Climate fiction was coined in 2011 by Dan Bloom, a freelance writer, journalist, and public relations enthusiast. It is called cli-fi for short.[1] In an interview conducted by David Thorpe of Smart Cities Dive in 2015, Bloom stated, “Cli-fi is a new genre term for novels, short stories and movies that stands for works of art and storytelling that deals with climate change and global warming concerns.” In another statement, Bloom wrote, “What is ‘Cli-fi?’ It is many things: a new literary genre, a meme, a motif, a buzzword, a warning flare, an alarm bell. Take your pick. Basically, Cli-fi was created as a platform for writers to use, upon which they could frame and flesh out their stories” (CLI-FI: Canadian Tales).[2] In yet another interview, Bloom told Erica Eller for the Bosphorus Review, “I wanted a new genre as a wake-up call, a warning flare, a PR tool.” However you may define it in short form, cli-fi is a relatively new term[3] for a genre of literature that utilizes fiction as a way to delve deep into the effects of our current climate crisis. Whether climate disaster is the backdrop for the media’s events or it is the primary conflict, climate fiction takes the crisis and runs with it.
There is a quote by François de La Rochefoucauld, an accomplished French moralist of the seventeenth century, that translates approximately to, “Death, like the sun, cannot be contemplated directly”[4] (Strainchamps).[5] In essence, it means that death is a heavy topic. You must tiptoe around it so as to not let its whirlpool of overwhelm suck you in. Talking about climate change is the very same. Climate change is this giant, looming threat above all our heads. One scarcely knows where to begin in tackling such a monumental obstacle. Yet, we must find a way. Climate fiction is one way we can contemplate the sun without blinding ourselves.
Fiction is a bit of magic right here in the real world. Maybe as a young child you read Junie B. Jones to escape elementary-school bullying.[6] Or the sprawling landscapes of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings have made you contemplate just what it means to be a little person in a big world.[7] Or late nights hunched over a smartphone reading fan fiction of a favorite ship has helped you believe in love again.[8] Fiction is the playground of the page. Fiction lets you step into the shoes of hundreds of other people you might never be. It tests you, challenges your beliefs, makes you wonder, makes you believe. Fiction is a coping mechanism and a plan of action. It allows you to see the world not as it is, necessarily, but as it could be.
Climate fiction uses these magical properties to their fullest capacity. Cli-fi can act as a back door to a world where we can contemplate consequences, opportunities, hope, and loss without experiencing the repercussions. It is a backdoor approach that makes our real-life disaster into something more manageable. With doom, gloom, and no more room for error in approaching the climate crisis, cli-fi presents the opportunity to explore. We are bombarded with information, facts and figures, all tremendously important to defending our planet, but fiction lets us step into new shoes and truly see what all of it means. Judith Curry, American climatologist and former chair of Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Studies, told NPR in 2013, “You know, scientists and other people are trying to get their message across about various aspects of the climate change issue. And it seems like fiction is an untapped way of doing this — a way of smuggling some serious topics into the consciousness” (Evancie). The time has come to tap it. In the same vein, Bill McKibben, a Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, wrote in 2005, “We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?” We have the science fairly well in hand (despite what some baffling naysayers claim), but can we lend our whole mind and heart to this topic?
At the beginning of the same article, titled “What the Warming World Needs Now is Art, Sweet Art,” McKibben addresses that we know about climate change, but we don’t know about it. He continues, “It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” (McKibben). He believes art can complete the circuit between observation, emotion, and action.[9] It would not be the first time art has acted in this role, and it certainly won’t be the last.
Art has always functioned as a mirror of society, while simultaneously being a catalyst for change. The examples are one-thousand-fold, even just within fiction, even just within the short span of American history. Two glaring examples include Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. The first, also known by the title of Life Among the Lowly, was published in 1852 by Stowe as an anti-slavery novel that had a profound effect on how Americans viewed slavery and the treatment of African Americans. Although white critics said the Black characters were painted in too positive of a light and Black critics condemned their oversimplification and perpetuation of stereotypes,[10] the novel was still considered to be so moving that it tipped the scales toward Civil War. In fact, when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe ten years later, he allegedly said to her, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” The story follows Tom, an enslaved man depicted as saintly and noble, as he is sold multiple times, as well as detailing accounts that directly attack American fugitive slave laws. The novel sold 300,000 copies in the first three months (History.com editors).
The second, originally published as a series of articles in a socialist newspaper,[11] was written by young American journalist and author Sinclair after he discovered the horrors of “wage slavery” within Chicago’s meat-packing district. Sinclair wanted to spark change with The Jungle. He did, but the changes weren’t what he had in mind. He meant to critique capitalism and steer working policies in a more socialist direction, but the legislative alterations that actually took place after the 1906 novel focused on the meat he described so grotesquely. Sinclair said, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” An outpouring of outrage and support for greater regulation of the meat industry occurred, even by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was no friend to socialism but was nevertheless persuaded (Klein). Both of these novels critically impacted American society and changed its culture and governance forever. And both were works of fiction that sparked humongous changes.
This is possible because fiction can approach heavy topics from a new point of view that’s more accessible to readers. Patricia Valderrama, assistant professor of English at Coe College in Iowa, says, “Fiction can transmit information really effectively in non-technical language. [It can] help people understand how an issue will affect them and be the catalyst to help them join an existing movement” (Stone). With climate fiction, this means readers can envision the warming world better and then take steps toward action. And though the genre was not named until 2011 by Bloom, books that can retroactively be categorized as cli-fi have been in publication for decades.
