When words like “hurricane” and “flood” and “fire” and “drought” have turned hot enough to burn anyone who hears them — hot as the word “war” was in 1922 — we’ll need novelists to navigate around and through them with an ironic detachment reminiscent of Modernist fiction. We’ll need novelists to show us, in other words, how we respond to a world rapidly becoming even less certain and stable than it already had been.

-Stephanie Bernhard, “Climate Changed”