Climate Fiction: A Brand New Genre Promised to a Big Future
Cli-fi has achieved a record of sorts: even though it has been around only since 2008, when the term was first coined by climate activist Dan Bloom, it has already become the subject of academic research. At the University of Copenhagen, a PhD student, Gregers Andersen, has explored global warming in fiction and philosophy in a widely-publicized thesis reported in the Science Daily, analyzing 40 different novels, short stories, and films produced between 1977 and 2014, all using global warming as a theme.
He has found five variations to the theme: The Social Breakdown, The Judgment, The Conspiracy, The Loss of Wilderness and The Sphere. For example, the blockbuster Hollywood 2004 film, the Day After Tomorrow, exemplifies the “judgment” theme. As he put it, “nature passes moral judgment on humankind’s exploitation of Earth’s resources and becomes an avenger.”
Gregers Andersen has also shown how cli-fi “works” on readers: through exaggerating the consequences of global warming and accelerating the pace of climate change. Another important feature that makes cli-fi narratives work with its audience are “characters who can remember how the world was before the climate changes set in.” This is a recognizable world readers can empathize with.
This human, “recognizable” aspect of cli-fi fiction sets it apart from mainstream science fiction.
Science fiction so often takes us away from our present world. That is the goal of works like Star Trek – to make us dream but it’s hardly a realistic future, even if that is what makes science fiction so attractive to most people. It titillates the imagination while climate fiction works on our emotions, even on our fears as it suggests dreadful outcomes if we let global warming go on unimpeded.
With cli-fi, we are dealing with near-future thrillers – often dystopian but not always. For Michael Crichton, who was no believer in climate change, climate activists were “eco-terrorists” as he called them in his 2004 novel, State of Fear. Yet that book too falls in the cli-fi genre.
With so many people involved, what is the future of cli-fi?
It certainly looks promising, and many notable writers have turned to climate fiction – most with narratives that support climate activism, like Margaret Atwood (MaddAddam), Ian McEwan (Solar) and Barbara Kingsolver (Flight Behavior), but not all of them. Michael Crichton stands out as a climate denier, and that certainly shows the flexibility of this new genre, that it can accommodate a wide range of views. Several younger writers have also achieved best-seller status with their cli-fi novels, like Daniel Kramb (From Here), Nathaniel Rich (Odds Against Tomorrow) and Paolo Bacigalupi (The Windup Girl).
However, cli-fi has yet to produce the Next Great Novel on the scale of Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that changed our political views forever. But in due course, this will most certainly happen. What we need now is the cli-fi equivalent of “Big Brother is Watching YOU!”
In the meantime, the opportunity is there to write in a brand new genre whose theme is constantly in the news. This is an opportunity that I haven’t passed up, my latest book is cli-fi, why don’t you try your hand at it? And if you’re not a writer, why not read up and decide which of those brand new cli-fi novels out there is the best?
Author bio:
Claude Nougat, a poet, painter and economist (Columbia graduate), is an award-winning author in Italy (recipient of three awards, including the Premio Mediterraneo, 1991). She is a contributor to various online publications, including Publishing Perspectives and Impakter, and maintains a high traffic blog under the name Claude Nougat (here). She is present on all major social media networks and Goodreads where she founded the Boomer Lit group.
Most recent book, a cli-fi thriller: Forever Young, Omnibus Edition (Parts 1-4),digital version exclusively on Amazon (here) and printed version available from Create Space (here)
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I certainly hope this is not a typical comparison between science fiction and cli-fi. The suggestion that science fiction engages your imagination and not your emotions is discounting some of the most powerful science fiction ever written, including the book generally credited as the first SF novel, Shelley’s Frankenstein, books like Lem’s Solaris, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, most of the works of Norton and Bradbury, and basically the entire catalog of Philip K. Dick.
