Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior falls into a relatively new literary genre known as "climate fiction": fiction that explores climate change. Climate fiction tends to fall into two general categories, either exploring how our world is already experiencing the effects of global warming or using speculative future worlds and dystopian themes to hypothesize how our lives may change as a result of climate change. The term "climate fiction" first gained notoriety in the early 2010s, although some novels written prior have been dubbed "climate fiction" retroactively. Authors whose work falls into the genre include Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers, and Kim Stanley Robinson.
Flight Behavior takes up the issue of climate change and sets it in the present moment, focusing on how climate change can disrupt natural ecosystems and human behavior. It overtly references many contemporary conflicts around the media's responsibility to communicate the truth about climate change. In one of his arguments with Tina, the journalist, Ovid references ExxonMobil, one of the largest gas and oil companies. Ovid alludes to ExxonMobil's long history of funding anti-climate change research, advertising, and lobbying initiatives, all while engaging in its own research on climate change behind closed doors in order to keep information secret from the general public and protect the fossil-fuel industry. ExxonMobil attempted to undermine public belief in climate change by funding corporations, individuals, and organizations that publicly denied climate change. In alluding to such a recent and contemporary event, Kingsolver positions her novel solidly within a realist form of the climate fiction genre. Flight Behavior's interest in the contemporary effects of climate change also extend its wide reach of concerns as Kingsolver connects political opinions about climate change to public education and a lack of funding, socioeconomic differences, and class biases between different regions of the United States.
