- A recent study explored whether a combination of hope and fear in climate fiction can induce climate action intentions.
- Climate fiction is a way to imagine consequences of the ecological crisis as well as solutions.
- Ambitopian fiction breaks away from binary climate narratives that focus on dystopia or utopia, and may be most effective in inspiring action.
In his 2020 book, The Ministry for the Future, author Kim Stanley Robinson, weaves together two scenarios: a world grappling with the stark realities of climate change while still offering hope. In doing so, Robinson breaks away from solely dystopian or utopian climate change narratives. A recent study used this book to explore if a combination of hope and fear in climate fiction can positively impact climate action intentions, with initial findings suggesting that it may have a small impact on willingness to take climate action.
Climate fiction is slowly growing as a tool to talk about climate change. In his 2018 study, researcher Matthew Schneider-Mayerson spoke about how climate fiction – literature that focuses on climate change – has “exploded” in the last decade. It has become a way to talk about climate realities, make people care about the planet, and stimulate climate action. However, empirical evidence on how climate fiction impacts climate action is limited, says Mayerson’s study, especially when it comes to understanding the role of hope and fear.
In the recent study, published in the journal Poetics, the authors focus on the genre of ambitopian climate fiction, which refers to fiction that combines both climate hope and fear appeals.
“Fear-inducing narratives have been dominant in the climate space but it’s good for attention, not for action. People also need a sense of efficacy to do something about it,” says study author Jagadish Thaker, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia. “A combination of the two (hope and fear) will most likely result in heightened concerns matched with beliefs that one has power, individually and collectively, to address them,” he adds. The study authors found ambitopian fiction was efficient at inducing both hope and fear in U.S. and Indian samples. Moreover, in the Indian sample, it stimulated climate action intentions indirectly through these emotions.

Climate fiction as a tool
In 2016, author Amitav Ghosh, in his book The Great Derangement, questioned the lack of fiction writers exploring climate change and its impacts. Since then, there has been a wave of writers who have delved into climate fiction, such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Janice Pariat, and Ghosh himself.
Pariat, who is the author of Everything the Light Touches, says writing climate fiction was a reaction to the climate crisis-addled world. “I am from Meghalaya, which is part of northeast India. In my region, there is a great deal of environmental degradation done in the name of development by a few capitalistic elites who take advantage of indigenous hill communities. Huge chunks of land are bought and leased out to mining companies. Writing stories on such issues is my way of responding to it,” she says.
As Pariat pointed out, climate fiction often is a way to talk about the severity of the ecological crisis and its impact on human and non-human life.
While there is data to inform, climate fiction helps people understand by encouraging them to imagine what it might be like to live through such a crisis. What are the ways people may adapt? What are potential solutions? It’s a tool that could be more effective than just putting the numbers on the table.
“It’s not just more effective, you need it. How do you imagine hope or action? You have to imagine it in the context. Adaptation is about human behaviour. And to understand how people will react, behave, and feel, you need the fiction element of it,” says author and ecologist Harini Nagendra who is also the director of the School of Climate Change and Sustainability at Azim Premji University.

Why ambitopian fiction?
Good storytelling has the potential to create consciousness and spark action, says Jayanthi Krishnamachary, a journalist and researcher who is doing a Ph.D. in environmental literature. She uses the example of American author and biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring published in 1962, which exposed the harmful effects of synthetic pesticides, especially DDT, and sparked an environmental movement. Senator Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, had told Carson, “Every once in a while, in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history.”
Krishnamachary says she believes that’s the kind of narrative readers need. “One that will kindle both environmental and political consciousness as well as action. You need a book that can be a turning point,” she adds.
In 2023, author Redfern Jon Barrett wrote a speculative urban fiction in which he went beyond the binary between dystopia and utopia and brought in an ambitopian narrative. Although dystopian fiction is more popular than utopian stories, Barrett argued in an interview, “No work of dystopian fiction has ever stopped the scenarios it portrays from happening.”
Often, the attempts to persuade people to engage in climate action rely heavily on climate change leading to disasters, erasure of civilisation, and widespread devastation of the planet’s biosphere, Thaker and colleagues note in their study. Dystopian narratives can add to eco-anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and negatively impact people’s mental health, possibly discouraging them from taking action, the study adds.
Meanwhile, utopian climate stories look promising but could result in complacency and wishful thinking, the authors state. Talking about utopian fiction in the aforementioned interview, feminist writer Laurel Penny said that instead of perfect futures, it would be more interesting to see societies that “want to be much better than they are now.”

Finding the middle ground
There should be a balance between conveying climate risks and solutions, says Nagendra. “While bringing in climate consequences is important, there has to be an element that tells people how to act,” she says. Homogenous narratives are not going to appeal to people. There should be diversity in storytelling, she further adds.
Both Pariat and Krishnamachary say doomsday fiction is not sustainable or useful. “Climate stories should include people’s resilience and response in overcoming the challenges, the initiatives to check the crisis and the preparedness during climate eventualities. Climate migration is a story that needs to be communicated,” Krishnamachary says.
Krishnamachary points towards Gabriel García Márquez’s book One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example. “Often in effective writing, you have to bring in both extremes. You can’t press the panic button and dwell merely on dystopia and despair.”
However, for Pariat, the combination of hope and love, rather than hope and fear is the alternative. She says she feels fear tends to constrict people and cause short-term impact. “It slides into despair at some point and makes it all about humans. Today, the capitalistic systems at play are built on fear of scarcity and fear of failure. Instead, love is expansive. Love makes us grateful, empathetic, caring, and even angry,” she explains.
Climate fiction offers a unique way to imagine the future, regardless of the scenario the writer chooses to offer. For Krishnamachary, it all comes down to effective use of language, narrative transportation, and identification with climate changes. “For collective action and long-term effects, climate narratives should have persuasive power. If the storytelling is not powerful, climate fiction may not be effective in changing attitudes towards the climate crisis,” she says.
Read more: [Book Review] Tackling climate crisis, the science fiction way
Banner image: A bookstore in Bengaluru. Since 2016, there have been a wave of writers who have delved into climate fiction. Representative image by Soumendra Kumar Sahoo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).