2025 Reading List
Let's explore what alternative climate futures look like.
We’re Book Club for the Planet, a book club dedicated to reading about the climate crisis in community. New to book club or looking for a refresher for how it works? Right this way.
Hello, friends.
I think a lot about the stories we tell ourselves about climate change and the future.
Much of it, most of it, is bad. We have read a lot of these books for book club. Stories of exploitation, mining our lands for resources, mass extinctions, dystopian futures.
There is a small, growing handful of utopian stories about climate change, too, especially within the emerging genre of solarpunk—the anthologies, Sunvault and Solarpunk Summers are both on my shelf, along with Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series. There are far-future stories, especially within hard sci-fi, like Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation series or the Star Trek universe, and softer versions as well, like Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic, Always Coming Home. These stories may acknowledge a dystopian past that humanity survived and thrived beyond, but they are often shaky on the specifics of how we accomplished a transition from doom to flourishing.
Then, there are a slowly growing range of stories that fit somewhere in the middle—neither dystopian nor utopian—that are often near-future speculations on how we get from today to an imperfect but measurably better future. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future falls into this camp, as does M. E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone, An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 and Nick Fuller Googins’ The Great Transition.
2025 marks the fifth year (!!!) of Book Club for the Planet, something I couldn’t have imagined when we started in 2020. Earlier this summer, I knew I wanted to do something different and a little special for our fifth year together. I imagined a new kind of a reading list, one held together by a common theme. And while we have read so much about what’s wrong with the climate crisis, we haven’t read much about what could go right.
It’s not enough to name and fight the many problems that got us here. We have to have shared, collective visions of where we’re going. We must conjure a tangible, beautiful, just and equitable future worth fighting for. And then, we can do the work of mapping out how we get there.
That last category of climate stories, what I’m calling visions of alternative climate futures, is what we’re going to be reading about next year. And not a moment too soon.
In grief, solidarity and hope.
Jess
January
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
We’re starting the year with a new classic from the Emergent Strategy series, a series of meditations on how marine mammals model lessons that we can learn on land about organizing, protecting, surviving. From the book description, that says it perfectly: “A graceful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice, it explores themes that range from the ways that echolocation might inform our understandings of visionary action to the similar ways that humans and marine mammals do—or might—adapt within our increasingly dire circumstances.”
I added this book to our list after the election. It feels like a necessary place to start, a table setting. We will read the words of the wise Black feminist Alexis Pauline Gumbs and intuit from embodied, interspecies wisdom of our whale and dolphin cousins on how we can move forward next year and in the years to come.
March
What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
This is the first time an author has made a repeat showing in our book club! Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist (seeing a trend?) and climate policy expert, was editor of our second book club read, All We Can Save. Now, she has edited a new compilation of essays, poems and conversations that imagine “an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.”
I had set our book club theme and was on the hunt for books that fit the assignment, and I learned of Johnson’s book days before its publication. I screamed with delight. And she has a Substack! This book is a long one, folks, so prepare accordingly.
May
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien
This speculative fiction novel is set 30 years in the future after “war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments.” And then, a revolution in New York City forges a new social order, led by workers—nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants—out of the ashes of capitalist collapse. This book is written as an oral history of these organizers, sharing how they survived their many crises to sow the seeds of a new world. Co-writers O’Brien and Abdelhadi come from academic and activist backgrounds in communist theory, LGBTQ+ movements, Palestinian liberation, Black Lives Matter, and work in HIV/AIDS.
July
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction by Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz is a journalist and sci-fi writer who was previously editor-in-chief of i09 and Gizmodo with her partner, fellow sci-fi writer Charlie Jane Anders. Her novels have won the Lambda Literary Award and been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Locus Award. And she’s written a book about colonizing space as an answer to climate collapse.
While billionaires have appropriated space travel for their own personal interests and profit, Space has long been a place of mystery, radical hope, destiny, and power for many. Think Afrofuturism, Sun Ra Arkestra, or Octavia Butler’s Black teenage protagonist from Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina, claiming “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.” Let’s approach the idea of space travel from the lens of a queer sci-fi writer as a possible climate future.
September
The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins
Published just last year, this speculative fiction novel is set in a future where we have successfully transitioned energy to net zero and the climate crisis has been averted. It’s utopia—or is it? This is a debut novel from Nick Fuller Googins, who is an elementary school teacher based in Maine. I’ve been eager to read this book since I first saw it in my local anarchist bookstore, Red Emma’s; it was the first book I added to our list, the one that got me thinking about alternative climate futures in the first place.
November
Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future, a story story collection edited by Grist
We will round out the year with big dreaming from a range of writers about climate positive futures. I initially chose Grist’s first climate fiction compilation, Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, for our book club but then I learned Grist was coming out with a new collection of 12 stories, winners of the Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest organized by Grist. I can’t think of a better way to close out the year than with “stories serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help us envision a tomorrow in which we flourish and thrive.” And check out that cover art, a Black woman communing with a marine ancestor—a nice bookend to our first book of the year.
Extra credit reading
If you’re interested in continued reading this year and exploring climate narratives beyond this list, here are the books I will personally be spending time with, in no particular order.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies by Andrea Ritchie
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead
Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse" by Emily Raboteau
We Loved It All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet
Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora edited by Sheree R. Thomas
Do the Work: A Guide to Understanding Power and Creating Change. by Megan Pillow and Roxane Gay
Thank you for reading! I would love to hear what you’re reading now, what you would add to this list, what you’re looking forward to reading next. Please don’t be shy to share in the comments. <3