As a research team formed of creative writing scholars and practitioners, we investigate climate change fiction, exploring the artistic and emotionally supportive possibilities of storytelling. In this article we explore the intersections between climate fiction and commercial romance fiction by analysing three case studies: Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rachel Griffin’s The Nature of Witches and Aya de León’s Side Chick Nation. We examine the ways in which they explore, challenge and offer strategies for engaging with the climate crisis in an optimistic relationship-oriented genre, considering the complications of subgenre and positionality.
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As climate change looms, a topic too big to ignore, these romance texts successfully embed depictions of a planet in crisis into the familiar narrative structures of a romance novel, in which two characters meet, fall in love, face barriers and ultimately end up happily together. Crucially, they do so without reducing climate change and its various manifestations to a mere contemporary backdrop, before which the standard courtship and consummation plays out. Instead, these texts demonstrate how the romance genre’s commitment to an eschatology of love (Roach, 2010) can offer deeper commentaries on pathways out of our climate crisis, with loving relationships the wellsprings from which serious change can begin. At a time when most climate fiction remains rooted in dystopian future-disaster, this dedication to the positive potentialities of human relationships casts climate fiction romance—or “Cli-Ro”—as a radically optimistic subgenre.
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Romance, as a genre built on foundations of idealism, hope and comfort, may have unique tools to help us write new climate fictions, tools that centre relationships, communities, love and an ethics of care.
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In Sally Rooney’s realist literary romance, Beautiful World, Where Are You, the characters actively worry about climate change, writing wonderfully complex and nuanced letters about capitalism and their implication in it, despite never actually being directly affected by the crisis; in the end, they are disconcerted to find love and happiness can co-exist with existential anxiety. In Rachel Griffin’s The Nature of Witches, a young adult (YA) romance-fantasy novel, magic softens the starkness of the climate crisis, and love, friendship and community become an integral part of the effort to combat the crisis (quite literally). Side Chick Nation is a romance-thriller set during Hurricane Maria and is more grounded in the realities of how climate change impacts those in the Global South, yet it is also arguably the most optimistic of the three novels, exploring how love can be a powerful tool for activism.
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Aside from gesturing at different narrative pathways, these case studies also demonstrate the part positionality plays in our experiences and responses to the climate crisis. Beautiful World, Where Are You is located in a developed nation, Ireland, and features white European characters for whom the climate crisis is still imminent, an existential but intellectual problem. The Nature of Witches has a more racially diverse cast but flattens their economic and geographical diversity into an homogenous experience at a private school for witches on the east coast of the US. The novel is primarily concerned with Gen Z emotional responses to the notion of inheriting responsibility for fixing the Problem. The characters in this book are positioned as economically privileged and race is not shown to be a driver of disadvantage. While both Rooney and Griffin’s novels are culturally from the privileged Global North, Side Chick Nation is very much set in parts of the Global South, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, where intersections of race, colony, gender and economic disadvantage are central to the characters’ experiences of the climate crisis.
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