The future of climate change and hurricanes is beset with huge unknowns – both scientifically and culturally – because the situation is so unique and unprecedented in human history. Given these unknowns, the climate fiction (cli-fi) genre is useful for envisioning a difficult-to-imagine future.
Below, I review three cli-fi books that present plausible scenarios. All of them predict that hurricanes combined with sea level rise will inevitably bring about economic hardship of the kind I have been warning about for years: a collapse of the coastal property market, resulting in people abandoning hurricane-prone coastal areas. I highly recommend reading all three books and give them a rating of four out of five stars each.
North (2025), by Jesse Keenan
One of the most impressive and comprehensive non-fiction books on climate change ever written is “North” (2025), by climate adaptation expert Jesse Keenan of Tulane University. “North” would make an excellent textbook for a college-level course on climate change adaptation, and I recommend it for readers unafraid of the highly technical language Keenan uses.
But Keenan devotes the last 5% of “North” to cli-fi, which envisions a relatively hopeful scenario for post-climate America in 2079. He defines this as a time when “societies and economies have internalized the uncertainty, the risks, and the opportunities of climate change … with climate action under a renewed sense of optimism of a shared future built on a balance of American civic nationalism and local autonomy.”
