Climate fiction is an increasingly popular genre. That, I think, is partly because it responds to an environmental challenge so massive that it will affect us all eventually, likely in alarmingly significant ways. It can also attract a large audience in that is isn’t wedded to any literary tradition. The six novels on the 2026 Climate Fiction shortlist ran the gamut: there’s science fiction, historical fiction, and contemporary literary fiction here, which means that even the most restricted of readers—that is, those who tend to confine themselves to their own preferred genre—will probably find at least one of the shortlisted books enticing and accessible.
It helps that many of the themes found in climate fiction are common to many different stories. Robbie Arnott’s Dusk is a clear example of this, being an example of a story where the sins of the parents are visited on the children. Thirty-seven-year-old twins Iris and Floyd Renshaw are looking for work in a setting which is somewhat unmoored from reality. Taking place generations ago in Australia, in what is likely the Australian Alps, these two itinerant labourers are widely distrusted. Their parents were famous criminals who survived transportation to the colonies and swiftly began to prey on their new compatriots. Iris and Floyd have no illusions as to the character of their progenitors and they don’t deserve the reflected shame and accompanying ostracism, but it makes no difference. Distrust seeps through the generations, and the twins are left on the outskirts of society, unable to find purchase within any community. This leaves them impoverished and open to exploitation, a situation which is not helped by the fact that Floyd is disabled and suffering from chronic pain.
Arnott’s descriptions of the natural world are gorgeous, providing supporting detail where the specifics of time and place are skated over. When I described the book as “unmoored,” however, I’m also referring to the title character: Dusk is a puma, the last of an escaped population of pumas, and she’s terrorising the highland community, having killed six people so far.
In this, she is clearly a dangerous invader—pumas are not native to Australia, though the country apparently has its own small stock of big cat sightings over the years. As with similar stories in my own New Zealand, however, there’s little hard evidence of this. Dusk and her kin, therefore, are effectively imaginary. Chalk it up to an alternate universe if you like, but I prefer to think of it as metaphor: the unexpected consequences of invasion, of colonisation and compromise; the constant reflection of how the Other is treated. It’s not just Dusk snarling in the corners of a country where she doesn’t belong. It’s the people after her, who are marauding and destroying in their own way, stealing land, sacrificing outsiders. Even the characters who initially come across as kind to others are hypocrites lacking in self-awareness, banding together in service of self-interest and control through punishment.
These themes repeat over and over. There’s a bounty on Dusk’s head and, with no better option, the twins are considering taking it up. They have few resources and no weapons, and they’re not only at risk from Dusk, who sees them as fresh meat in her territory, but from their fellow settlers, who consider them to be equally—if differently—expendable.
Dusk is probably the second least-likely of the books here to end up on the Climate Prize shortlist, because in a sense it’s really not about climate at all. It is about environmental exploitation, though. It sees environmental injustice through a historic lens—that is, the early stamp of colonisation and criminal sin—and when we look at what’s happening in the novel’s highlands, we can see how it’s all going to roll forward to the society that these foundations are building.
Roll forward it has. The ongoing tragedy of climate change is that it is, in a sense, the sins of the forebears repeating over generations, coming home to roost in ever more apparent mechanisms of feedback. Australia may not have a population of wild pumas and it may never have done so, but if it ever had or did then this is how it would go, because the society that is Australia today has prioritised, for centuries, the behaviour that Arnott illustrates in Dusk. No character is untouched by that, and most of them end up scarred.
This sense of consequence is common in climate fiction, albeit it is more often presented through a contemporary or future lens, through which historical or contemporary causes can be seen to have created a future that people probably do not want to live in. With the notable exception of solarpunk, a lot of climate and environmental fiction these days tends towards the dystopian. I have a great deal of sympathy for that approach. Not only are dystopias often just plain fun to read, but they also reflect the growing anxieties of our time: That we know what’s coming and really aren’t doing enough, and that the destructive, transformative powers of our collective unconstrained actions are going to come home to roost, so might as well cry about it.
