Global Warming Fiction

The End of the End of the Earth is a collection of Jonathan Franzen's essays and speeches from the past five years, in which he grapples with the most important and heated ethical subjects of the day: environmentalism, capitalism, wealth inequality, race, technology, and the role of art. He challenges us to ask difficult questions: What is our civic responsibility in the face of climate change, the greatest ever threat to our planet and species? Does technology give us a sense of control or community or is it stripping these from us?

Global warming has changed the world's geography and its politics. Wars are waged over water, and China rules Europe, including the Scandinavian Union, which is occupied by the power state of New Qian. In this far north place, 17-year-old Noria Kaitio is learning to become a tea master like her father, a position that holds great responsibility and great secrets. Tea masters alone know the location of hidden water sources, including the natural spring that Noria's father tends. But after her father's death the army starts watching their town - and Noria.

Only the most hardened survivalists can endure living in the scorched deadlands of the former state of Arizona. Among them is nineteen-year-old Georgia Reno, who lives in an isolated desert settlement with her father and younger brother. Roads don’t exist here; visitors are more dark fairy tale than reality. But when two mysterious strangers arrive on their land, Georgia begins to question her sheltered existence. Soon, her tentative curiosity blooms into a fledgling desire to leave the settlement, even if it means venturing into a world her father has only ever warned against.

Phaet Theta has lived her whole life in a colony on the moon. She's barely spoken since her father died in an accident nine years ago. She cultivates the plants in Greenhouse 22, lets her best friend talk for her, and stays off the government's radar. Then her mother is arrested. The only way to save her younger siblings from the degrading shelter is to enlist in the militia, the faceless army that polices the lunar bases and protects them from attacks by desperate Earth dwellers.

Phaet Theta is a fugitive. Hiding in plain sight with her friend Wes’s family on the drowned planet Earth, Phaet discovers the rugged beauty of the world her ancestors once called home. All her life, she’s been taught to fear the “Earthbound”, and their generosity and kindness surprise and touch Phaet. But when the Lunar Bases attack Wes’s isolated village, Phaet’s past catches up with her, and she’s forced to choose: Stay on Earth and fight beside the boy she’s falling for, or stow away on a Moon-bound ship so she can save her brother and sister from the government.

The next generation will face the reality that human activity is changing the planet from one geological epoch to another. From this vantage point—two generations across two geological epochs facing a fundamentally changing planet—Larry Rasmussen writes to his grandchildren. As a grandfather invested in a green earth and climate justice as well as a scholar of faith-based earth ethics, Rasmussen bridges this gap between generations to write to the future about climate change, global citizenship, democracy, and legacy.

Peaches Goes It Alone, Frederick Seidel’s newest collection of poems, begins with global warming and ends with Aphrodite. In between is everything. Peaches Goes It Alone presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel - and thrilled and offended his audiences. Lyrical, grotesque, and elegiac, Peaches Goes It Alone adds new music and menace to Seidel’s masterful body of work.

Even when the climate crisis escalates beyond our worst nightmares and people become refugees, the world keeps turning and life carries on as usual: teenage love stories, marital collapses, identity crises, and rebellions against hopeless parents continue to play out. Didrik is a forty-year-old media consultant whose misguided efforts to become the family hero render him a pathetic vision of incompetence. Melissa is an influencer with a suitcase full of lost dreams after denying climate change for years.