In second grade, my entire Midwest curriculum was focused on death and life. The caterpillars we were breeding in school had completely liquefied inside their chrysalises, and as I anticipated their re-birth as butterflies, we started a unit on extinction. We learned how dodo birds had vanished due to over-hunting and dinosaurs had been extinguished by a meteor. That same month, the children’s author Patricia Polacco visited our school. She read to us from her book Meteor!, which told the true story of a meteor landing in her grandparents’ yard. There had been a bright light, and then the house had shaken so badly that windows shattered and the plumbing broke. When they went outside to look for the cause of their terror, they found a large rock that stayed red-hot for days and left a huge dent in the earth. At the end of the assembly, Polacco pulled out a piece of the meteor that had landed in their yard and told us we were all going to have the chance to touch it. When my turn came, it felt like electricity had jolted into me. My second-grade body didn’t quite know how to process my simultaneous emotions: the reverence of touching something from beyond the exosphere, the terror of communing with its unknown powers.

As my education broadened, I learned how to use storytelling to contend with these larger-than-life feelings. When a classmate fell into an open drainpipe and died, our class conjured the myth of a sewer monster to give reason to the incomprehensible. In choir, we learned Ojibwe and Chippewa spiritual legends, which showed us how sorrow and loss could transform into powerful lyric-stories about the formation of the natural world. In one, a mother bear escapes a Wisconsin forest fire only to lose her two cubs in the treacherous swim across Lake Michigan. She keeps watch over the waves in eternal vigil for her cubs, and to honor her grief, the Great Spirit covers her in sand, turning her into the 400-foot-high sand dunes known as the Sleeping Bear Dunes. This was how I learned that storytelling could be used to transport myself away from the paralysis of despair, toward meaning and memory-making.

Now, as climate change becomes the fabric of our reality, we are faced with relentless horrors: Nashville blown apart by winds, Asheville swept away by water, a Texas flash flood that swallowed up twenty-seven girls. It’s hard to accept that these disasters are by our own hand. It’s even harder, for some, to accept that they pose an existential threat. I feel both despondent and outraged by the ever-increasing frequency of such news. In the face of these escalating, potentially irreversible effects, my impulse is once again to turn to storytelling. Others must too, evidenced by the proliferation of art dealing with the question: How will the climate catastrophe cause our own?

On one hand, I wonder why it has taken until the 21st century for us to yoke the climate crisis to literary fiction, and, on the other hand, I see that even as the genre matures, it remains reliably inept in dealing elegantly and critically with these eschatological questions. The issue with the genre is one of moral failure. Not a lack of morals, but the tightening of them. Climate-fiction as a genre is focused on planetary and societal dealings with catastrophe, which has led to a remarkably unified message: ecological disaster is at the gates, so to speak, and if we are to survive, we must focus our efforts into organizing. The counter options, it seems, are to wallow in anxiety over what we have done to our Earth or to ignore it completely. Yet it is cli-fi’s insistence on this moral stance that tourniquets the genre from its philosophical and imaginative potential. Despair is a feeling of smallness, and to witness chaos and destabilization on such an immense scale must allow for much more expansive processing. When we move beyond collective despair, toward the individual experience of destabilization and terror, another feeling is evoked alongside it. As my Midwest education showed me, to experience the apocalypse on the personal scale is to experience the sublime.

In their 2000 essay On the Apocalyptic Sublime, Joshua Gunn and David E. Beard write that “all apocalyptic discourses, from the parodic to the deadly serious, emphasize an eschatology, or a theory of ends.” The essay expands the apocalyptic form toward a scholarly inclusion of the sublime, which it defines as an experience that “is an unsettling and threatening one that escapes even our attempts to theorize its occurrence.” Why might one want to be unsettled and threatened? Because the destabilization that is created through sublime experience can result in a denial of a sense of ending that is “potentially liberating for the subject”—transmuting the threat into an opportunity to access a higher reality. So, in the quest for liberation from a mandatory sense of doom, we must expand the lexicon of climate fiction to include literature that orients us through memory, without emphasis on endings, and that is unafraid of an awe so profound it destabilizes. It seems it is possible then, for climate fiction to transcend the smallness of despair, reaching for the sublime.

If the sublime is a denial of a sense of ending, then a book riddled with endings might just be its very subversion. Let’s consider Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping, concerning two orphaned sisters raised by their transient aunt Slyvie, in the town of Fingerbone, Idaho. This American classic is not usually mentioned in the conversation about cli-fi, a term the novel predates, despite “an outsized landscape and an extravagant weather” and a philosophical inquiry into the metaphysics of ecology. Yet the novel, which opens with a sweeping family history, features the words “died”, “fled”, and “escaped” all in its first paragraph. Housekeeping can be understood as grappling with the same central question as “cli-fi”—“How will the crisis of climate cause our own?”—if we understand this: a lifestyle of transience contains within it a daily apocalypse on the personal scale. Every day an old way of life ends, and a new one begins. And imagine how fearsome, how grand, this daily threat must feel to a child. This fear is a driving force of the novel. Ruth lyrically narrates what it feels like at such a young age to experience the ephemera of existence, to feel small and ridiculous next to the greatness of the landscape and monstrous weather patterns.

If it had been written today, Housekeeping would be an unlikely candidate for a cli-fi novel, because it offers no moral prescription—not about the magnificent forces of weather, not about the quotidian tragedies of living. There is no map of how to feel when your grandfather’s train dissolves into a lake, when your mother leaves you graham crackers on your grandma’s doorstep before her car flies off a cliff, or when your great-aunts are all too happy to skip town as soon another caregiver arrives. There’s also no judgement cast on Sylvie, who has abandoned her marriage, sleeps upside down with her shoes on, and lets the house flood with the rains.

