In most fiction, environment plays a passive role that lies embedded in stability and an unchanging status quo. From Adam Smith’s 18^thCentury economic vision to the conceit of bankers who drove the 2008 American housing bubble, humanity has consistently espoused the myth of a constant natural world capable of absorbing infinite abuse without oscillation. This thinking is the ideological manifestation of Holocene stability, remnants from 11,000 years of small variability in temperature and carbon dioxide levels. This stability easily gives rise to deep-seated habits and ideas about the resilience of the natural world. 

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But this is changing. 

Our world is changing. We currently live in a world in which climate change poses a very real existential threat to most life currently on the planet. The new normal is change. And it is within this changing climate that eco-fiction is realizing itself as a literary pursuit worth engaging in.

Eco-Fiction (short for ecological fiction) is a kind of fiction in which the environment—or one aspect of the environment—plays a major role, either as premise or as character. Our part in environmental destruction is often embedded in eco-fiction themes, particularly if they are dystopian or cautionary (which they often are). At the heart of eco-fiction are strong relationships forged between a major character and an aspect of their environment. The environmental aspect may serve as a symbolic connection to theme and can illuminate through the sub-text of metaphor a core aspect of the main character and their journey: the grounding nature of the land of Tara for Scarlet O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind; the over-exploited sacred white pine forests for the lost Mi’kmaq in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins; the mystical life-giving sandworms for the beleaguered Fremen of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Many readers are seeking fiction that addresses environmental issues but explores a successful paradigm shift: fiction that accurately addresses our current issues with intelligence and hope. A way through it if not a way out of it. The power of envisioning a certain future is that the vision enables one to see it as possible. 

“the best part about writing science fiction,” writes Ottawa SF author Marie Bilodeau, “is showing different ways of being without having your characters struggle to gain rights. Invented worlds can host a social landscape where debated rights in this world – such as gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia – are just a fact of life.” The emerging sub-genre of ‘mundane science fiction’ addresses Bilodeau’s argument by featuring worlds and people within a new paradigm of ‘ordinary’. Eco-fiction examples of ‘mundane’ include Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girland Kim Stanley Robinson’s post-climate-change drowned New York 2140.  

In fact, eco-fiction has been with us for decades—it just hasn’t been overtly recognized as a literary phenomenon until recently and particularly in light of mainstream concern with climate change (hence the recently adopted terms ‘climate fiction’, ‘cli-fi’, and ‘eco-punk’, all of which are eco-fiction). Strong environmental themes and/or eco-fiction characters populate all genres of fiction from the literary fiction of Richard Powers to the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood and the science fiction of Frank Herbert. This establishes eco-fiction as a cross-genre phenomenon of literature better described as a focus or treatment than a sub-genre or brand, per se. My thought on the emergence of the term eco-fiction to describe works is that we are all awakening—novelists and readers of novels—to our changing environment. We are finally ready to see and portray environment as an interesting character with agency.

Below is my current list of 30 eco-fiction novels and short story collections that have impacted me, incited me think, and feel and act.

• Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Anihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
• Barkskins by Annie Proulx
• Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta
• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
• The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
• A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
• New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Canadian Tales of Climate Change (edited) by Bruce Meyer
• Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Breathing Hole by Coleen Murphy
• Borne by Jeff Vandermeer
• The Bear by Andrew Krivak
• Fauna by Christiane Vadnais
• Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad 
• Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan 
• Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling
• Lost Arc Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
• The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Greenwood by Micheal Christie
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Della Owens
• Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
• Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia (edited) by Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu

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