Further, the suggestion that science fiction is lacking “characters who can remember how the world was before the changes set in” shows a dim understanding of science fiction indeed. Even Star Trek is a more emotional franchise, regularly calling forth comparisons to present day and “the human adventure” than you give it credit for.
Perhaps this is why so many have a difficulty seeing cli-fi as a different animal than science fiction in general: Not only does it include the same elements that science fiction in general has written about for decades; but even its pundits cannot seem to define it independently, other than to compare it to a very narrow segment of science fiction.
It’s good to see another piece about cli-fi. If you’re interested in finding out more about the development of this exciting genre, it would be great to see you at the Facebook cli-fi group (Cli-fi Central) https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/320538704765997/
Cli fi as a new, emerging literary and movie genre will go the way the cli fi communinty worlwwide takes it to go, and it could go in many different directions. It’s that new. And just as sci fi started off slowly and without much understanding at first in 1926 — remember Hugo Gernsback first dubbed the genre as “scientifiction” — one word! — and he intendede to publish scientifiction in his magazine AMAZING STORIES but when he lost control of the mag in 1929 and created SCIENCE WONDER STORIES magazine he then came up with the novel phase (for those times) of “science fiction” — two words. This morphed to sci fi and SF and many other dubs and subgenres. CLI FI has a long road ahead of it and it will likely go in many different directions. In many ways cli fi and sci fi are joined at the hip — and the brainstem — and when i queried top SCI FI writers and historians such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Andrew Milner and Gerry Canavan and David Brin, among others, they all said they liked the new genre term of cli fi but considered, in their own frameworks, to be a subgenre of sci fi. That’s cool, too, since that is how they see it. But in fact, cli fi is now it’s own separate literary and movie genre and only time will tell which directions it will go in over the next 50 to 100 years. There is a world to explore and many new worlds to build. Cli fi has arrived. It’s in the air. It’s everywhere now. It’s interconnected to everything now. As Scott Thill the former WIRED reporter says cli fi is a “cutlural prism, a criticism prism” in which to view the global culture now. The next 50 years will be pivotal. And many climate-themed sci fi novels and movies will also take center stage, too: INTERSTELLAR directed by Christopher Nolan, due for a November 7 release worldwide, is one of the first of this new breed of sci-fi/clif-fi movies. Wait for it and wait for the critical reaction to the movie….
Thanks Paul, Dan and Steven for the comments. I hope readers will join Paul’s excellent Facebook site where discussions can go on and I agree with Dan, climate fiction is in the air everywhere. This is not surprising since the debate on climate change is raging on while the United States continues to be divided on it: it’s not only a new genre, it’s linked to a hot, world-wide political debate!
But I believe Steven that you have misread the piece. I never suggested that science fiction is an arid, emotion-free genre, that would be silly. Science fiction is deeply emotional as it fires up our imagination and suggests myriads of alternative possibilities to the life we know and alternative worlds, some in parallel and others distant in space and time. And by doing so, it gives us perspective on our own world, we see the limitations and possibilities – in short, in addition to moving us, it makes us think. For me, science fiction is the most exciting genre there is, it asks deep questions, it titillates the imagination and anything that fires the imagination necessarily fires emotions.
What distinguishes Cli Fi from sci fi is the linkage to a very real (for many if not most) problem – climate change – that is threatening our very existence on this planet. The Maldives are likely to be the first nation to go under water and it could happen over the next 30 or 40 years or even sooner. New York, hit by Sandy, has learned what climate change means the hard way (through personal losses of its citizens) though many other places in the US still need to learn it, I have no doubts about that. And, as I point out in the article, some excellent writers who don’t believe in climate change have successfully written cli fi (Michael Crichton).
The thing to remember is this: cli fi is linked to a certain reality facing us in the near future (whether you like it or not) and the only kind of science fiction I can think of that is linked to a reality facing us was written by two major writers you don’t mention: Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Both wrote at a time ( mid-20th century) when the Soviet Union was threatening the world and many people (including myself) feared that a wave of dictatorships sustained by ideology (communism) would overwhelm the free world. Both produced masterpieces (Brave New World and 1984) that reflect and build on those fears.
