ONE of the oddest tributes to the imaginative ingenuity of the human mind is its capacity to take the facts and manufacture from them, regardless of what they are, a narrative that corresponds with whatever our own view of the world happens to be. There's a great deal of that sort of thing going on at the moment, and while the process is nothing new, each generation feels that its own set of fears and worries about the future is more real and more urgent than any that has gone before.

Those of us lucky enough to be consuming the spectacle of Britain in flood from the comfort of warm, dry homes are now, broadly, of the opinion that this is a consequence of man-made climate change.

My friend Charles, a farmer in the Vale of Evesham, is not one of the fortunate majority for whom the floods are something to maintain a mere watching brief on. His home is flooded with sewage and his crops are ruined.

Of all he has witnessed in the last few days, he says that the most surreal scenario came about when he went to rescue a recalcitrant elderly man who was refusing to leave his flood-threatened home, only to find him sitting in a state of single-minded concentration, watching news of the deluge on television, while the water in his own living room advanced towards him. Sometimes the ability to persuade ourselves that disaster is what happens to other people is powerful indeed.

Charles has been convinced of the reality of climate change for some years now. Those few among us who remain loath to join the apocalyptic throng do so for political reasons. The left, the deniers suspect, disappointed by the failure of socialism, have switched to a politics-of-envy meta-narrative. The downside of capitalism is no longer as local a difficulty as violent revolution. The downside is the destruction of the planet itself. Interestingly, their messianic defence of capitalism has backed them into a corner more dystopian than that of the most miserablist of lefties. The end of the world may well be nigh, they now grudgingly admit, but this is nothing a reordering of human priorities can have any bearing upon.

In his latest book 'Black Mass' the philosopher John Gray traces the history of Western millenarianism, and suggests that the war in Iraq is no more or less than the latest in a long line of apocalyptic fantasies, rooted in religion and embarked upon under the misapprehension that a world-changing event can bring history, with all its conflicts, to an end. This particular fantasy, of course, was the neo-conservative enthusiasm for the idea that liberal democracy is an irresistible force in and of itself. Such projects, Gray wearily counsels, will always end in tears.

For Gray, it is utopianism itself that is the problem. He suggests that "it is dystopian thinking we most need".

We must, if we seek to understand our present condition, he says, "turn to Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Wells's Island of Dr Moreau or Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Zamiatin's We or Nabokov's Bend Sinister, Burroughs' Naked Lunch or Ballard's Super-Cannes - prescient glimpses of the ugly reality that results from pursuing unrealisable dreams."

Dystopian futures have of late become a staple of mainstream contemporary literature. Ballard has long been considered as foremost a sci-fi writer rather than a proper literary type, with only his naturalistic memoirs 'Empire of the Sun' and 'The Kindness of Women' awarded the unequivocal reverence all his work deserves. Suddenly, though, sci-fi has acquired literary credibility. We are now so comfortable with the idea of a post-apocalyptic future that such subject matter has become part of the mainstream English literary scene.

Most garlanded is Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer prize-winning 'The Road'. His story is of the struggle of a man and his son for survival in a US made desperately savage by climate catastrophe, and offers the sobering message that under such circumstances it would be foolhardy to expect anything more than the tiniest minority to behave with any decency at all.

Sarah Hall, whose first novel, 'Haweswater', won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and whose second, 'The Electric Michelangelo', was shortlisted for the Booker, is poised to publish 'The Carhullan Army', a futuristic fantasy in which a group of radical feminists make a stand against a Britain in repressive, authoritarian economic collapse. She joins a modest tradition, since Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing, to name but two, have each offered similarly cautionary tales. The big shift from genre, though, is that her book is not being marketed as either "sci-fi" or "feminist", any more than McCarthy's is as "sci-fi" or "masculinist".

Even children's literature, dominated as it is by the uber-fantasy of Harry Potter, has offered up a naturalistic post-apocalyptic classic, in the form of Meg Rosoff's 'How I Live Now', shortlisted for the Orange Prize for new writers. It has echoes of Iain Seraillier's wonderful Second World War story 'The Silver Sword', since it involves a group of children separated from adults the war.

- Deborah Orr