This article takes Andreas Malm’s 2020 manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline as a starting point to examine the representation of strategically used political violence in recent fiction and film. Political violence – as Malm envisions it for the future climate movement – has been a part of the radical environmental movement (in the U.S.) at least since the 1970s, very often, however, accompanied by accusations of terrorism from political interest groups and government agencies. In the immediate post-9/11 context, government rhetoric about “eco-terrorism” and new laws targeting different forms of expressing dissent as domestic terrorism were also accompanied by fictional representations portraying activists as dangerous terrorists (e.g. Michael Crichton’s State of Fear). Briefly tracing the so-called Green Scare in fiction and film from the post-9/11 era, I argue that a new awareness of the climate emergency has also led to a (literary) re-evaluation of strategically employed violence in protest movements. Analyzing Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future (2020), David Klass’ thriller Out of Time (2020), and the eponymous film to Malm’s manifesto, this article aims to show that recent novels envision political violence as an adequate means to inspire societal and political change in the face of the climate crisis.