I have spent the last five years reading climate fiction for my PhD research – which sounds more glamorous than it is. It means a lot of late nights with dystopian novels, many scribbled margins, and a slowly accumulating awareness that most adult climate fiction, for all its ambition, tends to land in one of two traps: it either drowns the reader in despair, or it resolves the crisis a little too neatly. What it rarely does is leave you with something as simple as hope that feels earned. Which is why Rajat Chaudhuri’s Wonder Tales for a Warming Planet surprised me.

I came to this lucid and compact illustrated collection shortly after submitting my thesis, in that odd, untethered week when you don’t quite know what to do with yourself. I expected something gentle and educational – a children’s book about climate change, illustrated, designed for classrooms and for raising awareness. I wasn’t wrong about any of that. What I didn’t expect was to finish it in one sitting, or to feel, at the end, that I had just read something that understood what climate fiction is and how complex technological usage, like geo-engineering and alternative energy, can be passed on to children in a simple story-like style. The author writes a letter to the readers at the beginning of the book, which sets the tone for the book.

In a faraway time, when there were almost as many seasons as the colours of the rainbow, we were still in school. The summers were not harsh; winter appeared when its time came, and rain clouds gathered when they had to, drifting away after washing the land clean… but we were not happy with all of these. A hungry demon inside our heads wanted us to do better for ourselves… we needed more power, more energy, more speech. The demon was happy… but the planet had begun to fall sick.

A world remade by climate change

The book contains three stories – “Tina and the Light of the World,” “The Seventh Sense,” and “How Did the Oceans Vanish?” Each one features a child at its centre, placed inside a world being remade by climate change. The illustrations by Isha Nagar thread through the pages in black and white, gentle and evocative. The inclusion of maps between the stories further enhances the reader’s understanding of these fictional landscapes. They provide a clearer sense of place and movement, while the metaphorical names of the locations add another layer of meaning to the narrative world. There are learning notes at the end of each story, written in an accessible voice, that translate the fictional world back into the real one. As a structural choice, this is thoughtful: the story earns its imaginative freedom, and then the note grounds the reader again without becoming overly didactic or moralising.

The first story, “Tina and the Light of the World,” follows a young girl navigating a town defined by blackouts and unequal access to power. The rich have electricity. The poor are left in darkness. Tina moves through this landscape guided by a series of figures – Stoker, then Anu, then finally a sun-catcher – each of whom brings her a step closer to a solar-powered community where energy is not a privilege but a shared resource. On the surface, it is a simple fable of illumination. But what Chaudhuri is doing underneath that surface is more interesting: he is writing about who gets access to the future. The solar community Tina discovers isn’t utopian in a naive sense – it is practical. The story suggests that the shift to sustainable energy isn’t just a technological problem but a question of who gets to decide and who gets left behind.

For anyone who has spent time thinking about climate justice, this is not an unfamiliar argument. But Chaudhuri delivers it not as an argument at all but as a story for a child to read. That is a harder thing to do than it sounds.

The second story, “The Seventh Sense,” is the one I cannot stop thinking about. It centres Gogol, a neurodivergent boy who begins to develop a new kind of perception – an extra sense, attuned to ecological shifts, that allows him to feel the effects of deforestation and habitat loss in ways others cannot. When the forest near his town starts being cleared to make way for urban expansion, Gogol is the first to understand what is being lost and why it matters.

What makes this story remarkable is that it takes neurodivergence and reframes it with an ecological aspect. When neurodivergence is thought of as a deficit, Chaudhuri is suggesting something else: that to perceive the world differently, to be more sensitive to its distress, might be exactly the quality the planet needs right now. The prose here is close to lyrical – spare and precise, the way children's writing at its best can be. Chaudhuri paints a picture through words and that comes to life when the readers can listen and feel the different sounds of nature, “…The people of the forest call it the seventh sense. To feel at one with the forest and live in harmony with the mind-boggling variety of life. The trilling and twittering of birds, the rustle of leaves, the fireflies among the ixora shrubs, the fragrance of a hundred wild roses, the hooting of owls when the silvery moon appears over the horizon and the sweet smell of mango blossoms when a gentle summer envelops Vasudha – our Earth home”.

The third story, “How Did the Oceans Vanish?” highlights a different aspect of climate change. It showcases a place where the seas have already dried up, their disappearance pieced together through fragments of memory. The culprit, we gradually understand, was a set of poorly tested geoengineering interventions – large-scale technological attempts to fix the climate that ended up catastrophically altering it instead. This is a story about hubris, about the danger of trusting that we can engineer our way out of a crisis we engineered ourselves into. In 2008, there was an article by The Guardian which showcased how reflective plants could send back more of the sun’s heat into space. Another technique introduced was stratospheric aerosol injection to cool down the planet's atmosphere. However, it comes with many limitations and unthinkable effects as shown in the film Snowpiercer.

The worst is here

By setting the story after the disaster has already happened, Chaudhuri removes the false suspense of “Will they stop it in time?” and replaces it with something more uncomfortable: the recognition that we already know what happened, and still we don’t change course. It ends with a question, not a conclusion – directed through the characters at the reader. It is the kind of ending that stays with you precisely because it doesn’t resolve.

Taken together, the three stories cover a remarkable amount of ground. Renewable energy and who controls it. Ecological empathy and who is capable of it. Geoengineering and its risks. Chaudhuri finds the human – the child ° at the heart of each one, and lets the rest follow.

Through these thought-provoking tales, Chaudhuri is building a vocabulary. Children who read these stories will have a language for things they might already feel but cannot yet name – the anxiety of a warming summer, the unease of a forest disappearing, the injustice of some people having power when others don’t. This vocabulary will produce people who are emotionally literate about the crisis they are inheriting.

My PhD thesis ran to 90,000 words on the question of how climate fiction, especially solarpunk, has developed in India and what the importance of such stories or anthologies is in the real world. Chaudhuri’s children’s book, in slightly more than 100 pages, does something my thesis could only describe: it constructs a reader who has not given up. A reader who still believes that things can be otherwise, that the future is not already written.

He tells the readers, “Let these stories about a warming planet be your friend and companion. Take from them, listen to their messages and use what you learn in your life. Through stories and climate action, you will one day bring back the seasons and the planet will be cooler.”

Sayantani Sengupta is an Assistant Professor at Bhawanipur Global Campus. Her academic interests include contemporary literature, climate fiction, ecological humanities.

Wonder Tales for a Warming Planet, Rajat Chaudhuri, illustrated by Isha Nagar, Perky Parrot/Niyogi Books.

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