Climate change is our reality, with wildfires, floods, and heat waves becoming regular occurrences. But for decades, both scientists and fiction writers have predicted this reality and tried to describe what the future will look like. With writing styles ranging from dark humor to lament, authors have speculated about how planetary changes affect human relationships. Will mass migrations occur?  Will communities turn on each other?  Will feelings of loss and sorrow emerge, or panic, or simply continuing denial?  

Some authors we will read in this course explore this topic through speculative fiction, which is the narrative equivalent of computer models that predict sea level rise or future warming. By imagining what might happen, based on the current science, they create a harrowing image of the future.  Other authors simply describe what is already happening:  flooding islands, disappearing reefs, changing migration patterns, and so on.  To understand how climate change works, we will ground ourselves in the basics with selections from The Global Warming Reader.  This course will give you a sense of how climate change affects how we think and feel about the future, as well as how it has impacted the structure of stories themselves.