The premier example of effective climate literature is Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, published in 1962. This is not a work of fiction (though it does begin with “A Fable For Tomorrow,” a brief imaginative narrative[12]); still, it is well worth highlighting here. Carson fills the pages with the horrors of DDT, a then-popular and destructive pesticide, and its very real consequences on people, birds, plants, and ecosystems. The book is filled to the brim with science — most of it new and shocking — yet it is highly captivating, in a way where you might feel like it was fiction, and deeply wish it actually was. The news it describes is startling and horrifying.[13] She also asks, “How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?” (8). She begs to know when we will see the error in our ways. Because, as it stood, she quoted Dutch scientist C. J. Briejèr: “Once again we are walking in nature like an elephant in the china cabinet” (78). Carson’s work brought about some much-needed change, fortunately. Silent Spring is credited with evoking many critical environmental policy changes and sparking a wave of environmental activism. The Environmental Protection Agency would be founded in 1970, along with the first Earth Day celebration, and DDT would be banned in 1972. Carson’s Silent Spring will always play a foundational role in the realm of climate literature. However, it was not the only book on the shelf to ignite conversation and concern about global warming.
It is difficult to chronicle the start of climate fiction. There are numerous tales from even ancient times that describe human’s negative effects on the natural world around them, like perhaps the flooding in the Old Testament[14] or the very oldest written story of all, The Epic of Gilgamesh.[15] It is difficult even to pinpoint the start of man’s corruptive touch on the climate; after all, like Bonneuil and Fressoz questioned, “Did this species not bring about the disappearance of the megafauna (reptiles, birds and giant marsupials, the sabre-toothed tiger, the American lion, the European mammoth) by fire and hunting, everywhere it settled?” (24). Even so, topics of conversation like “global warming” and “climate change” were not necessarily discussed by name until around the 1970s, regardless of previous research. All of this in consideration, we can merely muse at any definitive start of climate fiction books. Some, like the Los Angeles Review of Books, argue that John Wyndham wrote the first cli-fi novel in 1953. It is titled The Kraken Wakes. The story follows an alien invasion of Earth that is disbelieved by a large percentage of the population. The aliens hide in the ocean and begin to melt Arctic ice to raise sea levels, yet many humans are ready to arrest scientists and take to conspiracy theories in flagrant denial. Seidel from the LA Review says, on the surface, the book may appear to have little to do with climate change. However, it argues that Wyndham “predicts the effects of climate change we are facing today with an alarming degree of accuracy… he anticipated how political gridlock would frustrate necessary action, how the erosion of trust in the media would create the perfect environment for conspiracy theories to thrive, and how rejecting scientific evidence would only make real solutions more difficult to achieve” (Seidel).[16] If this truly is the first cli-fi novel, it began what would become a common thread amongst following books of the genre, which is that of predicting the future with sometimes scary accuracy. Due to the nature of the genre, this will crop up continuously.
Like the emergence of a coherent and collective environmental movement, other scholars believe the climate fiction genre of novels emerged in the 1970s. In one review conducted by experts Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra in 2011, they identified the “first climate change novel” to be Heat by Arthur Herzog, published in 1977. In an updated review by Johns-Putra in 2016, she explains that Trexler had previously identified around 150 novels he considered to be climate change fiction, but her own definition would whittle that number down. Whereas Trexler highlighted any novels that navigated “climatic change phenomena generally,” she “would prefer to define climate change fiction as fiction concerned with anthropogenic climate change,” i.e. climate change as a result of human activity. It was with that definition that Johns-Putra claims that with Herzog’s Heat, “the history of climate change fiction begins in earnest.” From there, they identified only about 30 novels from the late 1970s to the time of their report, including but not limited to, George Turner’s The Sea and the Summer (1987), James Herbert’s Portent (1993), Robert Silverberg’s Hot Sky at Midnight (1994), Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather (1994), Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998), Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer (1999), and more extending into the 21st century. Some of those included T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy (2004, 2005, 2007), Ian McEwan’s Solar (2011), and several more. Johns-Putra notes that these climate change novels spanned multiple classifications, like genre fiction versus literary fiction, thrillers, utopias, dystopias, and more.
In fact, Johns-Putra has argued, including in the aforementioned 2016 report, that “one must consider the slippery character of literature” and realize the fluid nature of genre. Because so many novels and works of fiction straddle genres, Johns-Putra appears to hesitate to dub cli-fi as its own genre. Instead, she writes,
It is probably more accurate to identify climate change as a topic found in many genres, for example, science fiction, dystopia (themselves two genres given to much cross‐fertilization), fantasy, thriller, even romance, as well as fiction that is not easily identifiable with a given genre… In other words, climate change fiction names an important new category of contemporary literature and a remarkable recent literary and publishing phenomenon, although it is not necessarily a genre. (“Climate Change in Literature”)
Separately, in a 2015 article Johns-Putra contributed to The Conversation, she states, “It is not a genre in the accepted scholarly sense, since it lacks the plot formulas or stylistic conventions that tend to define genres (such as science fiction or the western).” Although her point of the fluidity of genre is one I and most other literary scholars would wholeheartedly agree with, I remain unconvinced that cli-fi should not be considered its own genre. Climate change in fiction could be considered a theme, yes, but the explosion of content and increasingly prominent concern and focus on climate change within and outside fiction convinces me that cli-fi has done enough to earn status as a genre. More on this classification to come shortly.