This weeping is somewhat forecast, on a local and urban scale, in Susanna Kwan’s Awake in a Floating City. In the novel, San Francisco’s climate has altered and it becomes a place of constant rain as the city, permanently flooded and seeping back into the Bay, becomes ever more inhospitable—to human life, anyway. There’s not much of a focus on how this change impacts the wider ecosystem but then this is a novel that takes place on a very small-scale, set almost entirely in a single apartment building, in the homes of depressed artist Bo and 130-year-old Mia. They’re not alone in the building, or in the city, and the inhabitants—most of whom remain because they have nowhere else to go and few resources to take them there—have adapted to the rain, shifting markets to rooftops and building bridges between buildings, trying to stave off isolation as best they can.
Both Mia and Bo are defined by isolation. Bo has an escape route which she refuses to utilise (a loving cousin and uncle are desperate to get her to join them in Vancouver) and hasn’t produced any art in years, since the death of her mother in a flash flood. She gets work as Mia’s home healthcare assistant, as Mia is dying and her estranged centenarian daughter, far away, is unwilling to take on the responsibility of caring for her.
In fairness to Kwan, Awake in the Floating City is in many ways a much more muted and optimistic dystopia than some. People are really trying to keep their communities together and there’s a welcome lack of violence and cruelty. Environmental change on this scale, however, forces adaptation, and as individuals and families and communities attempt to adapt and survive in the new world they (and their forebears) created, some people fall through the gaps.
Thus falling, Bo and Mia catch hold of each other. Through caring for Mia, Bo regains her artistic drive—there’s an absolutely gorgeous payoff to this in the final section of the book, where she exhibits her work to the city—and Mia finds out that, even in age and extremity, one is never too old to make a friend.
Grief and isolation linger through the pages of the novel, and Kwan argues the necessity of engaging with loss directly. Memorials of a life and a city are “the practice of remembering” (p. 247)—and “practice” is a verb. It requires action: getting out and doing, building connection, making chicken soup and birthday cakes, listening to stories, making them stick. Books like this one practice dystopias before we have them, so that when the rain arrives (and the loss, and the grief) we know what to do. If climate change transforms cities such as San Francisco, makes them in many ways unliveable, then it doesn’t have to mean despair.
Bo, especially, is practiced in despair. She practices it every time she refuses to make a decision, every time she refuses to pick up a brush. That response is understandable … for a time. But it’s not sustainable, not for any sort of fulfilling life, and Awake in the Floating City makes clear that fulfilment, in dystopia, is not something that is doomed to drowning.
Comparison of Awake in a Floating City with another of the shortlisted titles is a reminder that adaptation is not atonement. It can be, I think: The choice to live in a different way can certainly help to remediate the damage of past actions. This is especially the case when that new way of life requires sacrifice—and it will, in the climate-influenced future that is barrelling towards us. That sacrifice will be of ego as much as it is of resources. The species bias that says that we are all that matters, that the greed-driven need to accumulate more and more at the expense of everyone and everything else? That’s going to have to go.
The problem with atonement, though, is functionally one of balance. Atone enough and you can adapt to your environment—you can make up for not accompanying your mother on the day that she died in a flash flood by making sure your neighbour doesn’t die alone and helping to build a supportive community thereby, for example—but it’s easy to overdo it. To sacrifice more than is needed, to make a martyr of yourself.
Then again, martyrdom can be effective.
It certainly seems to work in The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha. Brahm Saxena, retiring after a profitable life as an accountant, wants to leave his money to environmental causes, believing that providing his two children with excellent educations is inheritance enough. Older daughter Tara is fine with this; as a successful lawyer she is capable of making her own way. Younger son Rohit, however—primed by a gender-based privilege baked into Indian society and a rather lazy, entitled outlook on life—is rather less sanguine. He gets involved with a political lobbying group based upon the principle of humans first (which really means men first), as if he and everyone around him isn’t living in the world that this old, tired argument has created.
