For the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz analyzes “meteorological activity in fiction,” and how recent questions about climate change has led to a reemergence of weather related fiction, particularly in dystopian works:
Our earliest stories about the weather concerned beginnings and endings. What emerged from the cold and darkness of the void will return to it; waters that receded at the origin of the world will rise at its end. It is easy, in grim climatological times, to be drawn to the far pole of these visions. Weather has long been a handmaiden of the apocalypse, and the end of the world is so often presaged or effected by extreme climate shifts—floods, fires, freezing cold—that eschatology sometimes seems like a particularly dark branch of meteorology. Today, it is, if anything, even more difficult to imagine an end of the world that is not driven by a change in the weather.