Likewise, cli fi builds on and reflects some very specific fears – the fears that climate change induces in most sentient people, i.e. in anyone minimally concerned with the real future of the planet. Cli fi’s premise is not an imagined world like Star Trek that no matter how filled with “real” people who can feel and suffer “real” emotions as we do (love,hate,fear, jealousy etc) is still a world that could very well never happen, even in a very distant future.
Why? Because if climate change goes the way is is going now, i.e. unimpeded by humanity that is wasting time regarding whether it is real or not, there will be no world in which Star Trek and space travel will at all become possible. There will be no world, full stop – or perhaps only a very primitive world where humans barely survive in some corner of Antarctica.
That reminds me of that terrifying Pan Am accident that happened some 40 years ago in the Canaries, if I remember right (I think it was Pan Am unless it was a TWA plane, both companies have now disappeared). As their Boeing had just landed, the two pilots were faced with a plane taking off just in front of them. The planes collided and of course nobody survived – all that remained was the box that had registered the two pilots’ last words: “Do you see what I see? Yeah, man, now what?” Amazing. They were discussing what they were seeing rather than swerving off to avoid the oncoming plane…
Sci fi expert and editor in the UK Mr Niall Harrison at Twitter has recently been mocking and dissing the emerging genre of cli fi just as earlier critics mocked and dissed long ago his own beloved SCI FI genre term! Ironic, no?
For some reason which I cannot fathom yet — but I hope this blog post and subsequent discussions will be able to shed some light on — some people in the sci-fi community have been gently mocking the cli fi genre term in ways similar to way the ways in which sci fi itself was mocked once upon a time, say 50 years ago when sci fi first emerged on the cultural scene. 1926. and after. Lots of mockery.
Now we have good people with brillaint minds like like sci fi editos Niall Harrison writing in an Aug 23 tweet: “Nooooo “Cli-Fi” kill it with fire! #SFFNow”
And a friend of Niall’s tweets to that “I use “eco-SF” want of a better term. Occasionally also ecopunk, sheepishly.” ”Ecopunk or greenpunk or eco-SF, sure. But cli-fi… yuck.”
Tiemen Zwaan then tweets “A bit like what Atwood did with calling her books speculative fiction? ”
Someone else criticizers NPR saying: ”I think from last year. Claimed “cli-fi” isn’t science fiction..
Said it’s *lit* fiction. I guess because SF can’t be serious? ”
Friend adds ” Didn’t see that. Don’t understd need to deny SF 4 respectability ”
and then was the COMMENTARIAT HERE BELOW:
1. ”I didn’t read everything, but it sounds in part like a knee-jerk allergy to the term “cli fi”, rooted in part in the older hatred for the term “sci fi” which became popular in the 70s (though coined in the 50s and patterned on “hi fi”) and which was hated in part because it was associated with the kind of popular science fiction the traditional fans of written SF did not appreciate.”
2. ”I’m saying that if you hate the abbreviation “sci fi”, you’re probably going to hate “cli fi”… ”
3. ”Unfortunately, a lot of people have knee-jerk reactions to new terms and concepts. If they’re reasonable, they will listen to reasonable discussion on the matter. If they’re not reasonable, there’s no point in debating it with them. You may as well debate with a stone.
I haven’t been following the objections to “cli-fi” too closely, but it seems to be a mix of a few things.
Some people just don’t like the word itself on a stylistic level. They may also not like sci-fi, Hi-Fi, Wi-Fi, and any number of abbreviations, neologisms, etc. that they consider somehow odd, undignified, cheesy, etc. Hopefully these people will learn to “get over it” and use the term climate fiction if they’d rather not use the term cli-fi.