In any case, Johns-Putra highlights the upsurge of climate fiction, even just in the years between her reviews, in 2011 and 2016. She points to a number of climate change novels, like Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009), Robert Edric’s Salvage (2010), J. M. Ledgard’s Submergence (2011), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), the conclusion of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam Trilogy (2013; began with Oryx and Crake in 2003), Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), William Gibson’s Peripheral (2014), James Bradley’s Clade (2015), and, again, many more in between. She also points to novels outside the Angolophone literary world, namely to a plethora of German novels (“Climate Change in Literature”). Johns-Putra provides a fantastic review of the expansion of climate fiction. Whether she considers it a strict genre or not, even in briefly surveying her extensive research, one can observe how an outpouring of inspiration and dedicated work has seen climate fiction boom.
Growth throughout the years cannot just be measured in number of novels, but in impact as well. With its coining in 2011, a focused and renewed dedication to climate fiction was marked. Increased interest, quantity, and exploration have followed. Author Daniel Kramb, who wrote From Here in 2012, in which he put climate change “at the very heart of the novel,” told NPR in 2013, “In fact, I think when [people] look back at the 21st century … they will definitely see climate change as one of the major themes in literature, if not the major theme” (Evancie). At a point when climate action is more critical than ever before, it makes sense for climate fiction to be advancing in lockstep. Bloom, the man who coined the term cli-fi, remains a “cheerleader for the genre and its practitioners.” He claims, “These are the early days of the Age of Cli-Fi. Beginning in 2012, when Polar City Red became the first novel to be marketed specifically as a cli-fi novel, I feel the Gold Age of cli-fi will really bloom in the 2050s and into the 2090s. We are just at the beginning stages now and it is exciting to watch” (Eller). Exciting to watch indeed.[17] The genre of climate fiction will continue to grow, and it will reflect and constitute a response to the looming climate crisis.
Perhaps one of climate fiction’s greatest boons is its capacity for broadness. Yes, it can make the genre hard to pin down, as we have explored alongside scholar Johns-Putra. However, with multiple approaches to handling a topic as colossal as climate change, the genre spans a wide berth. In my opinion, if you can ask, “Does this count as cli-fi?” the answer is probably that, yes, it can. As I have embarked on this project, when sharing my interests with friends and peers, they will excitedly or curiously ask if such-and-such counts as cli-fi. Dune? Perhaps. Final Fantasy VII? Sure! I have even applied a cli-fi lens to reading Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. One of my favorite parts about climate fiction is its relevance and thus prevalence everywhere. When climate change is such a predominant component of everyday life, it only makes sense for that to flood into fiction. This does not trivialize the genre, nor does it make it arbitrary. Instead, it highlights what a powerful touchstone cli-fi can be. There is no singular cli-fi. As a response to climate change that swirls all around us, climate fiction can also be anywhere. Bloom has referred to cli-fi as a “veritable cultural” and “powerful critical prism” (Thorpe). As prisms do with light, cli-fi takes the focus of climate change and constructs a fierce spread of strategic and empathetic storytelling. Some stories may focus on the scientific elements, or some might examine refugeeism. The climate disaster could be named and explained, or it may linger just beneath the surface. Bloom also states, “There is no cli-fi Canon and there is no one way to write a cli-fi novel and every writer will use their own imagination to create their own kind of cli-fi storytelling. There is no one way to do it” (Eller). This opportunity for broad creativity strengthens the genre’s capability to reach and affect many authors, audiences, and observers.
Lacking a singular canon selection of literature, cli-fi captures and overlaps with many other genres of fiction. Arguments of genre encroachment like Johns-Putra’s above stem from this. However, I choose to allow climate fiction to envelop and interact with adjacent and related genres and subjects instead. Climate fiction is in conversation with the broader science fiction and speculative fiction, as it can dip its toes into utopias, dystopias, and other various imagined futures. I am, of course, not the first to argue as such, and I certainly won’t be the last. Many have stumbled over how cli-fi differs from science fiction and/or speculative fiction. To this point, when researcher and University of Manchester lecturer Carl Death explored how climate fiction should be used as a tool for and along with decolonization in an article titled “Climate Fiction, Climate Theory: Decolonising Imaginations of Global Futures,” he points out, “[M]any critical theorists – particularly feminist scholars – have emphasized the potential of science fiction to imagine radical alternatives… because of the particular capacity of novels to address the everyday, the experimental, and the private, speculative fiction has frequently had a privileged role in feminist theorising compared to abstract philosophising” (Death 444).[18] This is incredibly true of climate fiction, but how are we to reconcile the synonymous treatment of the genre with “science fiction” and “speculative fiction?” To me, two things can be true.
And it is not as if researchers in related fields are fighting tooth-and-nail to call a piece of fiction strictly one thing or another. To that point, Paweł Frelik, science fiction and American studies expert and professor in Warsaw, states that science fiction scholars and critics “do not mind” whether or not novels traditionally labeled as science fiction are included in prolific cli-fi studies and recommendations.
However, he also argues, “Whether labeled climate fiction, fiction of the Anthropocene, eco-fiction, or any other of a handful of names in circulation, the prominent majority of texts dealing with climate change… are really science fiction (SF).” As such, Parable of the Sower, The Water Knife, The Drowned World, and Dune are just some of the novels he claims as sci-fi, not cli-fi. He argues all this not to split hairs arbitrarily but to try to set the record straight from the “overly narrow understanding of what science fiction is, which limits it to stories about aliens, apocalypses, and time machines” (Frelik 125). Additionally, he seems to fear that such a large focus on cli-fi as the primary source of imagining climate-disaster-torn futures could result in an erasure of the years of work before it, since it is a recent development (128-129).
