New Climate Fiction Author Sarah Ruiz-Grossman’s Favorite Cli-Fi Books
This story and interview originally appeared in HuffPost’s Books newsletter. Sign up here for weekly book news, author interviews and more.In January, the European climate agency Copernicus reported that the Earth was on track to break annual global heat records, the latest undeniable symptom in the climate crisis. One month after this report, Sarah Ruiz-Grossman released her debut novel, “A Fire So Wild,” adding to the vital voices in climate fiction, a literary genre marked by notable works such as Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 “Parable of the Sower.”As a former HuffPost reporter, this isn’t Ruiz-Grossman’s first foray into writing about the environmental predicament and, more specifically, about how climate change affects the population unequally and leads to further social injustices.Informed by this breadth of knowledge, “A Fire So Wild” tells the story of a wildfire overtaking Berkeley, California. We observe the Bay Area city through the perspective of characters who possess vastly different socioeconomic statuses and access to resources, yet are interconnected in some way. As the blaze transforms homes and precious wildlife into ash and the city’s residents are left with the scorched aftermath, readers truly understand that natural disasters, though indiscriminate, never hit everyone the same way. Shortly after the book’s release, I had the opportunity to hear Ruiz-Grossman talk about her novel alongside the creator and host of “The Stacks” book podcast, Traci Thomas, at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. Appropriately nestled in front of a live tree growing at the shop’s center, we listened to Ruiz-Grossman explain the ways that works of fiction like hers can impart necessary commentary on the climate crisis in ways that nonfiction cannot. Here is some of their conversation, followed by a few of Ruiz-Grossman’s recommendations on climate fiction. As a HuffPost journalist, you reported on the climate crisis. How was this transition into writing something fictional? I was feeling the call to have a project outside of my journalism as I was isolating, not socializing with anybody, so I started working on fiction. And this felt like the only story I could tell. It was that fifth year of seeing the fires get worse. And just this past summer, I went to New York, which is my hometown, and there were orange skies blanketing our city for the first time. There was just no closing your eyes to this anymore. What I was able to do with the fiction that I couldn’t do in my reporting is that, in your reporting, you’re telling a very narrow story. It’s the story of this one fire and this one community. These stories are important, and sticking to facts are important, but there’s a lot more truth you can get in fiction in the ways that you thread in the relationships and the lives of people, and how those are impacted not just on this one day and the aftermath and the policies, but who are they as people before leading into a disaster like this, and who do they become on the other side of that? Because that’s going to be all of us at some point, affected and changed by this. I just read a piece by Matt Salesses in Literary Hub about climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” that the genre has been heralded as this tool for kind of sounding the alarm on what would come. He goes on to say how we’ve had time for these warnings, and now cli-fi needs to serve a new purpose because the future we’ve been warned about is already here. So I’m wondering what you think about your work entering that space? There’s a fine line when you’re writing something that’s both present day and dystopian. I found it hard not to be too heavy-handed with the politic because so much of it you want to feel infuriated and moralistic or self-righteous, and I don’t think that makes for good fiction or good politic. I hope that this book doesn’t feel like it comes in from on high as though I figured out what it is that we’re supposed to be doing or how we’re supposed to live our lives in this moment. I think what I hope it does is puts questions into all of our minds of how we’re supposed to live, how we can be our best citizens in this moment, knowing that we are making decisions every day that put our comfort ahead of what is best for the planet. When you’re writing, are you writing toward a question? Or how does the question come to you in the creative process?I think I’m always writing toward the same question, which is, how are we supposed to live this short, precious, insane existence in this really fucked-up society? And I think that question never gets answered by the work, but it is a way of being in community with other people and with other questioners and examine how the characters [in the book] are put in the world to see what decisions they make and see how that shakes out. Because that’s all we can do, right? Be community with each other and struggle to do our best.In the book, you write from different character perspectives, about seven or eight characters. Why did you choose to do that?I was really uninterested in writing a climate story from just