Cli-Fi Reading List

Climate change

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy.

• Orleans by Sherri L. Smith (YA)

After a string of devastating hurricanes and a severe outbreak of Delta Fever, the Gulf Coast has been quarantined. Years later, residents of the Outer States are under the assumption that life in the Delta is all but extinct...but in reality, a new primitive society has been born.

• Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters.

• War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

Two sisters are torn apart by war and must fight their way back to each other in a futuristic, Black Panther-inspired Nigeria.

The year is 2172. Climate change and nuclear disasters have rendered much of earth unlivable. Only the lucky ones have escaped to space colonies in the sky.

• Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

Thirteen-year-old Zahrah Tsami feels like a normal girl — she grows her own flora computer, has mirrors sewn onto her clothes, and stays clear of the Forbidden Greeny Jungle.

•  The Deluge by Stephen Markley

Goodreads Choice Award, Nominee for Best Science Fiction (2023)

From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.

In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat.

 Solar Punk

Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson

2065: In a world that has rediscovered harmony with nature, the village of El Modena, California, is an ecotopia in the making. Kevin Claiborne, a young builder who has grown up in this "green" world, now finds himself caught up in the struggle to preserve his community's idyllic way of life from the resurgent forces of greed and exploitation.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labeling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.

Environmental Disaster Fiction 

• The Storm by Arif Anwar

a sweeping historical novel that seamlessly interweaves five love stories spanning sixty years of Bangladeshi history. (Not particularly clifi other than "a storm of historic proportions").

• Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh

It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

• How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company.

Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

• Tentacle, by Rita Indiana (2018)

Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a voodoo prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean - and humanity - from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was - with the help of a sacred anemone. 

• Gamechanger by L.X. Becket 

Rubi Whiting is a member of the Bounceback Generation. The first to be raised free of the troubles of the late twenty-first century. Now she works as a public defender to help troubled individuals with anti-social behavior. That’s how she met Luciano Pox... Rubi has to find out why the governments of the world want to bring Luce into custody, and why Luce is hell bent on stopping the recovery of the planet.

•  The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades... Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one anotioner, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding

Dystopian (more political than environmental)

• Leila by Praayag Akbar

In a digitized city, sometime in the near future, as an obsession with purity escalates, walls come up dividing and confining communities. Behind the walls high civic order prevails. In the forgotten spaces between, where garbage gathers and disease festers, Shalini must search for Leila, the daughter she lost one tragic summer sixteen years ago.

• American War by Omar El Akkad 

Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. 

• Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan, Ken Liu

Located off China's southeastern coast, Silicon Isle is the global capital for electronic waste recycling, where thousands like Mimi toil day and night, hoping one day they too will enjoy the wealth they’ve created for their employers, the three clans who have ruled the isle for generations

Urban Fantasy

• The City We Became by  N.K. Jemison 

Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.

Links to Lists of Cli-Fi

https://storiesforearth.com/2021/02/11/black-cli-fi-and-ecofiction-authors/

https://theliteraryplatform.com/stories/climate-fiction-and-the-global-south-a-conversation/

https://grist.org/fix/climate-fiction/definitive-climate-fiction-reading-list-cli-fi-books/

https://www.himalmag.com/culture/southasia-in-contemporary-climate-fiction

https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/nf2mck/best_clifiscifi_with_strong_environmentalist/