Where Housekeeping hews close to “cli-fi” as we know it, then, is through Ruth’s burgeoning search for the sublime in her otherwise dreary life. “[W]hat had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it,” she says. “I…become extraordinary by my vanishing.” Ultimately, Ruth chooses the life of transience with Sylvie, which is to choose the daily apocalypse. And in the daily apocalypse, she becomes mythic, larger than life, deeply in tune with the sublime. In an unforgettable scene where Ruth crosses the bridge with Sylvie to fake their deaths, to become ghosts of existence, she notes the “terrors of crossing were considerable” before surrendering to the awe of that immense feeling, a manifestation of our ability to manufacture the apocalyptic sublime.

Over forty years later, from a different region of the world and a different language, we find another novel that contends with the manufactured apocalyptic sublime. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s fourth novel, We Are Green and Trembling, published in Argentina in 2023 and the winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2025 (in Robin Myers’ translation) also resists labelling as “cli-fi.” In this case, the author focuses not on a dystopian future but the past. The story draws on the life of a real historical figure, Antonio de Erauso, a Basque-born nun of the late sixteenth century who escaped the convent at a young age in order to transition to a male identity. When we meet Antonio de Erauso at the outset of the novel, he has just transformed from a violent Spanish conquistador to a fugitive from the very army he served, deserting to rescue two Guaraní girls from enslavement. This version of Antonio comes not just with his two rescued companions, Mitãkuña and Michī, but also a ragtag crew of two capuchin monkeys, a dog, a mare, and her foal. His main quest is for survival, but an equally important quest is to compose a long letter to his beloved aunt, the prioress of the convent he escaped.

Over the course of the novel, we read this letter in installments. Antonio writes lyrically of the jungle and its moods, enamored with capturing the sensory experience of inhabiting it. In the letters, a markedly different consciousness of Antonio begins to emerge, one whose priorities and concerns splinter from the corporeal Antonio. Antonio does not use the pages of his letters for handwringing about survival. He writes paragraph after paragraph about the temperament of the jungle, its textures, colors, and the creatures within it: “…the jungle is a volcano, beloved aunt, a volcano in eternal eruption, slow, very slow, an eruption that does not kill, that brings forth green and pulses green water welling from the soil of my forest that in no way belongs to me, but I to it…” he writes early in the letter, showing that he is not only enamored with the jungle but psychologically enmeshed with it.

At the same time, Antonio’s letters also recall his childhood torment. We learn that Antonio’s loyalty to the church was incinerated along with his girlhood, and in recounting his journey toward boyhood in these letters, Antonio allows himself to revisit this first apocalypse of his life, one he created himself. In unraveling the harshness of his own past, Antonio dips past the annals of memory, toward the most pressing concerns of his soul. He writes to his aunt, “I wonder whether hens barely fly because their feathers are so useful for this other task… and wonder why I am given to thinking that one part of the body must exist to do a single thing to the detriment of all the rest.” In these moments, his questions are mirrored by the setting of the jungle, which is a fertile ground to comb through his past heartbreak and gender transition. This is not because the jungle is an easy resting place but because of its brutality. The jungle is harsh, but it is not discriminatory. While young Antonio was disowned and cast off, the jungle is a great equalizer.

“If we are to move towards an era of storytelling that transports us beyond despair and toward life even during apocalypse, we must look to novels that contend with the experience of the individual apocalypse within climate catastrophe. Housekeeping and We Are Green and Trembling offer an unexpected roadmap for climate fiction, showing how the genre can achieve its most profound potential by writing past earth-bound moral targets, toward the apocalyptic sublime.” 

Antonio’s philosophical explorations reveal an interest in exploring what distinguishes man and beast. Is it man’s belief in God? Is it man’s orderly and thoughtless adherence to the rules of civilization? We get the answer almost precisely halfway through the novel. Antonio writes in a letter, “nonetheless, I am also the animals in my company, we are all of us together, and of course they too remember, yet they do so with the wordless memory of beasts.” Like a dam bursting open, here is an answer: language. Consider the work of language, and its responsibility. To record reality, to establish intergenerational memory, to bear the torch for the future, to showcase all there is to cherish, to provide a landscape to revisit when a map cannot yet be drawn. We Are Green and Trembling argues for a more expansive definition of what it means to bear witness. In this novel, a witness is less a bystander and something closer to an archivist, someone who uses language to capture an experience beyond despair.

The novel ends with a forest fire set by soldiers pursuing Antonio and his unlikely companions—one more instance of a manufactured apocalyptic sublime. Even before the fire, Antonio tells the reader over and over how he hopes his aunt is not dead, but he cannot be sure. Yet he still writes. This is perhaps the statement that underpins Cabezón Cámara’s novel: the archive is worth creating, even if it is destroyed.

If we are to move towards an era of storytelling that transports us beyond despair and toward life even during apocalypse, we must look to novels that contend with the experience of the individual apocalypse within climate catastrophe. Housekeeping and We Are Green and Trembling offer an unexpected roadmap for climate fiction, showing how the genre can achieve its most profound potential by writing past earth-bound moral targets, toward the apocalyptic sublime. As the stories of my Midwest youth showed me, when we liberate ourselves from despair and doom, we equip ourselves to weather the unknowable future, come what may.