And then there are the people who pride themselves on being “apolitical” (whatever that means) or who are politically opposed to discussion of climate change for various reasons. They make fun of cli-fi just as much as they will make fun of any fiction that they consider to be political, preachy, didactic, etc.
Honestly, none of these should be barriers to understanding and respecting cli-fi as an emerging genre. Even if it’s something that they personally don’t write, they should be able to see the literary value, as with sci-fi. ”
4. ‘Yes, i meant “does NOT aim to supplant sci fi” — thanks for catching this typing mistake, yes DOES NOT AIM TO SUPPLANT, of course. I will let you know if any of Niall’s friends reply by tweet. I think they will. I just chanced upon their cli fi HATE conversation yesterday and had no idea people felt so strongly. WOW. But I am sure once they hear me out, they will change their minds and see the light. CLI FI is not the enemy of SCI FI and does not aim to supplant SF and is a separate genre but if they want to call it subgenre of sci fi, they can do that too. although i do not call it a subgenre. and if sci fi writers tackle climate issues then BRAVO. we are on the same TEAM!”
5. ”my response in CAPS to your very good post above: re ”Dan, you’re going to have to very carefully define what makes fiction CliFi and not another genre. I HAVE VERY CAREFULLY DEFINED WHAT CLI FI IS FOR MORE THAN A YEAR BUT I CANNOT CONTROL WHAT NPR OR THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR OR THE NYT SAY ABOUT CLI FI IS THOSE REPORTERS DO NOT CONTACT ME. ! SIGH ……If it’s fiction about the present day world using only present day technology, you have a solid case. NO CLI FI CAN TAKE PLACE IN THE PAST, THE PRESENT, THE NEAR FUTURE AND THE DISTANT FUTURE AND IT CAN EVEN USE FUTURE TECHNOLOGY IS WRITERS WANT TO GO THERE BUT THE MAIN STORY IS BASED ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND AGW. AND IT IS STILL CLI FI. SURE. If it uses future technology or takes place in the future, then you are moving into the realm of science fiction. NO NO CLI FI CAN TAKE PLACE IN IMAGINED FUTURE FOR SURE. BUT IT DIFFERS, IMHO, FROM SCI FI IN THAT SCI FI IS WELL, A DIFFERENT KIND OF GENRE WITH DIFFERENT KINDS OF GOALS AND READERS…THAT’S ALL. SOM SCI FI NOVELS CAN BE CONSIDERED CLI FI SURE. AND SOME CLI FI NOVELS CAN BE CONSIDERED SCI FI SURE. BUT THEY ARE TWO DIFFERENT AND DISTINCT GENRES. ASK ME MORE OFFLINE AT danbloom@gmail.com – i have files and files of quotes to show you.
So, is the intent to define CliFi as fiction about climate issues (1) in the present day with present technology, YES (2) in the present day and projected future with present technologies, YES (3) in the present day and projected future with present and projected technologies, YES or (4) in any time with both real and imagined technologies? YES ……There would be no issue with defining group (1) fiction as CliFi. Group (4) is squarely science fiction genre. Groups (2) and (3) may overlap the science fiction genre and should be labeled SF if any significant part of the story is set in the future, but may be removed from the SF genre if the story is squarely set in the present world and any views into the future or about future technologies are presented as projections by characters within the story.
In the end it will likely be the mainstream media who defines what is called CliFi — THIS IS TRUE AND I AM MONITORING THE MSM TO MAKE SURE THEY GET IT RIGHT….BUT OFTEN THEY DO NOT CONSULT ME OR EVEN CONTACT ME FIRST THEY JUST WRITE WHA THE WANT AS DID NPR AND CSM AND NYT ROOM FOR DEBATE FORUM….I CANNOT CONTROL THE MEDIA. THEY WRITE WHAT THEY WANT AND ARE OFTEN WRONG!…..SIGH….. the term is certainly catchy enough to make it adoptable I AGREE AND THANKS FOR YOUR VOTE OF CONFIDENCE SMILE…..– but you should at least start out trying to give it a unique and coherent definition. PAUL I HAVE BEEN GIVING A UNIQUE AND COHERENT DEFINTION FOR OVER TWO YEARS BUT I CANNOT CONTROL MEDIA HEADLINE WRITERS OR REPORTERS OR TWITTER HATES. SMILE……BUT ALL THIS WILL SORT ITSELF OUT BY AND BY. I AM NOT WORRIED. AND I AM NOT UPSET. IT WILL TAKE 20 YEARS FOR CLI FI TO DEFINE ITSELF. JUST AS SCI FI TOOK A LONG TIME AT THIS TOO. So ALL GOOD AND ALL IS WELL.”
