This paper explores the notion of vocation – the compulsion to pursue a passion or calling for lasting meaning, regardless of financial reward, as opposed to the imperative to labour as a livelihood, or for survival – in two recent climate fiction novels, C Pam Zhang’s The Land of Milk and Honey (2023) and Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (2022). I understand climate fiction to be infused with speculation’s lingering sense of conjecture as it offers a site for inventing other possible futures, a space to insist on the possibility that imagination can and does intervene into economic life, thus representing and critiquing the future of work. This umbrella term ‘the future of work’ is increasingly used in reference to the growing influence of automation and Artificial Intelligence on existing jobs, amplified by financialized capitalism. I take a different route by adopting a more capacious visioning of both the near and far future of work, and investigate how the two novels represent labour in pursuit of vocation under conditions of planetary ecological crisis. These representations of work provocatively explore the intersection of coloniality and postapocalyptic pleasure – experienced through vocational aspiration – while raising questions about the limitations of imagining the future.