A climate fiction syllabus

Posted on October 6, 2024 by Bryan Alexander

Climate fiction is literature in any medium which explores how climate change might transform the world, and how humans respond. It’s a powerful and, I think, essential genre for our century.

I’m writing about climate fiction* today because an educator and colleague asked me to. Joshua Kim is Director of Online Programs and Strategy at Dartmouth College. He’s also an Inside Higher Ed columnist who is — by far — their writer most keenly focused on climate change. He’s been a terrific supporter of my Universities on Fire book. Last week he posted about what his ideal climate fiction class syllabus might look like. I had to follow suit.

I’m thinking of a college class, either undergraduate or graduate. A high school class could sample this. What follows is too much, most likely, so anyone trying to use it would really have to carve out what they can best use.

Each entry has some introduction, along with why I include it in this class. I tried to pick materials which each offer something different from the others: small scale and huge, satire and grimness, historical fiction and future-oriented stories. There’s some sense of a sequence here, starting with groundwork, then some more accessible texts, then building up in scale and out into variations. I linked to Wikipedia pages for each title, where available, and otherwise to authors.

I don’t include any nonfiction explainers about climate change. Fortunately those are…