The Tiger’s Share takes place against a backdrop of climate change, as the air quality in Delhi continues to deteriorate into a choking, polluting miasma that contaminates everything that it touches. Brahm, trying to live by example instead of instruction, has come to believe that humans are no more, and no less, important than other species, and his determination to offer up his personal resources, including his body, to model that principle has, in the final pages of the book, transformed him into a martyr. Granted, feeding oneself to a tiger might be said to be a little extreme in the atonement stakes but, depressingly, it works.
This offering mirrors, in a way, Tara’s ceding the bulk of her inheritance to her feckless brother in order to keep the family peace. This I did not admire so much, as while I can see the reflected storylines as narrative strategy—sacrificing self for the good of family, not just because family is theoretically important but because you love them, no matter how extended the relation—it does come across as reinforcing the sulky, me-first attitude that Rohit never apparently grows out of. In the wake of his father’s death, he gives up humans-first advocacy in order to push cryptocurrencies instead, so you can imagine why I find it so hard to like the little shit. He’s consistently awful all the way through and is ultimately rewarded for his poor behaviour, so what incentive does he have to change? Not that Tara is entirely blameless in the sibling relationship stakes herself, but still: when it comes to atonement, clearly some people are expected to offer up more than others.
That inequitable responsibility is again present in Hum by Helen Phillips, which, not long before this review was completed, was pronounced the winner of the Climate Fiction Prize. The book is about artificial intelligence and bad motherhood—or the perception of bad motherhood, when the father is also right there and is somehow let off the public shaming bandwagon. May, who has been let go from her job after being replaced with AI, agrees to an experimental operation on her face to make her less identifiable to the cameras of the urban dystopia in which she and her family live. She does it for the money, and promptly spends a large chunk of it on a three day holiday for her family in the city’s Botanic Garden, which is the last place left that has any semblance of greenery and natural environment.
May’s husband is concerned—this escapist idyll is expensive!—but willing to go along. It’s her two young children who are the problem. Desperately attached to their bunnies—wrist-worn AI that continuously coddle and entertain them—Sy and Lu are none too pleased about having to go without, and whine and complain endlessly about being suddenly unattached as May forces them to experience botanical paradise without their virtual companions. There’s a brief stretch where the kids manage to do so, but then they escape from the gardens and wander the city—lost, tantruming, loudly blaming May for letting them exist bunnyless—and naturally this is all caught on camera. The kids are nearly run over by a car, and let me tell you: I wish they had been. Rarely have I read such annoying child characters; my primary emotional response to Hum is deep gratitude for the fact that I don’t have children. Frankly, Lu and Sy are an argument for biological imperative, because May’s desperate attempts to hang onto those kids in the wake of the public outcry and state investigation that follows is otherwise incredible. (Motherhood must drastically increase your tolerance for unbearable nuisance. There’s just no other explanation.)
Alright, so that’s a slight exaggeration. The strength of my emotional response, however, is a credit to the tension that builds and builds throughout Phillip’s narrative, in which financial strain and environmental degradation and changing technological dependence play off each other as the story develops. Of all the shortlisted works, Hum is the one to most elicit an emotional reaction—albeit more frequently a negative than a positive one—and my guess is that this is why it won. It’s an all too plausible horror story, and one in which gender, as it does in The Tiger’s Share, constructs antagonism within the narrative. May gets the blame because she’s the mother, not the father, and Tara gets the blame for being the disloyal sister, disdained by her mother and sibling for not putting her brother before herself until she caves and finally does so, restoring peace within the family.
This assumption of responsibility is something that is often explored in climate fiction, and it should be. To be clear, that inequity isn’t always gender-based, although the hierarchy of value that places women below men is indicative of other power hierarchies which also adapt narratives of guilt and blame. These hierarchies shift focus from wider and more pressing issues to smaller conflicts which onlookers can more easily (and more self-righteously) engage in. The problem isn’t engineering a society in which children are utterly dependent on devices; the problem is the bad-apple mother. The latter can be dealt with through an avalanche of abusive social media posts and pointing fingers in the street; it’s easy to be on the “right” side then, it takes so little effort! Otherwise, one might have to go up against the companies and the governments that are so insistent on establishing Big Bunny in every nursery, in order to surveil the infant consumer base, and that would be much harder.
