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I've read multiple climate fiction books in the last few months, and I have a couple more queued up for the near future. In chronological order of my reading:
What We Can Know
Ian McEwan's 2025 novel What We Can Know follows a scholar in the 2100s as he searches for "history" of our time period. The world has warmed and flooded, making the British Isles even more of an archipelago than before.
I loved this book for many reasons, and McEwan uses the climate future as a way to feasibly slow down the researcher. Sometimes, mysteries frustrate me, because it does not make sense that a regular person would wait a week to look for the next clue. Academic mysteries often subvert this, because why would history be an emergency? But in a flooded UK, it might be.
Counterweight
Djuna (they/them) is a pseudonym for a South Korean genre writer. Counterweight was published in Korean in 2021 and in English in 2023. It's a densely written neonoir set in a near future, not explicitly about climate change, but surrounding a space elevator enabled by the titular "counterweight" of space garbage.
I love confident worldbuilding, especially when Djuna is writing for a Korean audience, so there isn't handholding about the corporate culture or social structures. With a book like this, part of the charm is that it's like looking through a window and getting to figure out what you're seeing.
This story is set on an indigenous island group off of Malaysia that has been colonized by Korea for its space elevator. The place, Patusan, is a "real" fictional island from literature.
Islands are highly politicized in southeast Asia, partly because they represent political control of waterways. They are also only way to add more land to dense and tourist-heavy coastal cities.
Emma Bamford's 2022 thriller Deep Water is similarly set on a colonized island off of Malaysia, with prison island artifacts based on real history.
Ex Partum
I picked up Emma Burnett's Ex Partum based on the bona fides of the author, a self described "doctor of food." Panya is a new mother in a near future where food is obsolete, and she tries, and fails, to wean her infant daughter onto her society's drinkable nutrient pastes.
If that sounds gross, you're right! Burnett does a great job sketching out a world where people are alienated from the idea of food. They use "reducing braces" to control their teeth, make fun of those who make chewing motions, and have corralled food eaters into a shunned social class. It is really chilling!
A Guardian and a Thief
Megha Majumdar's 2025 novel A Guardian and a Thief is set in near future Kolkata, where three family members get climate visas in order to join the father of the family in the United States.
What unfolds reminded me of Ian McEwan's 2003 novel Atonement. One main character makes a mistake, which paves the way for another main character to make a different mistake, and everything cascades from there.
Like in Counterweight, this novel put me directly into a setting that I had only passing familiarity with. Kolkata is one of the top ten largest cities on Earth, but not even in India's top five. You could set a novel in my own "home city" of Chicago, but choose a part I don't really know about.
Thinking in my own past reads, Jhumpa Lahiri's beautiful 2013 novel The Lowland is set in recent past Calcutta in a different neighborhood. You could read novels of just one city for your whole life!
In the Queue: Nourish
Laura Baggaley's brand new novel Nourish is a YA story set in a post-food world. The book is part of Green Stories Project, a group that promotes media with climate themes. (Years ago, I won a Green Stories contest with Next Door, a short text game you can play in your browser.)
In the Queue: Vampiricene
merritt k is a games writer and overall artist whose 2025 novella Vampirocene is a horror story with a climate hook:
"When viral pop star Janie Mack "comes out" as a vampire, most people think it's just a play for attention. But when she launches a new movement to stop climate change, ..."
Tantalizing!!
In Conclusion
This post is still quite long, even though I just cut it back by about 30%. Reading all these climate books was a total coincidence, and if people are interested, I'd be happy to share some other unconventional climate novels I've read in the past.
Have you been reading anything good? Or watching or whatever. The devastatingly beautiful adaptation of Station Eleven is another unmissable piece of climate literary media that I just watched in the spring!