Climate Fiction, or cli-fi, is an ever-growing and increasingly urgent subgenre of speculative fiction that explores the possible outcomes of climate change. Although this genre is more popular today than ever before, writers have been imagining what the future might hold for our planet for decades. Octavia Butler's seminal cli-fi classic The Parable of the Sower was published in 1993.
The following teen titles will inspire readers to think deeply what our world might look like in the future and to consider how humanity may change as our world does.
In This Is the Year, Juli is given the chance of a lifetime to join the Cometa Initiative on a mission to establish a human settlement on the moon. She desperately wants to leave Earth behind, where her Florida home has been ravaged by the climate crisis and where her twin sister, Ofelia, was recently killed in a hit-and-run accident. But once she has the opportunity to leave, she has to re-evaluate her place in the world and what she might lose if she leaves it behind.
A year after an apocalyptic storm, Liz has holed up in the bookstore she once worked at, trading books for supplies. When she learns that another, even more damaging storm might be coming, she has no idea how she will complete the various repairs that the store desperately needs, until a girl named Maeve breaks in in the middle of the night and agrees to help her. The two form an uneasy alliance that slowly blossoms into something more. Teens might particularly enjoy The Last Bookstore on Earth since debut author Lily Braun-Arnold is a teenager herself!
Hundreds of years in the future, most of society lives in a frozen hellscape, except for a select few who live in Snowglobe, a paradise where reality tv is created. When Jeon Chobahm is offered the chance of a lifetime to join one of her favorite shows, she is thrilled to finally leave her bleak existence in the outer world behind. But she soon learns that there are layers of darkness beneath Snowglobe's glittering façade, and learning the full truth may cost her her life.
Inspired by Lipan Apache storytelling traditions, National Book Award Finalist and Printz Honor A Snake Falls to Earth tells a wholly original story through two different points of view. Nina is a teenage girl trying to make sense of a mysterious story her great-great-grandmother told her when she was younger, and Oli is a cottonmouth snake person who can shift forms and move between our world and the Reflecting World. Their stories converge when Oli's learns that his toad friend Ami is dying due to environmental destruction, and Nina seeks answers to a series of mysteries surrounding her grandmother's house.
Teens feeling anxiety around climate change might also be comforted by a true story of teens taking action, such as The 21. In the ongoing case Juliana v. United States, twenty-one young plaintiffs sued the federal government for actively supporting the fossil fuel industry and denying their right to life and liberty. This well-researched and thrilling book follows the plaintiffs and their attorneys and dives deep into the complexities of this case and the workings of the judicial system in general.
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