Last week, this writer woke up in Washington, D.C., to a haze so thick and hot that both the thermometer and the air-quality index hit triple digits - the latter earning a cheery 'very unhealthy' label from her phone. If she lived in Delhi or Kinshasa or L.A., she might have shrugged it off as a Tuesday. But climate change has kindly democratized misery, making once-rare events routine for everyone. As Robert Rubsam noted in The Atlantic, 'To be unfamiliar with these outcomes is to be the outlier, not the norm.' So why can't literary fiction seem to nail that uncanny 'I've woken up in a different planet' feeling?

Amitav Ghosh argued in his 2016 book *The Great Derangement* that the literary novel was designed for a stable planet - and now that Earth has warmed up like a neglected microwave dinner, we need new storytelling tools. His latest novel, *Ghost-Eye*, attempts this but, per Rubsam, face-plants. Readers, however, pushed back, insisting that 'climate fiction' exists and is getting short shrift. Rubsam agrees that apocalyptic genre fiction and even some literary novels are tackling climate anxiety, but he points to older works - like Juan Rulfo's *Pedro Páramo* or José Donoso's *The Obscene Bird of Night* - that capture the vertigo of a world shifting underfoot without needing a melting glacier as a prop.

This debate echoes another Atlantic piece by Hillary Kelly, who found Jem Calder's *I Want You to Be Happy* frustrating for replicating millennial ennui rather than illuminating it. 'I want to understand alienation; I don’t want to feel alienated - and nothing more - by reading,' she writes. Similarly, this writer doesn't need fiction to describe a flash flood she's already lived through; she wants language that rejiggers her brain, not just a weather report in fancy font. Ghosh may be right that climate change demands a rethinking of the novel, but so far, the genre's best attempts still feel like they're writing about the weather instead of the apocalypse.