With all this respectfully in mind, I still must generally disagree. Frelik even criticizes Margaret Atwood’s approach, as a speculative fiction specialist who is also known for her contributions to the cli-fi collection, saying her work is just sci-fi under a different name (125-126). Even if speculative fiction and climate fiction were to fall underneath an umbrella of science fiction, this does not negate their efficacy or validity as independent contributions. Even in moderate disagreements as to where and whether cli-fi is situated as a genre or not, like with Johns-Putra and Frelik, few would venture to question the strength and benefits that cli-fi posits.
Furthermore, going from the macro to the micro within, climate fiction has numerous aspects that can lend it to other genres or other genres to it. The “Climate Fiction Issue” of Fix Magazine, produced by Grist in late 2021, helpfully divided cli-fi into a glossary of relevant terms. Associate editor Claire Elise Thompson divided the genre into “the futurisms,” “the punks,” and “the topias.” The futurisms consist of Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism,[19] Indigenous futurism,[20] disabled/”crip” futurism,[21] and queer futurism.[22] The punks include cyberpunk, solarpunk, ecopunk, and hopepunk. Finally, the topias include utopia, dystopia, ustopia,[23] and ecotopia. Each has its own definition, some contested, and there can be a lot of overlap between them, too. However, we can generally accept that if a piece of fiction utilizes aspects of any of them in relation to climate change or a climate disaster, that piece could be considered cli-fi. This is not to say that every instance of overlap between Africanfuturism or utopia or whatever else and climate concerns will result in a label of cli-fi, simply that it is possible. Cli-fi is a progressive and inclusive genre; simply acknowledging and appreciating how it may overlap with other genres and subgenres can be beneficial enough, as that acknowledgment demonstrates that there are many tools within fiction to tackle the climate crisis.
Every mode and every novel does it differently. For one example, let us turn to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Originally published in 1993, it was a bit of a shock for the book to shoot up to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List in 2020. What Butler wrote of raging wildfires, water scarcity, extreme weather, violence, and (climate) refugees hit close to home. And even more interesting as we address this book again now, it is set in 2024.[24] To open the front page and see that year staring back at me chilled me to the bone and made me approach the novel with hesitancy, curiosity, and some fear. Then, the first chapter opens with the epitaph:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God is Change. (Butler 3)
Lauren, the Black teenaged girl who serves as narrator and protagonist of the novel, grapples with big ideas like this throughout the novel, as she has begun to develop her own form of religion called Earthseed. As the world around her is marred with fire and violence and walls between people who used to be neighbors, she fights for something to believe in. Change is so clearly at the front of her mind as a defense against the change that has already happened all around. All the while, Lauren has what the book calls “hyperempathy syndrome,” which she describes like, “I felt every blow that I struck, just as though I’d hit myself … I feel what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel. … I’m supposed to share pleasure and pain, but there isn’t much pleasure around these days” (11-12). This means that as she and her companions must flee from their destroyed homes in search of some asylum up north, she feels every pain (emotional and physical) of the people they pass and carries the burdens of everyone else on top of her own as they traverse dangerous territory. As someone who is very empathetic and experiences great eco-anxiety myself, Lauren’s affliction resonated with me greatly, and I believe others would feel the same way. Lauren and a handful of companions that gather as the story goes make their way to a plot of land belonging to one of their families that they believe to be safe; though the going is tough, Lauren is fully committed to protecting her new friends and establishing the first Earthseed community.
Butler’s Parable of the Sower has been considered to be many things. Speculative fiction, dystopian fiction, apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, climate fiction, and so forth. Truth be told, it has aspects of all of these. And importantly, the way Butler holds climate disaster and community building at the core of the book’s message, it differs from even other cli-fi novels. In another article for Fix’s “Climate Fiction Issue,” Maddie Stone states, “[Butler’s] genius lies in how clearly she illuminated the disproportionate impact a warming world would have on the poor, people of color, and women, a reality many Americans are just now waking up to.” She calls on wisdom from Rebecca Evans, an assistant English professor at Southwestern University, who conducted research with two undergraduate students to survey around 30 climate fiction pieces of media. Their findings revealed that all of the works connected to the central themes of cli-fi, but “white authors tend to make the issue peripheral to plotlines about protagonists staving off disaster or surviving a post-apocalyptic world on their own,” Stone writes. “Stories by queer, feminist, and BIPOC writers, on the other hand, often make the unequal impacts of climate change along existing lines of social power a core theme. These texts also tend to focus on communities and collective action” (Stone). Parable of the Sower is the perfect example of this. Community building is at the fore of the novel. Characters band together to find the good left in humanity, and Lauren is determined to establish a new haven for them, with dreams of moving to other planets someday. With as much pain and hardship as there is still present in the novel, these things are taken in stride and result in a form of hope that many novels — that might be described as dystopian or apocalyptic or even spec-fic or sci-fi — are missing. Butler’s experiences as a Black and possibly queer[25] feminist shone through in her character and world building to examine a post-climate disaster landscape. Stone continues, “It’s no accident that Black, Indigenous, and other writers of color are less likely to frame climate change as a looming apocalypse. Not only are they more likely to experience its impacts today, their people have already lived through world-ending apocalypses in the form of slavery, displacement, and genocide.” And even furthermore, she calls upon Stephanie Bernhard, assistant professor of English at Salisbury University, who states, “The perspective in a lot of the speculative climate fiction written by people of color isn’t that the world was great and now it’s going to be awful. It is, ‘We’ve been marginalized and fighting for justice for a really long time, and this is a new front in the fight’” (Stone). These perspectives from people of color and queer folks and women and other marginalized communities must be showcased. The climate crisis affects all people, but while some stories take place in a dystopian future, as if climate disaster is in a far-off future, many recognize that this is a “dystopian present.”[26] By accepting that these visions reflect the world in its current state — remember that Butler’s novel is set in 2024 — the tool of climate fiction can be used to the utmost. Stories like Parable of the Sower defy strict genre definitions and move beyond doom-and-gloom tales to use cli-fi to imagine legitimate solutions and futures.
