What Climate Horror Is Missing: Making a Case for Historical Climate Horror
Author Kelly McWilliams examines what climate horror is missing and makes a case for writing historical climate horror.
Most climate horror looks toward the burning future. Books like Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future practically define the genre. I love these novels, but when I first contemplated writing my own work of climate fiction, I balked at the world-building. Apocalypse seemed all too close and all too real. My own mere outlines filled me with despair. As a horror novelist, I’m not afraid of a little despair—but some forms of it are generative and others simply paralyzing.
Reader, I was paralyzed.
What questions could a work of art reasonably be expected to answer about a state of destruction? Beyond the gutting shock, the Mad Max shenanigans, the nasty, brutish, and short logic of resource scarcity—even when countered with Station Eleven-style humanism—I found little to offer that felt fresh. Doubtless, this represents a failure of my own imagination. But I believe, too, that it’s a problem of the genre itself.
When climate fiction (the cheekily named “clifi”) focuses entirely on our horrific futures, we lose something crucial. Climate change is not only the incomprehensible weight of fire and brimstone, but also a human-wrought horror, located in the decisions of a precious few individuals. It is human—and nothing human is alien to you or me.
The horror we’re facing now is rooted firmly in the Industrial Revolution. In the past. Therefore, historical climate fiction (hi-clifi?) must play a central role.
With my novel, No One Leaves the Manor, I chose not to describe the coming fire. Instead, I went looking for the people who lit the match. I found them in 1921—a year of oil barons and assembly-line automobiles, of rampant sexism, ableism, and segregation. The monster in the book is obsessed with cataloging all the species of birds—the very ones we’ve been losing en masse, arguably since Audubon decided a dead bird made for ideal scientific dissection, caring more for the names of their bones than their small, beating lives.
In the story, four girls compete for an inheritance built on rot. Henry Ford colludes with other masters-of-the-universe, and mass production creeps across every page like a Lovecraftian tentacle. Each chapter begins with an advertisement for a product you almost certainly don’t need (face cream with a touch of arsenic, anyone?), and the manor serves up lavish meals, with rare meats a delicacy. In 1921, consumption is the name of every game.
My haunted manor, built in the Gilded Age, is in fact the very manor from which none of us can escape, even now.
The story highlights the century’s warping values—the villains and victims of the era that set us on our current path. This matters because readers already know how dreadful climate change is going to be. We can all picture a burning world. What we need to understand is why apocalypse happened, how we got here, and which of our human values we lost sight of in the process. For YA readers, this matters especially. Instead of simply handing them a world to fear, what if we paint them a portrait of the kind of person they must refuse to become?
Historical climate fiction isn’t entirely absent from the genre—it has always existed in the margins. But it hasn’t earned its own recognized shelf the way dystopian clifi has. As an example of how these subgenres might enrich each other, consider the impact of historical fiction penned by Black American writers. Faced with the terrors of the present and the awful, recursive feeling that the future won’t be so different, authors like Colson Whitehead, Jewell Parker Rhodes, and Jesmyn Ward carefully illustrate the history that led us here. As a Black writer myself, I know the power of historical fiction to speak to the current moment—and I live by the adage, the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.
During the BLM summer of 2020, bestselling books included Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, which began in the 1940s, and, on the YA list, The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds-Reed, which illuminated the Rodney King riots. Yes, we also needed our afro-futurist books, our contemporary novels, and our high-fantasy series—but it’s clear to me that the genre required historical fiction to feel complete. Why? In a time of terror, adult readers and young readers alike weren’t just asking, what comes next? or even, what’s really going on? A key question, across the bestseller list and the many recommendation lists that proliferated, was, poignantly: How did we get here?
Now, for the twist: No One Leaves the Manor is both a novel about climate change and a work of Black historical fiction, featuring a Black debutante who passes for white to earn her chance at the cursed fortune. I’ve spent my life reading and writing historical fiction because I earnestly believe that understanding cause is just as important as understanding effect. Perhaps even more important. Human beings cause the horrors of this world, historical fiction has ever said—even when the topic is as vast as racism, sexism, or climate devastation. And nothing human is beyond our imagining. Yes, the great structural problems of our era seem so unwieldy as to be paralyzing, but that’s only how they seem.
As terrifying as the future appears, nothing human can ever be hopeless.
Look to the past. Find the mistake.
And, if you wish to leave the manor-of-our-own-making…don’t repeat it.
These are the lessons of history—and the choired song of historical climate fiction, a genre on the come up.
Check out Kelly McWilliams' No One Leaves the Manor here:
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