Writing for a Warming World - Imagining the overwhelming, the ubiquitous, the world-shattering.

Climate change is one of those topics that can throw novelists—and everyone else—into a fearful and cowering silence. When the earth is losing its familiar shapes and consolations, changing drastically and in unpredictable ways beneath our feet, how can we summon our creative resources to engage in the imaginative world-building required to write a novel that takes on these threats in compelling ways? And how to avoid writing fiction that addresses irreversible climate change without letting our prose get too preachy, overly prescriptive, saturated with despair?

- By Bruce Holsinger

Climate change is one of those topics that can throw novelists—and everyone else—into a fearful and cowering silence. When the earth is losing its familiar shapes and consolations, changing drastically and in unpredictable ways beneath our feet, how can we summon our creative resources to engage in the imaginative world-building required to write a novel that takes on these threats in compelling ways? And how to avoid writing fiction that addresses irreversible climate change without letting our prose get too preachy, overly prescriptive, saturated with despair?

If there is any comfort to be had here, perhaps it lies in the number of novels written over the last several decades that have taken on this immensely challenging subject from such a wide variety of creative angles. Books like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, in which a family struggles to survive in a ravaged near future America and the young protagonist creates a new community based on principles of sustainability and collective action. Or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, a sprawling story of global despair and international cooperation featuring dozens of points of view and showcasing how individual actions and policy changes might intertwine in response to catastrophe. The setting of Téa Obreht’s recently published The Morningside is a reimagined Manhattan devastated by coastal flood yet still thrumming with the mysteries and stories that sustain its thinned-out population.