To this point, although the climate crisis can make us feel overwhelmed with sadness and despair, there is hope, and climate fiction can highlight those moments of hope, too. When considering times of climate crisis within literature, dystopias might be the first to come to mind for many, but we cannot stop there. Dan Bloom has said, “Each of these novels, like others in the genre, help us to ‘see’ possible futures lived out on a burning, drowning, or dying planet. But at the same time, there are also many cli-fi novels which are not dystopian stories but utopian optimistic stories with positive endings full of hope and promise” (Eller). When pondering how cli-fi can function, McKibben asks and answers,
[W]hat emotions should the playwright play with — fear? Guilt? Sure, but not only those… there also needs to be hope as well — visions of what it might feel like to live on a planet where somehow we use this moment as an opportunity to confront our consumer society, use it to begin the process of rebuilding community. They don’t have to be romantic visions, though a little romance wouldn’t hurt.”
There is no denying the doom and gloom surrounding the climate crisis. We feel it every day. But statically accepting that gloom does not move the needle. Cli-fi does not need to focus just on fear or guilt or dystopia. This would limit the genre’s potential as a tool of change.
In 2018, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson published a study titled “The Influence of Climate Fiction, An Empirical Survey of Readers.” This research is incredibly relevant to the topics discussed here, for a multitude of purposes.[27] Emotional responses of cli-fi readers were one of the topics he studied. He states, “Feeling is an integral aspect of most reading experiences, and many cli-fi readers had dramatic emotional responses to these works of fiction… [T]he majority of emotional responses were dramatically negative.” Schneider-Mayerson calls upon previous research that finds almost eighty percent of climate change stories within major newspapers in six countries used negative frames, too, with a doomsday outlook in mind.[28] If readers are left only with feelings of despair, they might be left worse off than before picking up the reading. A sense of helplessness can set in. Schneider-Mayerson writes, “[T]he psychological tendency to avoid stories that deliver negative emotions means that well-intentioned authors who vividly depict the catastrophic consequences of climate change may actually be hindering their goal of heightening environmental consciousness. In place of pessimism, psychologists suggest that climate communications be framed positively.” He says that, for a majority of the climate fiction works he surveyed[29] did not do this (490). Rather, only twenty-six percent of respondents replied that the book they read left them feeling remotely positive (489). That leaves far too many readers vulnerable to closing the books and shutting down, a real danger of majority-negative cli-fi.
Not every reader was left feeling down and hopeless, however. Not in the slightest. Numerous testimonials were given that show how cli-fi novels shifted their perspectives for the better. Cli-fi provides the opportunity to broaden one’s horizons and approach the toughest of topics with greater understanding and empathy. This can even coincide with some of those feelings of helplessness, if utilized correctly. Schneider-Mayerson found that “[M]ost readers saw these works as purposeful thought experiments: if we do not change, very bad things will happen.” The books were read as cautionary tales but not outright prophecies (486-487). This leaves room for making change. One 25–34-year-old male respondent from Florida says, “All books that I read open my eyes. They make you feel more aware of the reality of the world” (487). Another reader of the same demographics but from Arizona notes that the book he read, The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, “made [him] think about Phoenix more particularly rather than ‘global warming,’ which is so much more big and abstract” (488). A respondent who read Back to the Garden by Clara Hume said that the characters “really made me see how climate change could affect me on a far more personal level — one in relation to my family and friends — which I had never really pondered before” (486). These responses indicate that climate fiction has the capacity to bring humongous issues down to eye level. In this way, readers can comprehend taking action. Readers’ considerations can also bloom outward, too. For one respondent, Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver led to “an expanding of consciousness” to pay more attention to the world outside of her immediate household, where her thoughts usually revolved around (485). And yet another of the surveyed read Maggie Gee’s The Ice People and “began to see that it has so many other dimensions that [she] had not considered. Changes in climate have the potential to change the very fabric of society,” with special regards toward “power dynamics between the genders, between people of different classes, and from different areas of the world” (486). Their minds were expanded by reading cli-fi novels; climate change was not simply something they heard in dire news stories but something they experienced themselves, in the fictional world and the real one. Although Schneider-Mayerson’s findings showed a majority of negative feelings after reading the nineteen novels he considered, these impactful testimonials show that cli-fi does have the power to move people. Cli-fi has empirically been shown to broaden horizons, build empathy, and spark imagination for change.
One of the other prime opportunities I see climate fiction providing is the ability to imagine technology-based solutions to climate change that we do not yet have the capability to achieve in the real world. Growing up with sci-fi fans of parents, I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve longed for a ride in the TARDIS or to wield a lightsaber or be able to say “Beam me up, Scotty,” and go where I want to be. Climate fiction can be the same way. Perhaps we do not have the proper tools to cope with the rising temperatures and dwindling biodiversity yet,[30] but these works of fiction can act like the drafting table in a lab where authors and engineers can figuratively put their heads together. With cli-fi often taking a look into the future, it’s fascinating to see what new technologies will emerge.