one perspective. I feel like the story shouldn’t be what happens to this one family. It’s about how are the structures of our society baked-in so that even though the effect of the disaster is indiscriminate, the aftermath and recovery is. And that is all pre-existing historical and ongoing structures of inequality, race and class and how we create our cities and who gets placed where and who has access to insurance that places them in a hotel after a fire and who has nowhere to go and gets stuck in a shelter. So I didn’t ever consider telling the story from just one of those perspectives. The story that’s worth telling is one in which we’re all complicit in the society that we accept. The politicians, we continue to vote for who just keeps the status quo in which those inequities are what’s going to happen on the other end of each one of these disasters every single year.HuffPost and its publishing partners may receive a commission from some purchases made via links on this page. Every item is independently curated by the HuffPost Shopping team. Prices and availability are subject to change."Olga Dies Dreaming" by Xochitl GonzalezXochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel, “Olga Lies Dreaming,” quickly became a New York Times bestseller after its release in 2023. This beautifully written romantic comedy is expertly woven to include the political and cultural effects of capitalism and our self-preservation. Olga is an influential wedding planner for the elite in Manhattan, and her brother Pedro Acevego is a congressman. The two siblings were raised by their grandmother in Sunset Park, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, after their mother abandoned them and became a radical activist fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence. They seemingly have enviable lives, given their proximity to power and wealth, but the siblings each grapple with internal struggles. Pedro’s votes are being compromised by a real estate developer who’s in possession of photos depicting his closeted affairs, and though Olga may be an expert at weddings, she’s unable to find love for herself. And now their mother has suddenly come back into their lives. The drama is pushed to a crescendo with the arrival of one of the most devastating hurricanes to hit Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria. The multitude of threads and themes combined with Gonzalez’s vibrant writing make for an absolutely unputdownable story."Land of Milk and Honey" by C Pam ZhangIn C Pam Zhang’s 2023 book, “Land of Milk and Honey,” a smog that began in a rural part of Iowa eventually blankets most of the world, eviscerating the planet’s crops and dramatically altering available food sources. Our nameless narrator is a prestigious chef who, while the final ingredients for her pesto disappear, decides to leave the restaurant she works at for a new opportunity — one that promises to replace powdered peas with fresh ones. Her new position is as a private chef for an elite research community lying in the mountain border area between Italy and France. It’s here in this blissful land where she’ll rediscover the flavors she’s lost and learn who continues to hoard them."Birnam Wood" by Eleanor Catton“The Luminaries” author Eleanor Catton wrote this psychological eco-thriller that the publisher calls “Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are.” Mira Bunting is a horticulturist by training and the founder of a sometimes vigilante environmentalist collective known as Birnam Wood. She, along with a group of activists, commit guerrilla-style gardening by planting trees and crops on plots of land with and without consent. But when Mira discovers a seemingly perfect property to grow and develop, she learns that she's not the only one with her sights set on the land. A billionaire by the name of Robert Lemoine wants the property not for the purposes of trying to slow the progress of climate change but to use it as the location of a post-apocalyptic bunker. Robert takes an interest in Mira, and suddenly the activist is enticed to put aside her anti-capitalist ideals for a utopia — and it’s here Catton shows us how there are consequences to every choice, even ones we believe to be inconsequential."Migrations" by Charlotte McConaghyCharlotte McConagy’s climate thriller takes place across two points in time: the protagonist Fanny’s tumultuous past and a present when climate change has led to a mass extinction of animals and wildlife. Fanny is a wanderer, unable to commit to any one person fully, wild in her compulsions and a deeply unreliable narrator throughout the book. She decides to leave her life behind by convincing a fishing crew to let her board their boat. She claims to be a scientist studying the migration patterns of the Arctic tern, a bird that migrates as far south as the Antarctic. She assures the team that by following the tern they will be led to fish, and so they agree to let her come along. But since childhood, Fanny has lived closely with violence, deceptive habits and heartbreak, which have only carried on into adulthood. Readers come to learn that her escape south is really an effort to flee from her past as much as her present.
