Free Green Planets by Gerry Canavan

the Mind Set Free (1999), his quasi-reply to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.
    Ibn al-Nafis, Theologus Autodidactus (c. 1268–77). One of the earliest SF texts ends with an apocalyptic vision of radical climate change.
    M. T. Anderson, Feed (2002). Dystopian cyberpunk novel set amid widespread pollution, ocean acidification, mass infertility, and even the replacement of natural clouds (which can no longer form) with artificial Clouds™.
    Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves (1972). One of Asimov’s most technically sophisticated novels; the narrative concerns a free energy machine called the Electron Pump, which, alas, is too good to be true. Although he is not commonly thought of as an ecological writer, ecological themes appear across Asimov’s work insuch texts as Foundation’s Edge (1982) and Robots and Empire (1985), discussed in the introduction, as well as in such texts as The Caves of Steel (1953), which converts Asimov’s lifelong struggle with agoraphobia into a vision of immense domed cities in which no one would ever have to go outside. In the Foundation series we also have the city-planet Trantor, a fully urbanized planet with no natural spaces left to speak of; only in later entries in the series do we begin to get a sense of the unimaginable influx of food and fuel that would be required, on a daily basis, to make such a situation possible.
    Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003). The first entry in Atwood’s MaddAddam series finds a mad scientist crunching the numbers and determining that it would be best to eliminate Homo sapiens in favor of an upgraded and improved Humanity 2.0. After reciting a cavalcade of long horrors both historical and futuristic, the novel more or less dares us to agree with him.
    Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2009). Set in Thailand after a cascading series of global calamities including Peak Oil, climate change, and plagues and food shortages caused by genetically modified foods; the Western multinationals are finally ready to start global capitalism up again by raiding the independent kingdom’s seed bank. Also of definite interest: Bacigalupi’s short fiction (collected in Pump Six and Other Stories [2006]) and Ship Breaker (2010).
    J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962). Really, one could start with almost any of the apocalyptic and entropic disasters that appear across the early Ballard— The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Burning World (1964), The Crystal World (1966), etc.—but this novel’s rise of the sea levels and the spreading of the tropical zone as far north as England perhaps speaks most directly to our contemporary concerns about the future. Another noteworthy Ballard novel for students of ecological SF is High Rise (1975), which sees civilization utterly break down and all historical progress reverse in a modern apartment building once the lights go out.
    Iain M. Banks, Excession (1996). The novel offers an extended rumination on what Banks called the “Outside Context Problem,” in which a society encounters something so wildly outside its historical-cultural-ideological assumptions that it is barely able to contemplate the situation in the first place. This is, to say the least, a very useful frame for thinking of the way modernity encounters ecological crises like climate change.
    John Barnes, Mother of Storms (1994). A massive hurricane, caused by runaway climate change after methane release, breaks down into a series of even-more catastrophic global storms.
    Greg Bear, Blood Music (1985). The nanobots get out.
    Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888). One of the key improvements in the Boston of one hundred years hence is the elimination of smokestacks and smog, as well as pollution from the Charles River.
    J. D. Beresford, “The Man Who Hated Flies” (1929). A perfect insecticide isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
    Alfred Bester, “Adam and No Eve” (1941). In this