The literary production dealing with climate change is an ideal field to reflect upon the dialectics between tradition and innovation (of codes, structures and formal devices) characterizing the literary discourse when confronted to the emergence of new referents, problems or paradigms. After explaining why climate change is an example of unnaratable object for the tradition of the modern novel, I argue that science fiction constitutes a fundamental resource to tackle the challenges that this hyper-object poses to the regimes of representation.