This Earth Day, settle into "A Fire So Wild," Sarah Ruiz-Grossman's debut novel about the societal impacts of climate change.
This story and interview originally appeared in HuffPost’s Books newsletter. Sign up here for weekly book news, author interviews and more.
In January, the European climate agency Copernicus reported that the Earth was on track to break annual global heat records, the latest undeniable symptom in the climate crisis. One month after this report, Sarah Ruiz-Grossman released her debut novel, “A Fire So Wild,” adding to the vital voices in climate fiction, a literary genre marked by notable works such as Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 “Parable of the Sower.”
As a former HuffPost reporter, this isn’t Ruiz-Grossman’s first foray into writing about the environmental predicament and, more specifically, about how climate change affects the population unequally and leads to further social injustices.
Informed by this breadth of knowledge, “A Fire So Wild” tells the story of a wildfire overtaking Berkeley, California. We observe the Bay Area city through the perspective of characters who possess vastly different socioeconomic statuses and access to resources, yet are interconnected in some way. As the blaze transforms homes and precious wildlife into ash and the city’s residents are left with the scorched aftermath, readers truly understand that natural disasters, though indiscriminate, never hit everyone the same way.
Shortly after the book’s release, I had the opportunity to hear Ruiz-Grossman talk about her novel alongside the creator and host of “The Stacks” book podcast, Traci Thomas, at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. Appropriately nestled in front of a live tree growing at the shop’s center, we listened to Ruiz-Grossman explain the ways that works of fiction like hers can impart necessary commentary on the climate crisis in ways that nonfiction cannot.
Here is some of their conversation, followed by a few of Ruiz-Grossman’s recommendations on climate fiction.
As a HuffPost journalist, you reported on the climate crisis. How was this transition into writing something fictional?
I was feeling the call to have a project outside of my journalism as I was isolating, not socializing with anybody, so I started working on fiction. And this felt like the only story I could tell. It was that fifth year of seeing the fires get worse. And just this past summer, I went to New York, which is my hometown, and there were orange skies blanketing our city for the first time. There was just no closing your eyes to this anymore. What I was able to do with the fiction that I couldn’t do in my reporting is that, in your reporting, you’re telling a very narrow story. It’s the story of this one fire and this one community. These stories are important, and sticking to facts are important, but there’s a lot more truth you can get in fiction in the ways that you thread in the relationships and the lives of people, and how those are impacted not just on this one day and the aftermath and the policies, but who are they as people before leading into a disaster like this, and who do they become on the other side of that? Because that’s going to be all of us at some point, affected and changed by this.
I just read a piece by Matt Salesses in Literary Hub about climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” that the genre has been heralded as this tool for kind of sounding the alarm on what would come. He goes on to say how we’ve had time for these warnings, and now cli-fi needs to serve a new purpose because the future we’ve been warned about is already here. So I’m wondering what you think about your work entering that space?
There’s a fine line when you’re writing something that’s both present day and dystopian. I found it hard not to be too heavy-handed with the politic because so much of it you want to feel infuriated and moralistic or self-righteous, and I don’t think that makes for good fiction or good politic. I hope that this book doesn’t feel like it comes in from on high as though I figured out what it is that we’re supposed to be doing or how we’re supposed to live our lives in this moment. I think what I hope it does is puts questions into all of our minds of how we’re supposed to live, how we can be our best citizens in this moment, knowing that we are making decisions every day that put our comfort ahead of what is best for the planet.
When you’re writing, are you writing toward a question? Or how does the question come to you in the creative process?
I think I’m always writing toward the same question, which is, how are we supposed to live this short, precious, insane existence in this really fucked-up society? And I think that question never gets answered by the work, but it is a way of being in community with other people and with other questioners and examine how the characters [in the book] are put in the world to see what decisions they make and see how that shakes out. Because that’s all we can do, right? Be community with each other and struggle to do our best.
In the book, you write from different character perspectives, about seven or eight characters. Why did you choose to do that?
