola fights capitalism by bunking off school.

Shirley takes her twin boys to the zoo. The government – eager to detract attention from a foreign war it has waged – announces a spectacular City Gala.

But not even TV astrologer Davey Lucas can predict the extraordinary climax that ensues.

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section