Building imaginary worlds for climate fiction

An introduction to worldbuilding for climate fiction

Hello, fellow voyagers🖖! In today’s edition we’ll have a look at worldbuilding for climate fiction.

What is worldbuilding?

All my movies are about strange worlds that you can’t go into unless you build them and film them. That’s what’s so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.—David Lynch

Imagination is an innate part of being human, and research suggests that it might even serve an evolutionary purpose. Imaginary worlds built during childhood are known as ‘paracosms’ in psychology, and imaginary worldplay is considered a sign of creative giftedness. Many famous writers, such as C. S. Lewis and the Bronte siblings, started creating imaginary worlds for their writing already during childhood.

In a 2003 review of the Matrix franchise, the journalist Louis Kennedy wrote:

Forget about beginnings, middles, and ends. The new storytelling is about making your way into a fragmented, imaginary world.

Kennedy’s words were prescient, and 22 years later book series, film franchises and serials with multiple seasons and long form storytelling now dominate the market.

But why are humans so attracted to imaginary worlds?

In his book Literature and the Brain, Norman Holland includes a summary of how psychologists see human imagination:

1. ‘The ability to ‘simulate’ situations (to imagine them without acting on them) has great value for humans both in survival and reproduction. This ability to simulate seems to occur innately in the human species. We evolve the ‘association cortices’ in our large frontal lobes for just this purpose.

2. ‘All cultures create fictional, imagined worlds. We humans find these imagined worlds intrinsically interesting.

3. ‘Responding to imaginary worlds, we engage emotion systems while disengaging action systems.

4. ‘Humans have evolved special cognitive systems that enable us to participate in these fictional worlds. We can, in short, pretend and deceive and imagine, having mental states about mental states.

5. ‘We can separate these fictional worlds from our real-life experiences. We can, in a key word, decouple them.’

To paraphrase both Lynch and Holland, worldbuilding is our ability to build and go into strange worlds that are emotionally engaging, help us survive and reproduce or, in their artistic form, entertain us.

With climate fiction, we have a hybrid form of subcreation where secondary or strange worlds combine both survival and entertainment and help us understand how changing the natural world through anthropogenic intervention will impact our future. In his book The Great Derangement, Amitav Gosh writes that we can imagine the future of humanity with climate change through fiction.

…to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be. But as with much else that is uncanny about the Anthropocene, this challenge has appeared before us at the very moment when the form of imagining that is best suited to answering it—fiction—has turned into a radically different direction.

Why a radically different direction? Amitav Gosh argues that to make sense of natural forces that stretch well beyond the human lifespan and are, thus, difficult for us to grasp, we must revive storytelling forms that have been discredited by established literary circles such as science fiction and fantasy. The title of his book The Great Derangement refers to a lack of mainstream literature on the most urgent issue of our time: climate change.

What is climate fiction?

The Climate in Arts and History: Promoting Climate Literacy Across Disciplines, a website managed by the Smith College, defines climate fiction as follows:

Cli-fi, short for climate fiction, is a form of fiction literature that features a changed or changing climate. It is rooted in science fiction but also draws on realism and the supernatural.

The term cli-fi is attributed to the news reporter and climate activist Dan Bloom, who used it for the first time in 2007 or 2008. However, climate fiction as a genre was established in the 2010s, and many works were retroactively categorized as cli-fi. Browse the selected examples of cli-fi literature on the Climate in Arts and History website. You’ll find that the first book listed is Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite novels that was published in 2004 and I read in 2006. One of the main characteristics of cli-fi as a literary genre is that its plot centers around the emotional journey of its main characters.

Climate change is a deep-rooted systemic problem that cannot be solved by a single protagonist in a story, so the drama must revolve around emotions.

I can relate this to Oryx and Crake. While Snowman, aka Jimmy, ends up killing his friend Crake, who unleashes the synthetic virus on the population, he cannot save humanity from extinction. Snowman’s emotional journey has had a lasting impact on me for almost two decades. Climate fiction is already part of the syllabus of university courses in literature and environmental issues. And it could play a role in creating more awareness about the consequences of climate change.

Amitav Ghosh argues that ‘the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.’ He believes that future generations will look back at us and wonder why contemporary literature didn’t tackle the most urgent topic of our time: climate change. As mentioned, he observes that cli-fi is not considered serious literature because of its association with literary genres such as science fiction and fantasy.

Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.

However, Margaret Atwood does not call her novel science fiction because it doesn’t deal with things ‘we can’t yet do or begin to do’. Nevertheless, as a genre, cli-fi must go beyond the realism associated with a contemporary serious novel because, as Amitav Ghosh points out, it needs to re-include nature as an agent of change and as a protagonist:

I do believe it to be true that the land here is demonstrably alive; that it does not exist solely, or even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history; that it is itself a protagonist.

In a 2024 article titled Coming to Terms with Climate Fiction, Molly Tempelton writes that ‘what once seemed like a subgenre of science fiction is actually much bigger’ while describing how she came to terms with a fiction genre that she hated since the late 2000s.

All those years ago, when I resisted the idea, the label, of climate fiction, I was wrong. It’s not a kind of science fiction; science fiction is a kind of climate fiction. What once seemed speculative becomes existential. What once might have looked like a distant future, hopefully avoidable, now looms, immediate and pressing. It is everyone’s concern. There is no umbrella big enough.

