The new year’s finally here! You may have already celebrated with some of your favorite New Year’s Eve traditions: counting down to midnight, drinking champaign, making resolutions for the new year. Now that 2019 is in full swing, I invite you to join me in one of my favorite year-end traditions: looking back at the best examples of the past year of climate fiction.
Exodus by Julie Bertagna is a compelling coming-of-age tale in a world ravaged by catastrophic sea level rise. The colorful characters, the contrasting low-tech and high-tech communities of survivors, and the long and interesting heroic journey of a young woman displaced by climate change, come together to make this an entertaining and thought-provoking story.
The End We Start From is a quick, easy read that packs a powerful punch. This tale of a mother’s journey as a climate refugee reads almost like climate poetry rather than climate fiction, with short paragraphs and sections that are carefully crafted to convey as much information and underlying meaning as possible in a minimal amount of text.
The term climate fiction, or cli-fi for short, refers to any books, films, and TV series related to human-caused climate change.
Cli-fi used to be a small enough genre that it didn’t take much time or effort to read and watch all of the major cli-fi titles. Nowadays, though, there are so many released each year that it’s hard to keep up with them all.
In honor of this growing trend, I’ve decided to post a list of what I consider to be the best cli-fi titles of 2016 and 2017. Since this is my first year posting such a list, I couldn’t resist sneaking in a title from 2015 that’s one of my all-time favorites.
Start your new year off right by checking out these thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking works of clli-fi. Let me know in the comments if I missed any good ones!