Truthfully, stories about the deleterious effects of AI on children and society, and the disparate expectations of mothers and fathers, are not that uncommon. Phillips updates this dual narrative with a background gloss of climate and, more interestingly, the presence of hums: individual AIs who increasingly appear to have their own agency and preferences. The last section, in which a hum defends May’s actions, is by far the most interesting of the book, illustrating as it does compassion across species (if one can consider the hums a species). That keeping the family together is reliant on this nonhuman compassion—though how nonhuman can it be, if programmed by humans and learning from their material?—is almost hopeful. It’s a reminder, in a book that argues against constant connection, that connection can still be transformative in positive ways.
That transformative connection between human and nonhuman can also be seen in Endling by Maria Reva. In this case the nonhuman are endangered snails, particularly a single specimen known as Lefty who may well be the last of his kind. Yeva is a biologist travelling across Ukraine in a mobile lab, trying to uplift the lingering survivors of endangered snails in order to establish a breeding programme to keep various slimy species from going extinct in the wild. In order to help pay for this, she moonlights as a prospective bride for romance tours consisting primarily of American men touring Eastern Europe for young and compliant wives.
Unfortunately for Yeva, she and her snails get stuck in two simultaneous conflicts. The first is an attempt by two activist sisters to stop the romance tours by kidnapping some of the grooms. The second is the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Yeva finds herself driving through hundreds of kilometres of war-torn territory with thirteen hostage-grooms stuffed in the lab because a photo uploaded by someone fleeing invaded Kherson has shown, on an acacia tree, a single snail that may be able to breed with Lefty and save the species from extinction.
Endling is something of a black comedy, with the increasingly ridiculous romance tour storyline contrasting with the desperate hope that conservation can outlast war. In some cases, let’s be clear, it can’t. Most of Yeva’s snails die, and there’s a particularly awful passage during which she’s crouched at the base of that acacia tree, with Russians invading the town, on the phone with another snail conservationist in Hawaii, having to report that Lefty is the only specimen she has left, passing on the time and date of all the other deaths, all the other extinctions. The grief shared by the two scientists is palpable, and is one of the most effective—and affecting—moments in all six books on this shortlist.
Endling may not share the gorgeous prose of Dusk, but it is, I think, the most original of the shortlisted books. Reva plays with narrative and meta-narratives in ways that are increasingly bizarre, and there were times when reading when I found myself laughing in delight at the way the book was put together. That being said, the structural playfulness and the romance tour storyline could often take over the book and draw attention away from the environmental storyline.
That is, to be honest, a consistent characteristic of this shortlist, and unfortunately it’s not one I admire. I expect the Climate Fiction shortlist to focus on climate fiction, oddly enough, but the selected books tend to wander from the point, and this happens nowhere more than it does in Madeleine Thein’s The Book of Records. Frankly, I’m finding it hard to separate my irritation at the book itself with my irritation at its inclusion on this shortlist, but I’m well aware that only one of these responses is valid.
The Book of Records, to give the book its due, is well-researched with a genuinely interesting concept. At one point a character called Blucher comments that “What we call ‘now’ has no solidity. We’re always falling through it” (p. 107), and the novel’s structure underlines this. Thien doesn’t have Reva’s lightness of touch when it comes to structural whimsy, but three historical strands—following the lives and migratory journeys of the ancient Chinese poet Du Fu, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the historian/philosopher Hannah Arendt—collapse in on each other. Linking these three is a fourth (speculative) strand, in which a young girl and her dying father make a home in a community known as the Sea, which is a stopping place for those people, navigating climate change, who are on journeys of their own. It’s a very reflective novel, one which has a strong philosophical underpinning, and it is hardly Thien’s fault that philosophy in general makes me want to screech Will you just bloody get on with it?! at a pitch only bats can hear. Certainly The Book of Records is the slowest-paced book on this shortlist and I found its meandering nature a challenge.
