Storytelling

End-of-the-world nightmares will blossom, including in children’s bedrooms, where siblings once whispered worries over the fact of death. Among their parents, climate trauma will take its place in the pop-psychological vernacular, if often as a scapegoat for more personal frustrations and anxieties.

That environmental alarm was echoed in fiction of the Victorian era, including H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which depicted a distant future in which most humans were enslaved troglodytes, laboring underground for the benefit of a pampered and very small aboveground elite.

Why global warming and natural disaster haven’t yet become preoccupations of contemporary fiction?