Howdy Boundlings!

I hope everyone has been enjoying the quest so far. 😊 I wanted to announce that @pagesofemma and I are going to co-host an unofficial buddy read of The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googings. That’s right, it’s a 2-for-1 buddy read special! Join us and make progress on your Solarpunk Futures AND the A Quest For The Future: Climate Fiction badge!

The buddy read will be from September 14 - October 14. I hope to see you all there!

Hi everyone! I’m Sasha (@sashareads). Putting this quest together has felt a bit like tending to a tiny book‑baby, and I’m so excited to finally share it with you. I hope you’ll adore it as much as I do.🥰

About the quest The Kaleidoscope of Time dives into worlds where time doesn’t behave the way we expect - loops, pockets, displacement, and intentional travel across eras. Because it stretches across so many genres, some books will feel instantly like your thing and others might not - and that’s completely okay. You’ll find a mix of YA and adult titles across historical fiction, speculative fiction, literary fiction, romance, dystopian, fantasy, mystery, thrillers, and plenty of genre‑blending, all threaded with a touch of sci‑fi.

Books that helped build the subgenre If you’d like to read some of the books that helped make the subgenre what it is today, then you should go for The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey by Enrique Gaspar, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler and Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.

Personal recommendations Personally I’ve especially enjoyed Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (Historical Fiction), Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Fantasy), Love Lethal, Death Divine by Jelena Dunato (Fantasy Romance), The Austen Affair by Madeline Bell (Historical Romance), The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (Fantasy Romance), and On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (Literary Fiction)

Suggestions for future additions I’ll be taking suggestions through this post: 🔗Quest Recommendations. Please give it a read before sharing your recs.

We’re all passionate about our favorite time travel stories, and I’d truly love to hear yours. However, recommending a book doesn’t guarantee it’ll be added, even if it’s popular and/or fits the criteria.

Let’s get questing! 🕰️

Hi everyone, I’m Emma (PagesOfEmma), and I’m so thrilled to share my quest with you!

About the Quest As the name might suggest, the books in this quest all touch on the climate crisis in some way. I’m incredibly passionate about our planet, and I care deeply about what we as a species are doing to it and all that live here. Climate fiction is a way for me to broaden my knowledge of issues around the world that I may not be experiencing myself, and I feel strongly that it is a genre that should be more mainstream.

The books I have chosen to launch the quest with are ones that I feel offer a solid base for the subgenre, including some big names like Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, to new voices that are doing brilliant things. Climate fiction can be a part of many different types of stories, and I have tried to choose a variety that gives something for everyone. Genre-wise I have mostly stuck with stories that lean either more literary or more science fiction, as the issues I want to highlight are the most prevalent in these, and it helps keep the quest a bit more focused.

A very important thing I want to note about this quest is that climate fiction on the whole, is not a happy subgenre. Please take care of your mental wellbeing when reading these books! I have been mindful about including a mixture of hopeful and bleak stories (and ones that are both) because I think it is good to take a balanced approach to reading climate fiction. It won’t do you any good to just read the difficult books, and it also won’t help to just read the super hopeful ones. At some point, I am planning to write up a separate post with this info and any related trigger warnings so you can all go in informed, but in the meantime please be aware there are often many trigger warnings for climate fiction.

A note on representation: As climate fiction has its roots in scifi, historically it has been dominated by white, mostly male, writers. I have tried my best to find books from a variety of voices (that fit my quest criteria), but some are sadly very underrepresented in the genre. This is changing nowadays, but slowly. I am hopeful that future additions to the quest will continue to become more diverse, and if you have any feedback for me on this front, I am open to hearing it.

Recommendations As this is a main quest, I will be taking recommendations for additions on this post >> 🔗Leave Your Recommendations Here!. Please don’t add recommendations as a new post - keeping the suggestions consolidated will help me stay organised!

Further Reading There are SO many books that come under the wider climate fiction umbrella. I can’t possibly include them all here, and a lot of them don’t fit my specific criteria but are still amazing. If you’re up-to-date on this quest, or nothing is currently speaking to you, you can check out my list that covers a lot of wider climate fiction across many different genres 🔗here.

Unofficial Readalongs If there is interest in doing some readalongs for this quest, then I would love to do that with you all! My thoughts are to do it quarterly, but I am open to feedback. If, on the other hand, you’d all prefer to sort out buddy reads as and when, that’s cool too! Just let me know if you want me to host anything.

Thank you for joining me here, I’m super excited to read with you all! I’d love you to tell me why you’ve joined and what you hope to see and learn from these stories. ☀️ 🌍 ⛈️