Abstract
The study assesses the personal reactions of readers, educators, and amateur writers to climate fiction of the twenty-first century in English. Besides the written critique of eco-criticism, it builds the power of climate stories through reference to moral imagination, ecological comprehension, and the reader's sense of agency. The main aim of the study is to qualitatively assess emotion, ethics, and agency in contemporary climate fiction in the 21st century. Thematic analysis, grounded in eco-criticism and reader response theory, was used to strengthen the broad parameters of the environmental humanities by analyzing the results of semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants from the creative, literary, and academic communities. The study focused on five interwoven themes: emotional ecologies and eco-anxiety, moral imagination and ethic-spiritual awakening, connective relational thinking and ecologically bound interdependence, critical power and inequality consciousness, and hope, agency, and restructuring the future. The discoveries concluded that readers interpreted climate fiction as a transformative experience that provoked extensive emotional reflection, moral self-examination, and a sense of responsibility towards the planet. Climate fiction plays a crucial role in cultivating empathy and ethics in teaching and communication settings and in enhancing the impact of narrative fiction by adding humanitarian viewpoints.