For example, let’s turn to J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. This novel was written in 1962 to imagine a 2145 where solar radiation has rendered Earth largely uninhabitable and underwater. Reptiles even become the most dominant form of life once again, and “the temperature will soon be up to nearly two hundred degrees. The entire planet is rapidly returning to the Mesozoic Period” (30, 108).[31] The main character Kerans is one of a few still hanging on in what was Britain,[32] trying to collect data on temperatures and mapping that even they think is pointless by now. Kerans “had been born and brought up entirely within what had once been known as the Arctic Circle—now a sub-tropical zone with an annual mean temperature of eighty-five degrees—and had come southward only on joining one of the ecological surveys in his early 30’s. The vast swamps and jungles had been a fabulous laboratory, the submerged cities little more than elaborate pedestals” (32). The world-building in this novel are what make it most remarkable to me. It’s Earth but not as we know it at all; it is covered in water, and humans, despite fleeing to the poles, have nearly gone extinct in the heat. It's fascinating and horrifying to read. These people were unable to use technology to stop climate disaster. However, they are looking for ways to use it to survive it and reverse it.
With the blazing sun out of doors, Kerans and the other characters mostly stay inside in an interestingly imagined, controlled environment. Kerans stays in the Ritz, still an elegant destination that greatly contrasts with the surrounding drowned world. Indoors, he can seal air-locks and set thermostats to use a lot of fuel just to make the air “a pleasant eighty degrees in two hours’ time” (27). It works via “heat curtains” which seal perfectly and work in conjunction with a “250-amp. air conditioning unit [that] had worked without a halt” despite the fact that “the first six storeys of the hotel were below water-level and the load walls were beginning to crack” (20). This technology does not exactly give off sustainable vibes.[33] And once the power runs out, as it will soon, there is no other way to survive. To further traverse the disastrous landscape, Kerans and the others use boats and hydroplanes on the endless lagoons. These items don’t paint an optimistic vision of how technology can be used, but they represent a way of coping.
The characters also use technology to try to find a solution. After all, that’s what their seemingly hopeless studies are for as researchers. A little more than halfway through the novel, Kerans dons a massive diving suit to explore the drowned world beneath the 95-degree waters. A massive domed helmet, still only suitable for five fathoms (thirty feet) and a complex tubing system make Kerans “look like the man from inner space” (120-121).[34] It’s relatively elementary technology, but given the book was written in the early 1960s, an astronaut going beneath the sea like this sticks with me. Then, there’s the more remarkable draining that occurs. In an attempt to save London, Strangman defies all odds to (controversially) drain the lagoons. He dammed up what used to be Leicester Square, and the pumps he installed cause the water to go down by three feet a minute. Beatrice calls it horrible, Kerans is in shock, and Bodkins goes numb. “For a moment Kerans fought to free his mind, grappling with this total inversion of his normal world, unable to accept the logic of the rebirth before him. First we wondered whether there had been a total climatic reversal that was shrinking the formerly expanding seas, draining the submerged cities…” (140-141). It is not the only lagoon, but it is draining. What does this mean for the rest of the world? Well, that’s spoiling even more of the conflict for the rest of the book. In any case, this is an instance of imagining what technology is capable of. It is not always sunny, agreeable, or morally just. However, the technology is capable of so much. We just have to imagine it.
Amid one of the more intense moments of The Drowned World, Strangman, a disagreeable character, as you may have picked up on, lets himself into Kerans’ quarters and makes himself too comfortable. He monologues a bit before pausing. Then, “He picked a book off the air-conditioner, a copy of Donne’s poems, and extemporised a line: ‘World within world, each man an island unto himself, swimming through seas of archipelagos…’” (Ballard 133). This character believes the world is every man for himself.
The real poem, composed by John Donne, a great English poet considered to be a founder of metaphysical poetry, has the opposite effect. It reads, “No man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.” Donne is sometimes known for his cynicism, but not here, no.[35] Here, the poet evokes a sense of connectedness to all human beings. Strangman deliberately chooses to turn from this optimistic perspective, and that is how he approaches the post-disaster world and its possibilities. This fixation on individualism found in J. G. Ballard’s can be contrasted with another technologically explorative piece of cli-fi[36] titled War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi.
Onyebuchi is an American author known for incorporating Afrofuturism into his stories. The 2019 book War Girls certainly does, and any ideas of individualism in the face of a world ravaged by climate and nuclear disaster are present only in the necessity of survival and are far-overshadowed by messages of sisterhood and community. Set in a futuristic Nigeria in the year 2172, sisters Onyii and Ify are ripped apart and find themselves on opposite sides of a raging conflict between Nigerians and Biafrans. The two sides fight over the riches of the land as if they have not already helped decimate the Earth underneath. The North American and European powers that led the world to this stage have already fled to outer space. They have left most non-Western countries and peoples to deal with the aftermath of intolerable radiation and climate change. It’s an example of post-colonial eco-racism when those countries were the only ones able to escape what humans had stupidly done to the planet (24). While they have been left in the dust, the Nigerians and Biafrans become entangled in a conflict echoing the real Biafran War/Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s. On either side, bonds are extraordinarily close-knit, and all will fight tooth-and-nail to prevail. Largely, this will be through technology.