I was really uninterested in writing a climate story from just one perspective. I feel like the story shouldn’t be what happens to this one family. It’s about how are the structures of our society baked-in so that even though the effect of the disaster is indiscriminate, the aftermath and recovery is. And that is all pre-existing historical and ongoing structures of inequality, race and class and how we create our cities and who gets placed where and who has access to insurance that places them in a hotel after a fire and who has nowhere to go and gets stuck in a shelter. So I didn’t ever consider telling the story from just one of those perspectives. The story that’s worth telling is one in which we’re all complicit in the society that we accept. The politicians, we continue to vote for who just keeps the status quo in which those inequities are what’s going to happen on the other end of each one of these disasters every single year.
HuffPost and its publishing partners may receive a commission from some purchases made via links on this page. Every item is independently curated by the HuffPost Shopping team. Prices and availability are subject to change.
"Olga Dies Dreaming" by Xochitl Gonzalez
Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel, “Olga Lies Dreaming,” quickly became a New York Times bestseller after its release in 2023. This beautifully written romantic comedy is expertly woven to include the political and cultural effects of capitalism and our self-preservation. Olga is an influential wedding planner for the elite in Manhattan, and her brother Pedro Acevego is a congressman. The two siblings were raised by their grandmother in Sunset Park, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, after their mother abandoned them and became a radical activist fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence. They seemingly have enviable lives, given their proximity to power and wealth, but the siblings each grapple with internal struggles. Pedro’s votes are being compromised by a real estate developer who’s in possession of photos depicting his closeted affairs, and though Olga may be an expert at weddings, she’s unable to find love for herself. And now their mother has suddenly come back into their lives. The drama is pushed to a crescendo with the arrival of one of the most devastating hurricanes to hit Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria. The multitude of threads and themes combined with Gonzalez’s vibrant writing make for an absolutely unputdownable story.
"Land of Milk and Honey" by C Pam Zhang
In C Pam Zhang’s 2023 book, “Land of Milk and Honey,” a smog that began in a rural part of Iowa eventually blankets most of the world, eviscerating the planet’s crops and dramatically altering available food sources. Our nameless narrator is a prestigious chef who, while the final ingredients for her pesto disappear, decides to leave the restaurant she works at for a new opportunity — one that promises to replace powdered peas with fresh ones. Her new position is as a private chef for an elite research community lying in the mountain border area between Italy and France. It’s here in this blissful land where she’ll rediscover the flavors she’s lost and learn who continues to hoard them.
"Birnam Wood" by Eleanor Catton
“The Luminaries” author Eleanor Catton wrote this psychological eco-thriller that the publisher calls “Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are.” Mira Bunting is a horticulturist by training and the founder of a sometimes vigilante environmentalist collective known as Birnam Wood. She, along with a group of activists, commit guerrilla-style gardening by planting trees and crops on plots of land with and without consent. But when Mira discovers a seemingly perfect property to grow and develop, she learns that she's not the only one with her sights set on the land. A billionaire by the name of Robert Lemoine wants the property not for the purposes of trying to slow the progress of climate change but to use it as the location of a post-apocalyptic bunker. Robert takes an interest in Mira, and suddenly the activist is enticed to put aside her anti-capitalist ideals for a utopia — and it’s here Catton shows us how there are consequences to every choice, even ones we believe to be inconsequential.
"Migrations" by Charlotte McConaghy
Charlotte McConagy’s climate thriller takes place across two points in time: the protagonist Fanny’s tumultuous past and a present when climate change has led to a mass extinction of animals and wildlife. Fanny is a wanderer, unable to commit to any one person fully, wild in her compulsions and a deeply unreliable narrator throughout the book. She decides to leave her life behind by convincing a fishing crew to let her board their boat. She claims to be a scientist studying the migration patterns of the Arctic tern, a bird that migrates as far south as the Antarctic. She assures the team that by following the tern they will be led to fish, and so they agree to let her come along. But since childhood, Fanny has lived closely with violence, deceptive habits and heartbreak, which have only carried on into adulthood. Readers come to learn that her escape south is really an effort to flee from her past as much as her present.