Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale is the most culturally active dystopia of the present era — its red cloaks now appear at actual legislative hearings — and Atwood's prestige carried speculative fiction into rooms that had pretended not to…
Climate Fiction
Near-future speculation about climate change and ecological crisis, from drowned cities to terraforming politics.
The authors (2)
Kim Stanley Robinson
The standard-bearer for utopian hard SF and the writer who made climate fiction a serious policy conversation.
Essential books, oldest first (5)
The Drowned World
A founding text of both the New Wave and, retrospectively, climate fiction; its psychological inversion of the disaster story remade the form.
Red Mars
Nebula winner (Green and Blue took the Hugos); the trilogy is the standard against which all planetary-colonisation fiction is measured, cited by actual Mars mission planners.
Parable of the Sower
The novel that made Butler a prophet: a New York Times bestseller decades after publication, source of an opera and a graphic novel, and the founding text of modern climate dystopia.
Oryx and Crake
Booker and Orange shortlisted, the founding volume of the MaddAddam trilogy and a cornerstone of modern climate-and-biotech dystopia: the engineered apocalypse as corporate deliverable.
The Ministry for the Future
Obama reading-list anointed and cited at COP meetings and central banks: the rare SF novel functioning as live policy document — climate fiction's current centre of gravity.