Have you noticed that stories with climate themes tend to be dystopian?

Here are a few examples that spring to mind:

• Snowpiercer (TV Show).

• Parable of the Sower (Novel) by Octavia Butler.

• Dreamland (Novel) by Rosa Rankin-Gee.

• The Wall (Novel) by John Lanchester.

All of these are dystopias. The story exists in the wreckage after the world has been ravaged by climate change disasters and resulting socio-economic breakdown. The stories aren't about climate change per se, but it is the terrain on which the stories play out.

They're all really good and some of my favourites —definitely check them out if you haven't.

But I do think maybe having so many climate dystopia stories and so few other kinds of climate stories is a shame.

What do fictional climate dystopias tell us?

Does our collective pessimism about the future of climate change lead us to regularly cast it as a dystopia? Or does a media diet of climate dystopias lead to pessimism about the future, as we can't imagine anything else?

I think it's probably both.

To do something you first have to be able to imagine it.

Tell the stories of a world that solved the climate crisis

I would love to see more stories set in a future where the climate crisis was addressed more or less successfully.

What would it look like?

Would all the homes generate their own energy and have rooftop gardens? Do people still eat meat? Would vast forests be rewilded? What was lost along the way?

So many fascinating worldbuilding possibilities. Maybe with more stories like this, we'd more clearly see the possibilities open to us in the real world.