This chapter summarizes the debate on literary climate realism before arguing that existing ecocritical research on scalar mismatches should be complemented by a sustained reflection on political realism and climate activism. That such a shift can be productive is illustrated via a two-part analysis of Rachel Kushner’s novel Creation Lake, an example of Polemocene or planetary protest fiction. As the chapter details, Kushner’s text exhibits typical features of climate fiction yet it also mixes features of multiple realist subgenres to stress the impact of extractivist practices on rural and underground settings. It is a peculiar activist novel too, seeing that it does not celebrate communal protest but foregrounds an apparently cynical narrator tasked with undermining an insurgent group. Yet the story of this anti-environmental spy performs valuable cultural work, as it hints at unexpected alliances, trains readers to mistrust seductive storytellers, and to resist interpreting individual characters as generalizable models of behavior. Climate scholars should not dismiss realist fiction too quickly, this chapter shows, nor should we overlook the urgent question of political realism.