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SHORT story collections are always a mixed bag, and this set of 10 pieces inspired by global warming is no different. The strange title refers to an old joke: if humans wind up in a struggle against bears, the smart money will be on the bears.

The high point for me was The Tamarisk Hunter, a near-future story of a farmer struggling to make a living on a drought-ridden Colorado river. Issues such as water rights, which can be rather (excuse the pun) dry, come to life because Bacigalupi makes them part of the plot and shows how they affect his characters. He pulled off a similar trick with genetic modification in his debut novel The Windup Girl, and The Tamarisk Hunter continues his strong run. More than any other story in the collection, it makes climate change feel real.

Cloud Atlas author uses similar ideas to strong effect in The Siphoners, which follows an elderly couple struggling to survive in a lawless future society where oil prices have skyrocketed. Diary of an Interesting Year also captures the sheer helplessness of living in a collapsing society, although her cataclysmic scenario is more generic.

I was intrigued at first by Hermie, in which a marine biologist chats with a hermit crab. But what could have been a darkly whimsical piece is undercut by clumsy narration and becomes didactic.

Similarly disappointing are two pieces extracted from longer books. Zoogoing is an excerpt from novel How the Dead Dream, which follows a mysterious man who breaks into zoo enclosures. It stops just as it is getting interesting. Meanwhile Sacred Space comes from the third volume of Science in the Capital series. Robinson is always best working on a vast canvas, as readers of his Mars trilogy will attest, and snippets are not the way to show off his excellent writing.

We haven’t yet had the definitive climate-change novel, but the strongest stories in I’m with the Bears do at least hint at what it might be like.