7 Summer Climate-and-or-Apocalypse Reading

I know with everything going on <gestures wildly> what you might want is an escape. Although many of you might be okay with some higher-intensity summer reads like I am. But I get it. Summer is hot. Summer is busy. Summer is a time to distract yourself from the political party conferences. So maybe reading about climate change isn’t what you’re going for. But stay with me. This is a list that might actually help keep spirits high and spark some sense of hope. 

Thus, I am going to give you a rundown of 7 of my favorite hopeful-ish climate fiction books. They’re all page-turners and they’re not all doom and gloom. And, incidentally, all but one are written by women. 

At any time, you can also check out the Families for Climate Bookshop storefront that I created for the organization in my role as communications consultant. So if you purchase through there, a portion of each of your purchases will go to their work fighting for climate justice in Oregon!

The Future by Naomi Alderman

The Future is a page-turner that I binged over the course of a few days. It takes place in the near-ish future–subtle references to an aged (yet still handsome) Ryan Reynolds help establish that. It’s a future that might feel familiar where the economy and the climate are basically controlled by three CEOs from exceptionally powerful tech corporations. These very powerful people are preparing for the very near future apocalypse with lavish bunkers and stockpiles of all that one needs when the world has shut down. All things that Elon Musk and Peter Tiel are doing in real life. The story revolves around them and the people in their orbit–one of their wives, one of their assistants, and one of their grown children–as well as Lai Zhen, who is an internet-famous survivalist. The book reads like a thriller and in that, it is unputdownable. And you’ll be surprised several times over. 

Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang

Land of Milk and Honey takes place in a world that has become engulfed in smog. Everywhere smog. Crops have failed and people are surviving off of a powdery dry bean meal. The main character is a chef whose career is all but obsolete when she receives a mysterious invitation to serve as the chef at an exclusive colony that exists in the mountains above the smog in Switzerland. Admittedly, this is a book that I appreciated more in retrospect. It was an easy and interesting read, full of some really strange and sometimes volatile characters. In the same way The Future puts the ethics of the rich and powerful in the face of climate change in full view, Land of Milk and Honey does that similarly, but through the main character’s perspective, you begin to wonder how you would act in the face of this dilemma.

The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton

The Light Pirate starts with, quite expectedly in climate fiction, an extreme weather event: a violent and destructive hurricane. That first section, though, was the most dramatic part of the book as the rest was a slower-moving drama that carries us through the life of Wanda who grows up and spends her life in Southern Florida where she sees the land transform into a vast watery ecosystem. There are some sad moments, but as her life progressed, the sense of peace and hopefulness for the future is what I was left with. I wrote about this in May, so there’s a more extensive reflection in that story. 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven is not climate fiction, per se, rather more generally apocalypse fiction. However, given that climate change could create an environment that’s quite hospitable to virulent viruses like, say Covid-19 or the “Georgia Flu” which kills off around 99% of the world’s population in Station Eleven. Having read it a couple years ago, it quickly became one of my favorites in that it was beautifully written in an even, peaceful tone with the main character, Kirsten, being a member of a traveling symphony of Shakespeare performers around 20 years after the collapse. The troop’s motto is the Star Trek line “survival is insufficient” putting thriving and art and beauty at the center of the story. While there is some drama, it felt secondary. To me, Station Eleven gave me a glimpse into a world that’s not too bad if it doesn’t revolve around capitalism. I wrote about this awhile back, you can read that post here.

Mobility by Lydia Kiesling

Mobility felt uncanny to me because the main character, Bunny Glenn, is from my elder millennial generation. The book takes us through Bunny’s life beginning as a 15 year-old in Azerbaijan while her dad served in the foreign service where she was introduced to the vastness of the oil industry. Over the course of her life, climate change is a constant theme. If not directly, it’s constantly in the background. Bunny is ostensibly liberal and believes in climate change but then eventually ends up as an oil executive. While Bunny and I took vastly different paths, the character provides a look into what someone kind of moving along only kind of thinking about climate change thanks to privilege that provides a soft bubble as the world shifts. In its steadiness and lack of tense drama, Mobility is similar to Station Eleven. But also it’s similar as I found myself flying through it and yet that last chapter stayed with me for days.

Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan

Erin Swan was on a panel about eco-fiction at AWP, the big writers conference, I attended in February and I immediately requested her book Walk the Vanished Earth from the library. The book is expansive in that it takes you from 1873 on the Kansas Planes to 2073 on Mars and several places and time periods in between. You know from the outset that something cataclysmic eventually happens on Earth and there’s some kind of operation happening on Mars. It’s an epic about seven generations of one family and one of those dystopian novels that feels distant enough from my reality to not get too nervous, but resonant enough to feel some sense connection.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (no relation to me unfortunately)

Cloud Cuckoo Land takes place in three distinct time periods and places: 15th century Constantinople, present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar spaceship in the not-so-distant future. The connecting force was an obscure centuries-old story called “Cloud Cuckoo Land.” It took me a while to get into it and to figure out what the three time periods meant, but that’s the beauty in the discovery. And honestly I think if I read it again, I’d see it from a slightly different perspective which is what makes the story so striking. I don’t want to give too much away because of how the story concludes. All of it left me reeling and thinking for weeks.

What are you reading this summer? And what would you add to this list?