Storm Cloud Library
- Full-Text Nineteenth-Century Climate Fiction
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Fictions of the Future
In the nineteenth century, some creative writers were apprehensive about the changes industrialization wrought on everyday life. They wrote fictions that imagined possible futures that might result from emerging technologies. Some of these speculative fictions were utopian, others dystopian. You can see early and first editions of these books on view in the exhibition. Many of these have been digitized and are available to read for free on Project Gutenberg.
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Samuel Butler, Erewhon; Or, Over the Range, 1872
The name of the realm in which the novel is set, Erewhon, is an anagram for “nowhere.” The novel begins as an adventure story, using the convention of travel in an imaginary country. To the story’s narrator, Erewhon at first seems utopian in its disregard for money—which lends status but has no purchasing value—and machines—which have been outlawed as dangerous competitors in the struggle for existence. Erewhon has also declared disease a crime for which the sick are imprisoned, and crime is considered a disease for which criminals are sent to the hospital. As the unnamed narrator further examines the institutions of Erewhon, his illusions of utopia and eternal progress are stripped away. (britannica.com) -
Richard Jefferies, After London; Or, Wild England, 1885
After some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life. Beginning with a loving description of nature reclaiming England —fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland—the rest of the story is an adventure set many years later in the wild landscape. (google.com/books) -
W. H. Hudson, A Crystal Age, 1887
The narrator, Smith, regains consciousness buried under earth and entangled in plant roots. Upon extricating himself, he encounters a peculiar funeral procession and is struck by the beauty of a grieving girl named Yoletta. Integrating into their utopian society, he struggles with cultural misunderstandings and unrequited love for Yoletta, who is actually much older than she appears. (wikipedia.org) -
William Morris, News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest, 1890
In the novel, the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no marriage or divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work. (wikipedia.org) -
John Jacob Astor, A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, 1894
This story offers a fictional account of life in the year 2000. It contains abundant speculation about technological invention, including descriptions of a worldwide telephone network, solar power, air travel, space travel to the planets Saturn and Jupiter, and terraforming engineering projects — damming the Arctic Ocean, and an adjustment of the axial tilt of the Earth (Terra) by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company. (wikipedia.org) -
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895
Wells advanced his social and political ideas in this narrative of a nameless Time Traveller who is hurtled into the year 802,701 by his elaborate ivory, crystal, and brass contraption. The world he finds is peopled by two races: the decadent Eloi, fluttery and useless, are dependent for food, clothing, and shelter on the simian subterranean Morlocks, who prey on them. The two races—whose names may be borrowed from the biblical Eli and Moloch—symbolize Wells’s vision of the eventual result of unchecked capitalism: a neurasthenic upper class that would eventually be devoured by a proletariat driven to the depths. (britannica.com) -
M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud, 1901
Adam Jeffson, a man on a polar expedition, discovers a mysterious and deathly Purple Cloud. In the wake of the massive global deaths wrought by the Purple Cloud, Jeffson becomes ruler of the world and builds a huge palace to his glory. He meets a young woman and the two become the heirs to the future of humanity. (wikipedia.org)
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- Nonfiction Books
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- Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, 1789
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays, 1836
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854
- John Muir, The Mountains of California, 1882
- Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 1903
- John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911
- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974
- Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, 1986
- Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, 1989
- Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on The Great Beach of Cape Cod, 2003
- Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change, 2011
- Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, 2014
- Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, 2014
- Paul Hawken, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, 2017
- Obi Kaufmann, The California Field Atlas, 2017
- adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, 2017
- Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, 2018
- M Jackson, The Secret Lives of Glaciers, 2019
- Obi Kaufmann, The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Resource, 2019
- Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, 2019
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, 2020
- David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, 2020
- Marcia Bjornerud and Haley Hagerman, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, 2020
- Winona LaDuke, To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers, 2020
- Ayana Elizabeth and Katharine K. Wilkinson, editors, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, 2021
- Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, 2021
- Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, 2021
- Paul Hawken, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, 2021
- Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, 2021
- Johan Rockström, Greta Thunberg, and Owen Gaffney, Breaking Boundaries: The Science Behind our Planet, 2021
- Daniel Sherrell, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, 2021
- Barry Lopez and Rebecca Solnit, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays, 2022
- Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, 2022
- Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, 2022
- Greta Thunberg, The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions, 2023
- Alexander Nemerov, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, 2023
- Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World, 2023
- Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, 2023
- Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, 2024
- Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, 2024
- Sunil Amrith, The Burning Earth: A History, 2024
- Fiction and Poetry Books
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- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or, The Whale, 1851
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855
- Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872
- Richard Jefferies, After London, 1885
- H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895
- M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud, 1901
- Upton Sinclair, Oil!, 1926
- Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965
- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993
- Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003
- Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 2006
- Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Zahrah the Windseeker, 2008
- Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior, 2013
- J. G. Ballard and Martin Amis, The Drowned World, 2013
- Harryette Mullen, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, 2013
- Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia, 2014
- Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven, 2015
- N. K. Jemisin, The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky, 2015
- Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, editors, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, 2015
- Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus, 2016
- Alexis Wright, The Swan Book, 2016
- Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves, 2017
- Omar El Akkad, American War, 2018
- Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning, 2018
- Richard Powers, The Overstory, 2019
- Rita Indiana, Tentacle, 2019
- McSweeney’s Issue 58 (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern): 2040 AD - Climate Fiction Edition, 2019
- Jenny Offill, Weather, 2020
- Robert Silverberg, editor, The New Atlantis, 2020
- Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future, 2021
- Taiyo Fujii, et al., Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, 2021
- C. Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey, 2024
- Michelle Min Sterling, Camp Zero, 2024
- Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time, 2024
- Children’s and Young Adult Books
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- Dr. Seuss, The Lorax, 1971
- Jeanette Winter, Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg’s Call to Save the Planet, 2019
- Jess French, What a Waste: Trash, Recycling, and Protecting our Planet, 2019
- Tochi Onyebuchi, War Girls, 2020
- Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade, We Are Water Protectors, 2020
- Emily Hawkins and Ella Beech, Rewild the World at Bedtime: Hopeful Stories from Mother Nature, 2024
Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis
Storm Cloud
Sept. 14, 2024–Jan. 6, 2025 | “Storm Cloud” analyzes the impact of industrialization and a globalized economy on everyday life from 1780 to 1930, as charted by scientists, artists, and writers, and contextualizes the current climate crisis within this historical framework.
More Stories and Resources from The Huntington
Most guests who visit the Botanical Gardens at The Huntington appreciate their beauty, but there is much more to them than meets the eye. Our living plant collection is both regionally and globally diverse. Thousands of the species in our care are not found in any other botanical garden.
In this lecture video, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, professor of the history of science at Harvard University and Dibner Distinguished Fellow, examines Mexico’s pivotal role in addressing global hunger in the mid-20th century, revealing the significant but often overlooked consequences that continue to haunt us today.
Azby Brown, author of Just Enough: Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture, and Design, examines what it is like to live in a fully sustainable society.
The exhibition “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” has been made possible with support from Getty through its PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.
Southern California’s landmark arts event, PST ART, returned in September 2024 with more than 70 exhibitions from museums and other institutions across the region, all exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information, visit PST ART: Art & Science Collide