...wow, I haven't read Lathe of Heaven in years.  Talk 'bout a flashback.

The Dark Materials series talks some 'bout global climate change and climate refugees as well (though not so much due to GHGs as it is those trans-dimesional dust particles).

After I get through the next couple of reading assignments, I am looking forward to reading Le Guin's new novel "Lavinia," apparently a story about the arrival of Aeneas and his Trojan refugees in the Tiber valley, as told by Lavinia, the Latin princess who is the hugely important background presence, but mostly mute, in the latter half of Virgil's epic, the "Aeneid."

My husband snatched my copy out of my hands as he prepared to visit his mother in Missouri, a couple of weeks ago.  He did not like the Earthsea trilogy much, but he said he liked this book a lot.

It is very possible that I read Lathe of Heaven, back in the 1970s.  But if I did, I am afraid I do not remember it.

I DO remember "The Wizard of Earthsea," vaguely: the inadequate geography, economics and history, which do not hold up in comparison to the creations of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; the Jungian psycho-cosmology, which is rather more interesting.

And yes indeed, Earthsea has a school (or at least a loose educational system) for boys and girls preparing to become accredited wizards and witches.  But there are so many differences between that world and the world (closely parallel to our own) of Harry Potter, and between the tone of that book and of the Harry Potter books, that we should hesitate before suggesting that J.K. Rowling was doing something derivative.

As for prescient dystopias with an environmental background, we just saw the 1990 movie "The Handmaid's Tale," with Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall and Aidan Quinn, based on Margaret Atwood's novel.  It is very well done, and very closely tied to current social realities in the US.  The basic situation is, following some sort of catastrophe in the US government (my husband tells me that in the novel, Islamic extremists blow up the Capitol, with most of the government inside), a break-away Christian fundamentalist racist militarist republic is struggling both to cleanse itself of violent dissidents, and to deal with the unnatural sterility of most of the women, brought on by some terrible sort of pollution.  The "handmaids" are the fertile women, who serve as sex-slaves, more or less, to the men in charge.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Harry Harrison's 1966 disturbingly dystopian novel "Make Room! Make Room!" (from which the movie "Soylent Green" was made) was set in a much hotter 1999 New York City.

I think that I'm remembering the novel correctly; I'm fairly sure the movie reflected this also.

Those of you who like Ursula K.LeGuin, and would like to try something more utopian than dystopian, might be interested in her novel "Always Coming Home".  This book is set in northern California, (the Napa Valley area), in the far distant future.  The world has evidently passed through some major changes, (human population is substantially lower, there are no fossil fuels, toxins in the environment have caused lingering problems, and San Francisco appears to have fallen into the ocean), but the climate does not appear to be significantly different than it is today.  (Perhaps, by this time, the CO2 levels have declined, and temperatures have become more "normal".)
      With regard to the Earthsea books-as charming as the Harry Potter series may be, the Earthsea books have always seemed to me to belong to a much higher class of literature.  I'm not sure it's entirely fair to put them in the same category.

Let the jaguars return!