Have you ever voted on the fate of a character in a work of fiction? Now’s your chance to help me choose my character’s next victim!
One of the two novels I’m writing, Burning, features a protagonist named Rionach. Rionach suffers a tremendous personal loss during a climate-fueled wildfire. Rather than dealing with her climate grief in more socially-acceptable ways, she decides to hunt the people responsible for the climate crisis.
In honor of Halloween, Samhain, and my inclusion in the “There Will Be Blood” gory ebook giveaway, I’ve decided to let my readers vote on who Rionach will choose as her next victim!
Are you concerned about climate change? If so, you’re not alone.
According to the world’s largest survey on climate change, 80% of people globally want their country to do more on climate change. Here in the United States, Yale’s “Climate Change in the American Mind: Beliefs & Attitudes, Spring 2024” report tells us that majorities of Americans think global warming will harm plant and animal species (72%), future generations of people (72%), the world’s poor (69%), people in developing countries (68%), people in the United States (65%), and people in their community (52%).
In other words, most people do in fact care about climate change!
If you want more information about the climate crisis and what you can do about it, I can recommend some great nonfiction books about climate change. However, many readers prefer reading fiction, especially in their spare time. As both a reader and an author, I love picking up a good novel or short story collection and spending a couple of hours immersed in a compelling fictional narrative. I read nonfiction too, but it doesn’t fill the same niche in my life as reading a good work of fiction.
If you want to read novels, short stories, and other fiction with climate themes, you’re in luck! Authors and publishers have started writing and publishing so much good climate fiction that you could read a climate novel a week for the rest of your life and still not have time to read it all. But where can you find all of these amazing works of climate fiction? And how do you decide which ones you want to read?
With those questions in mind, I’m excited to tell you about two places where you can find good climate fiction! This includes both the climate fiction I’ve written and all of the climate fiction I’ve read or heard about as a climate author, climate communicator, and avid climate fiction reader.
There’s more than one way for a family to deal with generational trauma. And there’s more than one way for a family to respond to systemic racism and the climate crisis.
Mary Annaïse Heglar’s debut novel, Troubled Waters, tells an intense, compelling, and deeply personal story at the intersection of these themes. After listening to her on the Hot Take and Spill podcasts, and reading her essays about climate justice and new children’s book, I was eager to read her novel to see how these themes play out in her fiction. Now that I’ve read it, I’m pleased to report that this novel will be a great read for people interested in climate justice themes, racial justice themes, Southern characters and settings, strong women protagonists, and compelling literature in general.