Climate fiction writers have the dual challenge entertaining the reader through storytelling and preparing them for survival in a world that will be vastly different from our past. We can tackle both these challenges by building rich imaginary worlds that are emotionally engaging and informative.

Worldbuilding for climate fiction

In the past two years, I have read over 15 climate fiction books and was impressed with the width and breadth of their worldbuilding. The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is a tour de force packed with information about climate change, social inequality, climate science and possible climate solutions meant to educate the reader. In the Parable Series, Octavia Butler uses faith—the main character creates a new religion called Earthseed—and a mission to conquer the stars as a means to save planet Earth from anthropogenic destruction.

Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.

In The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi delves into a pressing issue of the 21st century—the genetically modified seeds and seed patenting practices of fertilizer megacorporations. I love his windup girl, a non-human character:

She is an animal. Servile as a dog. And yet if he is careful to make no demands, to leave the air between them open, another version of the windup girl emerges. As precious and rare as a living bo tree. Her soul, emerging from within the strangling strands of her engineered DNA.

In her novel The Future, Naomi Alderman creates a mirror of today’s society placed in a more tech savvy world where humans prepare for an impending apocalypse. I summarized her solutions for creating a better future:

• Turning mall rooftops into wildlife sanctuaries

• Creating FutureSafe zones where the animals and the natural world balance come first. Humans might or might not be able to live there.

• Land owners should not only have access to the land and its resources but also a responsibility to care for it.

• Installing drones to monitor and protect endangered species.

• Social media platform owners make money by enclosing public property. This money should be used to benefit future generations.

• Shutting down cities for a month to install infrastructure for electric cars. Car owners can exchange their old petrol or gas cars for lifetime access to an electric car-sharing system via an app of their choice. Reduce vehicles by 75% by introducing car sharing.

• Tech companies should not only think about profits but primarily about the kind of world they leave behind.

• Allowing the rain forests to advance across the bare lands by two thousand meters a year in each direction.

• Developing a spongy algae that eats plastic masses, leaches the poison out of the waters, and returns the nutrients to the system.

When I read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake for the first time in 2006, I wondered:

• Who would be interested in watching someone streaming their daily life online? Today, I watch people streaming their lives on YouTube channels daily.

• How would the only decent job for a writer be at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, writing propaganda ad copy? Fifteen years ago, my first translator job was localizing ad copy for a sports betting company. The customers were modern gladiators.

• How could corporates dominate the world? In 2017, the IMF reported that the annual revenues of Apple, Volkswagen and Walmart were higher than the GDPs of Portugal, Chile and Belgium, respectively.

• Why would corporates build privileged walled compounds for their employees and families to protect them from the degenerate outside world? Today, Silicon Valley parents raise their children tech-free in exclusive private schools.

In 2025, it’s hard to believe I considered such a world science fiction.

As you can see from these five examples, cli-fi novels are ambitious works of fiction that require their authors to fully use their ‘association cortices’—as the psychologists put it—to simulate possible futures based on current world events, scientific discoveries, social developments and next generation tech trends. Their secondary worlds seamlessly weave real-world data into fictional worlds to explore what the future might look like. In many cases, their imagination is prescient. Just like cyberpunk fiction works predicted our present society, future generations will look at these cli-fi works and see their present.

Building your secondary world

My cli-fi mosaic novel There Is Hope is set in Europe in the 2550 ÆV¹. Here’s a brief overview of the worldbuilding.

It’s the year 2550, and following a period of 400 years—also known as the Data War—in which data moguls battled for the last natural resources, Europe is a post-apocalyptic wasteland ravaged by climate change and human greed.

The North Colonies Alliance, located in the cool north, is segregated from the Dust Tribes of climate refugees gathered in the dust bowl of Central Europe and the Japanese Seaweed Colonies situated in the largely uninhabitable south. The Siberian Cooperatives—the stewards of the Taiga, the last standing forest—have a monopoly on all natural resources in an attempt to save the planet’s ecosystem from extinction. Everything is connected by an underground trading route, the Dust Road controlled by the mysterious Dust Pirates.

Dune by Frank Herbert and the Mad Max franchise have been major influences on my novel, as have a series of nonfiction books such as The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells and Seeds of Resistance by Mark Schapiro.

The worldbuilding for There Is Hope has been in the making since 2013, and it expands over 1600 years. Besides climate change, I also explore transhumanism and our evolving relationship with nature and technology in my fiction. I plan to place my short story entry for The Future of Nature writing prompt in this secondary world.

How about you?

As you develop your idea for a short story about the future of nature, I’d like you to take some time to reflect on your worldbuilding.

• What is the backstory of your imaginary world?

• What fiction works influenced your story?

• What nonfiction works informed your worldbuilding?

• What real-world issues do you tackle in your story?

Story development exercise

Write an elevator pitch for your story and share it in the chat until our next live Q&A session on April 3rd, where you will enrich your story world with Jonathan Tonkin an ecology professor who will have a look at your story through a science lens.

You’ll need your elevator pitch to get the most out of this Q&A session.

See you in the chat!

—Claudia

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As a writer, my goal is to inspire action through fiction. I write cli-fi and speculative stories on climate change, transhumanism, and our evolving relationship with nature and technology. Subscribe to get my stories directly in your inbox! Paid subscribers get my mosaic cli-fi novel There Is Hope as an eBook this spring. Stories can change the future.

1. Æræ Vulgaris or Common Era