Blue sky thinking: why we need positive climate novels [View all]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/16/blue-sky-thinking-why-we-need-positive-climate-novels

Blue sky thinking: why we need positive climate novels

Environmental fiction is booming – but can it move beyond dystopia to a brighter vision of the future?

Sarah Hall
Sat 16 Aug 2025 04.00 EDT

Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel, Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, but there was no imperative to write about such things. These stories involved anomalistic catastrophes – a mutated virus, nuclear war – and they were very bleak. They resonated but also seemed unusual. At the other end of the scale, Ben Elton’s Stark had comedically outlined the nature of oligarchic greed, resource consumption, and the ruination we were hurtling towards, while the Bezos and Musk equivalents could head off-world – not quite so funny now.

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In the 2000s, while the scientific data was righting itself from hacks and attacks, a whole spate of alarming nonfiction books arrived, forecasting the devastating effect of global temperature rises, mass extinctions, and the chaotic world that would occur if our trajectory of fossil fuel consumption, industrial farming, deforestation and the like wasn’t altered. Books like Six Degrees (Mark Lynas), A World Without Bees (Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum), and Half Gone (Jeremy Leggett) sounded the doom gong, loudly.

As a news-hungry novelist, I responded, wringing jeopardy from these predictions to create a dire, possible future. Full-throttle dystopian speculation seemed to be appropriate. I wrote The Carhullan Army, which imagines female paramilitary resistance in a Britain destabilised by flooding and politically fascistic, where rationing and population control are the new norms. Looking back, I can see this story arrived out of pure, exhilarated fear about impending ecological disaster, the repressive systems which could arise out of it and their effect, especially, on women. It was an attempt to ring the same warning bell, to create a virtual, experiential realm for the reader out of their propositions.

… more … ecotopia vs dystopia …