6 Science Fiction Books That Will Make You Want to Give Earth a Hug

Clade, by James Bradley
Clade is possibly the most beautiful, optimistic end of the world novel ever written. In interlinking narratives, it tells the story of Adam and Ellie Leith, their family, their friends, and their descendants, set against a backdrop of apocalyptic storms, vanishing glaciers, flooding, turmoil, and dwindling colonies of bees. But what that description doesn’t convey is the amount of hope, beauty, poetry, and heart that Bradley pours into his apocalypse, painting lush portraits of the Australian bush and the people there who are just trying to survive together. In spite of the encroaching doom they must face, somehow the Leiths and their friends survive together, leading to an ending equal parts beautiful, melancholy, and a little bit hopeful.

Wonderblood, by Julia Whicker
An unexplained disaster in Kansas released “wonderblood” into the soil, causing mass destruction, disease, and death. In the years since, humanity has built itself a kingdom centered around the rocket towers of Cape Canaveral and perverted the studies of science into a weird form of religion, punishing actual science and medicine as a form of heresy and depending on astrology, religion, and the totemic worship of heretics’ shrunken heads. The world is thrown into an uproar by the arrival of Aurora, a young woman who gets caught in the struggle between a traveling carnival owned by a prophecy-obsessed megalomaniac and the kingdom’s chief advisor, just as mysterious lights appear in the sky. Whicker captures a tone somewhere between dark fairy tale and grotesque new weird fantasy, setting her violent, apocalyptic science-fantasy in a grotesque, fully-realized setting augmented by equally surreal illustrations, creating a strange and hopefully timeless work of climate apocalypse fiction.

The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin
Jemisin spent time with NASA climate scientists to build the world of the Broken Earth trilogy, set on a perpetually post-apocalyptic continent where numerous disasters, natural and otherwise, have split the earth asunder countless times over the centuries…but never quite like this. As the trilogy opens, the Earth itself has taken on the auspices of something of a Satan figure, perpetually threatening all life; the moon hass been knocked into an erratic orbit; and an oppressive, survival-obsessed empire keeps oppressive control over the orogenes, a group of magically (?) gifted people able to cause earthquakes and change weather patterns. The Stone Sky brings the series to a close. Though protagonist Essun’s powers slowly turning her to stone, she is determined to use them—and the mysterious Obelisk Gate—to right what is wrong with the world and end the apocalyptic “Fifth Seasons,” and bring the world back into equilibrium. The series’ themes of balance and history repeating also come to a head, as the stories of past civilizations echo into the present. Jemisin’s complex worldbuilding and deep use of history and social themes create a series of truly epic scope.

New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Told from the multiple viewpoints of people in an apartment building in Manhattan in the year 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Hugo Award-nominated 2017 novel takes place over a century into the future, when the rising sea levels have flooded Manhattan and turned it into a city of canals and skyscrapers. Robinson has long been known as a writer of harder, more realistic science fiction, with books like Red Mars and The Years of Rice and Salt edging closer to alternate/future history than speculation; in his character-driven exploration of a future New York, he shows he’s still firing on all cylinders. Mixing a wide-ranging mystery plot, a travelogue of the drowned city, and a deep dive into the history of New York and the science of climate change, this is a fascinating, engrossing journey into a scarily plausible vision of the future.

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
On a beach sometime after the end of humanity, a man who calls himself Snowman reminisces about his life pre-apocalypse, and how his best friend “Crake” possibly caused the extinction of all human life. From this beginning, Atwood paints a picture of a world where genetic engineering has gone mad—transgenic pigs are grown for organ transplants, and scientists are conducting truly squirm-inducing experiments involving viruses, and the environment is only becoming stranger and more dystopian with each technological advance or attempt to play god. Ecologically, things are in decline, with numerous species going extinct, catastrophic storms on the rise, and evolved forms of genetically engineered creatures roaming around. Atwood weaves a satire at times darkly hilarious, genuinely hilarious, horrifying, and deeply affecting as she tells the story of Snowman and the world he unwittingly helped end.

The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner
Told in the style that defines most of Brunner’s work, The Sheep Look Up is a multi-strand narrative told in an experimental documentary style, focusing on a future where the Earth has become a polluted hellhole, air is unbreathable (an early section of signs reads “WATER UNSAFE FOR DRINKING” and “OXYGEN—25¢”), and corporations and government alike vie for a way to hold the basic rights to things like clean water, air, and gas masks. Forty-six years after it was first published, the novel looks both dated and prescient, inviting us to draw parallels to the present day more often that we scoff at predictions that never came to pass. The somewhat disjointed style allows Brunner to fully explore the implications of his dystopia and its inevitable resulting societal collapse, making for an unnerving, compelling read.