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Climate fiction, speculative fiction, whatever you want to call those emerging genres, they increasingly feel necessary.

After the story, Matt and Maddie discuss the promises and pitfalls of climate fiction–and why we want to feel empathy, but never too much.

Immediate crises have fed subgenres like Latin American climate fiction, or cli-fi — speculative works concerned with the environment — including the work of Ramiro Sanchiz of Uruguay, Edmundo Paz Soldán of Bolivia and Rita Indiana of the Dominican Republic, whose books are available in English.

Last year, she wrote this piece for The Times: “Climate crisis is here; so is climate fiction. Don’t you dare call it a genre.”

Shannon Falkner, an English teacher at Chatham High School in Chatham, N.J., said her freshman English students have written climate fiction, or “cli-fi.”