Technology is impeccably integrated into the world. Two characters, Daurama and Daren, jest in a sleek and advanced world, “Do we live in mud huts?” “My mud hut has wireless internet and wallpaper televisions. What does your mud hut have?” “In Nigeria, we paper the walls of our mud huts with advanced engineering degrees” (Onyebuchi 78). It’s like some narration states about halfway through the book: it’s all “due to technological wonders she can’t even imagine” (240). That’s precisely how one feels while reading this detailed novel. Onyii, the older sister, is an “Augment,” as many humans of the time are. Her arm is a completely removable electronically enhanced prosthetic (4) and gains technology that covers an eye and half her face (118)[37]. Her dear friend, Chinelo, has more internal Augments, including a braincase that allows for direct data transmission and even some metal where bones should be (10). Ify is not Augmented but uses her “Accent” to view the world through an overlay bursting with information: “The tiny piece of tech, a ball small enough to fit on the end of an ear swab” made it so “the world exploded with answers” (15, 16). She’d later go on to figure out how to use this technology to do remarkable things, even hack live animals that are half-tech, completely mutated beasts (“before she knows what she’s doing, she’s peering at the beast’s metal organs and CPUs…” 46. Again on 314.). There are nanobots (28, 73), battle mechs with powerful guns and flying capabilities (37, 248), instant surgical sealant (100), and more. Daren replaces several organs and builds a whole new skeletal and nervous system to survive (127). There are “regeneration pools” for healing (155). Under foot at the girls’ camp in the start, fiber optic cables run across the ground to repeatedly zap the soil to release water that can then be purified for washing, cooking, and cleaning; they also collect precious minerals from the ground to power the tech at the girls’ camp (8-9). The list could go on and on and on. Onyebuchi is phenomenal at building a world almost unrecognizably advanced in technology.[38]
It is not just that the technology is mesmerizing — though obviously it is — but what the implications of it are. The technology is not flaunted without purpose. It has been demonstrated for its advancements in war and in healing, but it stands to solve the climate crisis, too. When Daren and Ify first meet, he tells her, amid ongoing climate disaster, “We are working on technology to… reverse the tide, as they say. … The climate is changing, and we must change with it” (Onyebuchi 77). It is this idea that makes Onyebuchi’s War Girls strike me and others as a climate fiction novel. Sci-fi shows us great scientific marvels constantly; cli-fi lets us take it a step further and look for solutions. Healing baths and electronic prosthetics fascinate me, but it is every mention of restoring the climate-change-ravaged Earth that truly grip me. How might they use their technology to accomplish this? Ify has dreams.
She dreams of building extraordinary structures that will beat back the waters that gobble up more and more shoreline with each passing month. And she will figure out ways to harness that energy and power entire cities with it. She will figure out how to terraform those parts of pasture in the North that the desert has conquered. She will study and learn how to resettle those tribes. She will make Nigeria a beacon of light on the continent. (128)
Or take for example, the Redlands: “It’s land neither the Nigerians nor the Biafrans want to touch just yet,” where “[r]adiation hangs thick in the air and glows beneath the soil. Beasts occasionally roam, bigger than they have any business being, and often with more limbs than they have any business having” (303, 302) This land that is left in the wake of climate and nuclear disaster sits rotting away and killing anyone who dares come near. But. ”But maybe someday Biafrans will have the technology to terraform this place…” Testing facilities have already started sprouting along the edges (303). This is part of the world driven by technology and devastated by climate change. It’s not an unimaginable future outcome. These characters are ready to start finding solutions. War has charged their tech progress for a long time; what could happen when their attention is turned to the common enemy of climate change?
It is hard to imagine what technology could overturn global warming and eco-disaster in our own world, but imagining is precisely what we must do. It is the first step to anything. Fiction, like Ballard’s The Drowned World or Onyebuchi’s War Girls, is in the unique position to act as a sounding board, think tank, and drafting table all at once. Climate action must involve innovation. Technology is one of our greatest tools of innovation and progress. Cli-fi acts as a handle on this powerful tool, so that we may one day wield it. Fiction authors may not have all the science down. But we can begin the work. First between the covers of a book, but one day out in the field. What solutions can we dream up?
Climate fiction can bridge genres, build empathy, strengthen community, and imagine technologies. However, like anything, even cli-fi has its limitations. Even at its best, cli-fi can still be limited by cognitive dissonance, being too heavy-handed, and not reaching a very wide audience.
