This chapter looks at Greek and Roman approaches to climate and weather, showing how geographers, astronomers, and physicians organised and understood geographical differences, and the consequences of those differences for agriculture, navigation, and even human physiology and disease. In some sources, very broad generalisations were made based on latitude alone, and in others variation was handled on a much more local basis. Long-term prediction of local weather was seen as an important task and utilised methods from astronomy, astrology, and folklore alike.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.