6. ”My main point that I didn’t have time to talk about earlier was related to genre overlap. This may be a somewhat unconventional view, but as far as I’m concerned, genre overlap is fine. In some cases, a work of fiction may be influenced by several genres. It may even be unclear which (if any) is the dominant one.
For example, some “pulp sci-fi” lies at the intersection between the science fiction genre and the romance genre. These works are set in a sci-fi setting but the plot is more reminiscent of a romance novel. If I were forced to choose, I would classify some of these as romance rather than sci-fi.
To use a much more nuanced example, let’s consider Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior”. Arguably, it could be considered a slightly “sci-fi” plot because real butterflies have not yet exhibited the exact behavior that they do in the novel. It could also be considered “romance” because it explores relationships quite thoroughly and one of the main plot arcs has to do with a relationship. But personally, I would place it solidly in the “cli-fi” genre with aspects of the other genres. As I see it, the main thrust of the book is using a slightly quirky occurrence and a very personal narrative to explore the issue of climate change (and certain related themes of gender, class, the nature of science, urban vs rural, etc.).”
7. ”I am a long time science fiction fan. I have no problem with there being a “CliFi” genre — whether it’s a separate fiction genre or a sub-genre of something else. But you’re going to have to very carefully define what makes fiction CliFi and not another genre. If it’s fiction about the present day world using only present day technology, you have a solid case. If it uses future technology or takes place in the future, then you are moving into the realm of science fiction.
So, is the intent to define CliFi as fiction about climate issues (1) in the present day with present technology, (2) in the present day and projected future with present technologies, (3) in the present day and projected future with present and projected technologies, or (4) in any time with both real and imagined technologies? There would be no issue with defining group (1) fiction as CliFi. Group (4) is squarely science fiction genre. Groups (2) and (3) may overlap the science fiction genre and should be labeled SF if any significant part of the story is set in the future, but may be removed from the SF genre if the story is squarely set in the present world and any views into the future or about future technologies are presented as projections by characters within the story.
In the end it will likely be the mainstream media who defines what is called CliFi — the term is certainly catchy enough to make it adoptable — but you should at least start out trying to give it a unique and coherent definition.”
8. My main point that I didn’t have time to talk about earlier was related to genre overlap. This may be a somewhat unconventional view, but as far as I’m concerned, genre overlap is fine. In some cases, a work of fiction may be influenced by several genres. It may even be unclear which (if any) is the dominant one.
For example, some “pulp sci-fi” lies at the intersection between the science fiction genre and the romance genre. These works are set in a sci-fi setting but the plot is more reminiscent of a romance novel. If I were forced to choose, I would classify some of these as romance rather than sci-fi.
To use a much more nuanced example, let’s consider Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior”. Arguably, it could be considered a slightly “sci-fi” plot because real butterflies have not yet exhibited the exact behavior that they do in the novel. It could also be considered “romance” because it explores relationships quite thoroughly and one of the main plot arcs has to do with a relationship. But personally, I would place it solidly in the “cli-fi” genre with aspects of the other genres. As I ….As I see it, the main thrust of the book is using a slightly quirky occurrence and a very personal narrative to explore the issue of climate change (and certain related themes of gender, class, the nature of science, urban vs rural, etc.).”