Bloom is the Oceanic Farm of the Future

‘Cli fi’ novelists work a ‘crisis of the imagination’

by Dan Bloom

Sci fi has a long and illustrious history, and it is now part of the culture.
From novels to movie to cartoons, even stage plays and musicals, sci
fi — and spell it whichever you wish, SF or scifi or whatever — is
part of
Western culture now and has made a few inroads in Asia as well.

This past year has seen the rise of a new subgenre of sci fi
literature called ‘cli fi” that its boosters, from Margaret Atwood to
the ghost of Isaac Asimov, are saying is the next big thing in modern
literature. Movies, too.

NPR did a big story in April, followed the by the Guardian and
Financial Times in London in May, with the New Yorker weighing in in
July.

In Wired’s December issue, on its Jargon Watch page, Jonathon Keats
led off with a definition for ”cli fi” (climate fiction:
”A subgenre of dystopian fiction set in the near future, in which
climate change wreaks havoc on an otherwise
familiar planet, cli-fi has attracted literary authors like Ian McEwan
and Barbara Kingsolver.”

Keats told me in an email: ”Cli-fi seemed especially appropriate for
an issue guest-edited by Bill Gates, so it was the lead term for the
December issue.”

Cli fi seems to a perfect fit for the times we are living in, and
writers like Nathaniel Rich (”Odds Against Tomorrow”) and Barbara
Kingsolver (”Flight Behavior”) have already mined this territory
well. There will be more cli fi novels next year and the next.
Publishers and editors are aware of the term now, and agents are
looking for writers who fit the bill. Cli fi is here to stay, not to
supplant sci fi, but to serve as a subgenre in world fully aware of
climate change and global warming.

Novels about climate themes will be part of the literary scene for the
next 100 years. In many ways, it all began with JG Ballard’s 1962
novel “The Drowned World.” He was there first.

For writers, cli fi presents a challenge. One cannot write a long
sermon in the guise of a novel because readers don’t want to be
preached to. But writers can and will, I am sure, mine the same themes
that Rich and Kingsolver did, peering into the future, the far future
and even the past, with stories about our Earth and those who live
upon it.

NPR put it this way: “Over the past decade, more and more writers have
begun to set their novels and short stories in worlds, not unlike our
own, where the Earth’s systems are noticeably off-kilter. The genre
has come to be called climate fiction — cli fi, for short.”

British novelist Rodge Glass noted in his piece in the Guardian that the
literary world is now witnessing the rise of cli fi worldwide. He
called it “a warning” for a warming world.

After the NPR and Guardian news stories went through the usual social
media stages of tweets and retweets, a literature professor at the
University of Oregon, Stephanie LeMenager, announced that she had
created a seminar that she will teach early next year titled “The
Cultures of Climate Change” using the cli fi theme as a main theme of
the class.

Both Rich and Atwood were invited to appear together at the
WritersFest in Canada in September, as the opening night speakers,
with Atwood recommending Rich to the organizers as her co-star that
night. They asked him and he flew up to Canada for the event, which
from all acounts with both serious and humorous, as befits both
authors. ”Cli fi” was in the air, Atwood told me later in an email,
although the term itself was never mentioned on stage.

Cli fi is a broad category, and it will apply to climate-themed novels
and movies created in many countries across the globe, from Finland
to France. America and Britain will figure large in this new genre, too.

Note that cli fi novels can be dystopian in nature, or utopian, or
just plain ordinary potboiler thrillers.

With carbon dioxide emissions in terms of parts per million (ppm) now
hovering at around 400ppm, cli fi novelists and screenwriters have
their work cut out for
them.

I asked American University professor Paul Wapner, who has written
extensively about a novel concept he calls “climate suffering,” how
important cli fi novels might be for both writers and readers. He told
me in a recent email:

”Novels and fiction in general are essential for helping us address
climate change. Above all else, climate change is a crisis of the
imagination: we cannot envision alternatives to fossil fueled
economies or to a politics of inertia, nor put ourselves in the shoes
of the poor who live at the receiving end of our carbon addiction.”

==========================

Dan Bloom is a freelance writer based in Taiwan. He blogs about cli fi at
CLI FI CENTRAL: