Writing Climate Change

A series on writing Climate Change for fiction

This series started out as a simple look at how to add climate change into science fiction world-building. Since then the series has evolved into a comprehensive study of everything writer’s (and other creators) need to know on the subject.

If you are a writer, this is what you need to know about climate change.

Drop in where you like. Some parts will make more sense if read in order.

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Basic World-Building

How to write a future climate scenario.

• Part 1: Burnt polar bears and making **** up

• Part 2: A case study where I go down a rabbit hole about oranges

• Part 3: The basics - how much warming?

• Part 4: The basics - what time period?

• Part 5: The basics - curve-balls

• Part 6: If I can’t see it does it exist?

• Part 7: The biggest shortcut

• Part 8: research resources

• Part 9: being beautifully wrong

• Part 10: being fantastically wrong

• Part 11: prophets of the Apocalypse

• Part 12: Mass Extinction

• Part 13: The Collapse of Civilisation

• Part 14: The Destruction Gap and the Foreclosure of the Imagination

Literary Forms

Different styles of literature, and how they work for climate change.

• Part 15: Getting Literary - the Apocalypse for Optimists

• Part 16: Getting Literary – Global Weirdness

• Part 17: Getting Literary – Actually Epic

• Part 18: Getting Literary – Modern Epic, Encyclopedias, and Giant Books About Everything

• Part 19: Getting Literary – The Individual Moral Adventure

• Part 20: Getting Literary – Realism vs Reality

• Part 21: Getting Literary – Tragedy

• Part 22: Getting Literary – Comedy

• Part 23: Getting Literary – the War and the Bomb

The Fight for the Climate

The struggle over the future of our world.

• Part 24: The Fight for the Climate – The Power’s That Be

• Part 25: The Fight for the Climate - The Climate Challenge & Social Change

• Part 26: The Fight for the Climate – Political Ideology & Planetary Questions

• Part 27: The Fight for the Climate – Institutional Failure

• Part 28: The Fight for the Climate – The Failure of the Economy

• Part 29: The Fight for the Climate – Psychology & the Individual (the bad stuff)

• Part 30: The Fight for the Climate – Psychology & the Individual (how people change)

• Part 31: The Fight for the Climate – Social Psychology

• Part 32: The Fight for the Climate – Psychology & Power

• Part 33: The Fight for the Climate – Quirks of the Modern Mind

• Part 34: The Fight for the Climate – Why the World Has Failed: a Quick Summary

• Part 35: The Fight for the Climate – Language, Metaphors, and Imagery

• Part 36: The Fight for the Climate – Climate Activism

• Part 37: The Fight for the Climate – Climate Obstruction

• Part 38: The Fight for the Climate – A Brief History of Climate Fiction

• Part 39: The Fight for the Climate – Thinking Big (planet sized big)

• ... more coming!

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