Writing eco-fiction and climate chaos

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24 January 2025
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Deborah Tomkins

I am passionate about nature! I grew up in the countryside and was fortunate to be surrounded by people who were very knowledgeable about the natural world. In the tiny village primary school (about 85 pupils) a classroom corner was set aside for our own Natural History Museum, and we were encouraged to bring in natural objects for display — a feather, a fossil, a shell.

When I realised in the 1990s that climate change is real and that nature is struggling, I assumed, along with many, that the governments of the world would deal with it. A decade later, it became obvious that this wasn’t happening, and around 2007 I began writing stories about climate change.

My sci-fi novella Aerth (Weatherglass Books) and my realist novel The Wilder Path (Aurora Metro Books) both have climate and nature as themes, and are both being published this year. It’s taken a long time, but the topic is timely. People are waking up to the twin crises of climate and nature.

Earth’s climate is changing very fast due to the overuse of fossil fuels. While it’s true that Earth has lived through several Ice Ages in the last 3 billion years and should right now be approaching another, these natural cycles happen thousands of times slower than what we are experiencing today.

The culprit is our unchecked burning of coal, gas and oil, which heats up the atmosphere – all that heat energy has to go somewhere. In recent years the UK has experienced unprecedented heatwaves, storms, flooding, and cold weather; across the world extreme weather events are increasing, including floods sweeping cars and buildings away in city centres, hurricanes and terrifying wildfires, even in the depths of winter. Globally, weather is becoming unpredictable, as normal climatic patterns are disrupted by ever-greater amounts of heat energy in the atmosphere.

This is climate chaos, when we really don’t know what’s coming next.

Climate chaos causes unreliable seasons — tropical rains fail, or come at strange times of the year, so that crops die through drought or flood, and people starve. Economic and financial chaos follow, not forgetting the emotional, psychological and political fall-out. We are seeing this right now in California.

How do we begin to write about these enormous issues?

For me, writing about climate chaos means making the stories intimate and personal. How do people feel when the military arrive to sort things out? How do they feel when the Red Cross or Red Crescent is handing out food parcels? How do they feel when their village is swept away or burnt down, or when they lose family members?

And then the politics. How do governments manage? What about the human stories of officials being overwhelmed by their responsibilities — or doctors, nurses, firefighters, farmers, and builders. We could write about town planners and their responsibilities to keep people safe and keep the town functioning, while planning for an uncertain future. Or teachers, and of course parents, children, and elderly relatives.

In Aerth, Magnus experiences two types of disrupted climate on two planets, and we see and experience it with him. I began this book by imagining how a society would adapt to a new Ice Age (not so far-fetched, in northern Europe). In The Wilder Path, Rosalie grieves for her climate activist son, who died some years before on a Greenpeace ship, and also for the damage done to nature by increasingly volatile and unpredictable weather systems.

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But such stories can’t just be about loss and grief. We have to find some sort of redemption, a different and better path, some hope. It’s not possible to reverse climate change (although we can perhaps slow it down and learn to adapt), so writers need to imagine different ways through the climate/political/societal chaos, different ways of structuring society or growing food, for example, different futures. Writers can research and write moving personal stories.

Many people find it difficult to imagine what they haven’t experienced, whether good or bad, past or future. I think it’s our job as storytellers to explore these different worlds and bring them to readers, as it always has been. Charles Dickens wrote extensively about social inequality in his storytelling, thus helping to bring it to the attention of the public, which in turn began to bring pressure on successive governments of the time. And he didn’t preach! This is probably one of the most difficult challenges, to lay out a persuasive case for change without telling readers what to think. But we are surely up to the challenge – stories can change the world.

Aerth won the Weatherglass Inaugural Novella Prize, 2024. (ISBN 978-1739570781)
The Wilder Path won The Virginia Prize for Fiction (Aurora Metro Books), 2024. (ISBN 978-1910798683)

www.DeborahTomkinsWriter.com

Deborah Tomkins writes long and short fiction, often about climate change. She lives in Bristol with her family.

 

If you're interested in writing climate change fiction for read The Last Bear author Hannah Gold on the role of children's writing in shaping a better future

 

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