Lukács engaged in a series of exchanges with his contemporaries on the Left, including Bloch and Brecht, in which he defended realism as the only valid form of the novel, and they promoted modernism. This debate helps us to see the value and the limitations of the realist form and the need for other forms of fictional narrative. The representation of the future under climate change would seem to be something beyond realism’s grasp because such a radically different world is by definition far outside the quotidian. And yet, climate change is itself a reality that fiction would seem to be obliged to address. in The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh tries to explain why fiction has failed to address the problem of climate change, and he blames the novel as a form. Ghosh wants fiction that embodies a posthumanist perspective, but the novel form is dependent on human agency. A variety of novels address climate change, and most combine realism with other narrative modes. Realism is needed in order to make these novels persuasive, though it is unlikely, given the current reach of print fiction, that a climate novel will have the inpact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin once did.