Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022, with Dini at Dini Panda Reads as co-host from February 2025.
This is a really interesting topic for today (though to be fair, LTB topics usually are!), and I think very timely, as we’re increasingly seeing the effects of climate change taking hold. The weather in the UK has always been up and down, but feels more often like it’s sitting in extremes now. So, let’s dive in and see what comes out with today’s LTB post!
Let’s Talk Bookish 24th April:
The Increasing Popularity of Climate Fiction
Prompts: Climate fiction is an increasingly popular genre, and has grown from being seen as a sci-fi subgenre to a broader category of its own — its own literary prize even being established in 2025. Have you read climate fiction (‘cli-fi’) or books centred around environmental issues? Do stories about the climate or the environment make you feel hopeful, anxious, or something else? Do you think cli-fi can influence how people think about the environment?
I’ve read a handful of cli-fi books, and a few others that centre around the environment in different ways, often looking at the extreme endpoint of what could happen in the future. Like any other genre, there’s good and there’s bad, but for me personally, I don’t think I’ve read any that I particularly loved so much I think of it regularly afterwards (except for maybe The Supreme Lie, where the environment plays a constant role and has resulted in a dystopia, worsened by recent floods).
Again, the feelings and emotions I feel towards the book are dependent both on the author and their skill – if an author has the skills to make us feel a particular way, we’re going to respond to that. Unfortunately, I think there’s often a gap between the intended emotions and the actual ones, and even in books which feel like they’re supposed to be hopeful, there can be an anxiousness underlying it all, or a feeling of hopelessness, depending on the actual book and what the characters experience.
Maybe I’ve just so happened to pick up the poorer examples from cli-fi, but I find they tend to err on the side of preachy, and if they’re set in the future, there’s a lot of criticisms about people from the past (ie, our present day) being ignorant and not caring, and occasionally it’s utterly insulting. With a subgenre built specifically around politics in this way, I do think it risks containing a certain kind of smugness that can be off-putting. In the (admittedly few!) I’ve read, they lean too much on telling rather than showing. All these elements add up to a poor book experience, and I think if you spend the book lecturing rather than allowing people to experience the story, characters and environment, it’s not going to hold much interest.
The other issue I see is people reading cli-fi are likely going to be aware of environmental issues anyway, and interested in the genre because of a pre-existing interest in the environment. I do believe fiction does have influence, and the power to influence, but I don’t see it pushing the needle much in the way people consider the environment, though I think it’s strength lies in being able to inform and deepen someone’s knowledge. But who knows – maybe there’ll be a huge, mainstream breakout hit from the genre that impacts the world.
And if you have any cli-fi recommendations for books you think don’t have the negative aspects I mentioned above (or they’re handled in a good way in a talented writer’s hands, have less of them etc) please do let me know! I’d definitely be interested in reading more of it.
Unwrapping Words 