Climate Change Fiction

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.”  --Robert Frost

Learn what the future may look like by reading novels that envision how climate change will shape the planet. Will mass migration occur? Will new diseases emerge? Will endless fires darken our skies? Some authors explore this topic by using what we now know about climate change to extrapolate into the future, which is the narrative equivalent of computer modeling. By imagining what might happen, based upon the current science, they create a harrowing image of the future. Other authors simply describe what is already happening: flooding islands, disappearing reefs, and so on. To understand how climate change works, we will read brief selections from The Global Warning Reader. At the same time, we will read exciting contemporary fiction from around the world. This course will give you a sense of how climate change is affecting our ideas about time and the future, as well as how it is impacting the structure of stories themselves.