Lydia R. Cooper shows that queer cli-fi plays a significant role in our understanding of climate disaster, both by critiquing the systems that create it and challenging us to work toward mutual caregiving for others.

As the first book-length study of queer contemporary cli-fi, Queer Climate Fiction in the Age of Eco-Disaster adds to an already-vibrant conversation on the role of cli-fi in imagining possible futures amidst accelerating climate disasters. Cooper reads new and emerging American and Canadian authors to show that queer cli-fi challenges many of the tropes of disaster literature, addresses the root causes of asymmetrical climate impacts, and depicts resilient community practices capable of creating a viable future out of the disastrous now.

Using literary trauma studies and queer affect theory, Lydia R. Cooper demonstrates how queer cli-fi invites readers to bear witness to the structural violences that shape the 21st-century world; to imagine a world otherwise through difference, queerness, and otherness; and to act in meaningful and collectivist ways, establishing a kinship-oriented system and a world based on migration, relationality, and fluidity.

As we enter the final decades of human history in which averting total disaster may – or may not – be achieved, we need to listen to the stories that teach us what it means to be fully alive in a dying world. Queer cli-fi, including works by Joshua Whitehead, Rivers Solomon, and Omar El Akkad, is not merely about survival, but also about learning how to love a world that is irrevocably damaged.

This study will be of interest to students and scholars working in North American literature,speculative and science fiction, ecocriticism, and gender and queer studies.