My hatred of philosophy does not make The Book of Records a bad book, however. As I said, it’s well-researched and constructed and the sections centred on Hannah Arendt, in particular, can be effective and compelling; if there’s a central focus in this very diffuse novel, it’s Arendt. My personal response is therefore subjective, and certainly there are readers who will appreciate this often theoretical, sometimes even abstract, book.
It does not, however, belong on the Climate Fiction shortlist, for the simple reason that it’s barely climate fiction at all. Now, cli-fi is a broad category and so that’s a pretty audacious claim on my part, but I stand by it. The Book of Records does include climate, but mostly elliptically and never in any real depth. That climate change can force migration and will surely do so in the future is a certainty. That does not mean, however, that any book focusing on migration is a book about climate change. A thin frame of climate migration is just that: a frame, and not a central narrative. Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt are forced into migratory journeys through poverty, famine, war, and religious persecution. These are not the same thing as climate migration, although there’s certainly the possibility of intersection in less historical narratives. Compared to the truly excellent Arendt sections, especially, that barely-there climate frame lacks both gumption and engagement with the causes (and realities) of its particular migration. Let’s not soft soap the oncoming disaster this way, please.
I expect climate fiction to prioritise climate change, or at least to prioritise reaction to climate change, in meaningful and illuminating ways. Spotlighting books that tiptoe around that responsibility is counterproductive, and I find it frankly baffling that The Book of Records made this shortlist. That is not, I emphasise, a question of the book’s quality. I may not have enjoyed Thien’s novel, but I can still recognise worth when I see it. It’s a question of focus.
Climate fiction frequently imagines futures in which adaptation is key: how humans and other species transform the way that they live, or the places that they live, in order to better survive there. It’s simply good worldbuilding to include those changes, and even to place them at the centre of the narrative. How does the way we parent change in a world impacted by climate? How do we perform elder care and treat refugees? These things matter, and it’s exciting to see them explored in literature. It becomes less exciting, however, and certainly less convincing as climate literature specifically, when the climate is little more than interchangeable backdrop.
I don’t want to take away from Phillips’ achievement with Hum, which is an excellent novel that I thoroughly enjoyed, by saying that Hum is another example of this indifferent use of climate as setting. That’s because Hum is a story not about climate, but about parenting children in an AI world. If May lived in a community completely unaffected by climate, and if she were dragging her very urbanised kids away from their bunnies to a national park run by AI, and those kids revolted and ran away to public backlash, then the novel would functionally be no different. Climate’s just a literary convenience to make the city look shittier than normal, that’s all. The Book of Records could happily follow Arendt and Spinoza and Du Fu without the benefit of that very soft-focused frame. Endling barely needs to engage with climate at all to explore a rescue mission for a single snail in wartime. Brahm Saxena could take up any environmental issue to force a reckoning between his children and their different experiences of a misogynistic society in The Tiger’s Share.
And yes, of course a lot of environmental issues, such as habitat destruction and decreasing air quality caused by pollution are exacerbated by climate change. This is something to really dig into—but few of this shortlist do. Mostly, they use climate change as a largely disconnected bit of environmental colour, inserted into the background where it has very little effect on the main narrative. The one exception is Awake in the Floating City, which really should have won on the grounds that it marries climate change and adaptation in a manner that is far more balanced, and far more convincing, than the rest of the texts.
Don’t get me wrong: the Climate Prize shortlist for 2026 is full of excellent, even outstanding novels. Dusk stands out for its gorgeous prose, Endling for its playful (if grim) inventiveness. But for the most part, this is a shortlist that considers climate through the lens of aesthetic rather than urgency.
That is not a failure on the part of any of the authors. Their books were largely excellent. I do hope that next year’s shortlist centres climate more forcefully than this one did, however, because when the worst of climate change hits us it’s not going to be as colourful background. Perhaps the fiction prize most associated with climate change might consider taking that into account.