Looking back now at the way she depicted the environment and climate with a granular seriousness about the costs of human interference, she reads like a psychic preparing readers for the current era. Le Guin became one of my major influences. Through novellas like “The Word for World Is Forest” and “Sur,” Ursula K. Do they still exist or have they winked out one by one? No one on Earth knows.īut if it seemed natural and right that Veniss Underground intrinsically included climate change and examined our fraught relationship to the nonhuman world (a major reason for the current crisis), then it was because I had grown up on so many other climate-adjacent works of fiction.

Over time, climate crisis has even reached colonies in the solar system, with Earth no longer able to support them. Humans, along with their increasingly rebellious biotech creations, live in fortress cities with protective walls a mile deep. In the story cycle, climate crisis has turned most of the world into lifeless desert. I’ve been grappling with “climate fiction” by any other name ever since I wrote my first novel, Veniss Underground, and short stories set in the same far-future world. Sometimes it is written in an era where the subject in question cannot help but become the underlying infrastructure and subtext. But the term “climate fiction” didn’t yet exist-at least not in any widely used form. Even then, I took it as a given that human-created climate change had overtaken us, and that any future I wrote about must in some way grapple with the issue. I can’t quite recall when I first read or heard the term “global warming,” or its successor, “climate change.” I can only tell you that it has permeated my fiction since I started writing in the 1980s.

Entangled life