As we have previously established, climate fiction cannot hope to succeed by only dwelling on the negative. Dystopias have a place in the genre, but too much pessimism can override the hopeful goals of the cli-fi genre. Research from Schneider-Mayerson’s empirical survey of the influence of cli-fi furthers this line of reasoning. He explains, “While some negative emotions (such as anger) can be fuel for personal or political action, others (such as guilt, shame, helplessness, and sadness) are much less likely to lead to active responses.” He also calls on psychologist Per Espen Stoknes who says, “When climate change is framed as an encroaching disaster that can only be addressed by loss, cost, and sacrifice, it creates a wish to avoid the topic” (490). Cognitive dissonance is the sensation that occurs when one’s thoughts and beliefs do not align with their actions. Should readers of cli-fi feel too helpless or too overwhelmed, cognitive dissonance is a likely outcome. Fiction is often seen as a way to escape our reality in search of something different, perhaps for better or worse. With climate fiction, the imagined futures can often be realistic and simultaneously troubling. The stories may point out large, important problems regarding climate change, but those can backfire to not be used for action. Schneider-Mayerson says, “This lesson is counterintuitive: the psychological tendency to avoid stories that deliver negative emotions means that well-intentioned authors who vividly depict the catastrophic consequences of climate change may actually be hindering their goal of heightening environmental consciousness.” Instead, Schneider-Mayerson suggests that psychology shows us that positivity through frames like “preparedness and resilience” and “values and a common cause” and “opportunities for innovation and job growth” can make cli-fi a much more effective tool.[39] Good examples of these messages that the researcher suggests, based on respondents’ feedback, are Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver and Back to the Garden by Clara Hume. My mind immediately went to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
Cognitive dissonance can occur in other forms, too. Works of climate fiction can be interpreted by climate change skeptics to discount the imagined futures as purely fictional. Schneider-Mayerson’s research found this discrepancy in several climate deniers’ reports, many of whom were religious and/or conservative. Respondents reported that “The book made me feel skeptical [because it] went over the top with the conditions and I felt a lot of the story was ridiculous” and they saw a book purely “as a work of fiction, and not something that is ever likely to happen.” Another said of Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain, “The book was a joke. Seriously, in the Bible, God promised that he would not flood the Earth and wipe out humanity, again. So, I don’t think we have anything to worry about.” Other respondents had even more shocking ways to justify their cognitive dissonance, like one who read Flight Behavior but didn’t find it convincing or moving because “this author is a well-known climate change alarmist… My feeling is that maybe the portrayals [sic] of the imminent danger to the butterfly population was a bit exaggerated because this author is a known climate change advocate” (491).[40] It did not matter how well-researched the book was. If ideas do not match a person’s pre-existing notions of the world, they are eerily easy to disregard.
We see this happening with climate topics other than fiction, too. Margaret Atwood punchily raises the example of Florida governor Rick Scott banning all Florida government employees from using the phrases “climate change” and “global warming;” “What a practical idea for solving pesky problems: let’s not talk about it, and maybe it will go away,” she writes.[41] Scott denied making any such ban as the story blew up nationally and more scientists stepped forward to confirm the pressure to avoid the phrases. As if they were buzzwords or propaganda, and as if Florida has not already had to face rising ocean levels in a serious way. But no, that’s just “nuisance flooding” when sea-levels affect people’s properties. Atwood sharply remarks, “I myself would like to disbelieve in gravitational forces, because then I could fly, and also in viruses, because then I would never get colds” (Atwood). Cognitive dissonance when it comes to climate issues is nothing new. Even so, it’s unfortunate that this extends to climate fiction.
It is not just conservatives that can remain unconvinced by what they read in climate fiction, however. Schneider-Mayerson finds that some liberal and moderate readers who are already concerned about climate change do not report literature having any influence on their views. One respondent said Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife “did not influence [him] in any way” since he “already believed many of the things in this book to be possible.” Another read Forty Signs of Rain and said, “It just kind of gave me a feeling of ‘that would suck, but it’ll probably never happen.” Yet another says she “doesn’t use fiction to shape [her] view of the world. [She] think[s] anything in the realm of fiction is over the top and very rarely based on anything real” (484). This falls into the same camp of cognitive dissonance as before. The cli-fi is not enough to overpower everyone’s beliefs about the world or about climate change. This makes it difficult for cli-fi to move the dial at times.
Especially whenever feelings of cognitive dissonance and helplessness are high, there exists a real danger within climate fiction to become too heavy-handed. Partially because it’s such a serious topic, partially because it’s a debated topic, and partially just because fiction can be fickle, cli-fi can easily hold the threat for authors to overdo it. Cli-fi opens doors to explore all sorts of futures based on our current actions. It’s powerful, but there must be balance to that power. Johns-Putra explores the difficulties of finding the sweet spot in her 2015 contribution to The Conversation. She writes, “The paradox is that the harder cli-fi tries, the less effective it is.” If readers feel endangered or threatened by the contents of a cli-fi novel, or the content is too far out of their ability to imagine realistically, cli-fi loses its value. Johns-Putra continues, “Many writers want to inspire change, not insist on it: the line between literature and propaganda is one that most novelists respect. … Cli-fi at its best lets us travel to climate-changed worlds, to strive there alongside others and then to return armed with that experience” (“’Cli-Fi’ Novels Humanise”). At its worst, cli-fi might, unfortunately, make climate change seem trivial, trite, out of control, inevitable, or something else it doesn’t intend; this goes in both the positive and negative direction, too. If there is too much negativity, there is that chance for cognitive dissonance. If there are seemingly magically easy solutions in cli-fi novels, that could potentially lead to indifference instead of pressure to act. There is a delicate balance to find in climate fiction, and just how to find that balance is anyone’s guess.
One last of these limitations could be the reach of readership of climate fiction, as informed by Schneider-Mayerson’s empirical survey. Despite the fact that almost half of Americans (47%) will read fiction every year and climate change is an increasingly prevalent topic, the survey still revealed that readers of climate fiction are more limited in scope (496). “This study found cli-fi readers to be younger, more liberal, and more concerned about climate change than nonreaders of climate fiction,” Schneider-Mayerson writes (478). This in itself is not a limitation, but he goes on to say,
While it is possible that these readers were more concerned as a result of reading a cli-fi novel, their political orientation suggests that we should not be surprised if readers were already more concerned before picking up these books, and therefore more inclined to do so … For ecocritics and environmentalists who hope that climate fiction might convert conservative climate deniers, these results might be disappointing. (479)
I am an environmentalist that hopes that climate fiction can convert climate deniers, in fact, but Schneider-Mayerson’s survey has not caused me to lose hope. It is unfortunate that cli-fi has remained limited in its readership. From his survey, only 17.1% of the respondents identified as “conservative” or “very conservative,” versus 50.1% identifying as “liberal” or “very liberal” (479).[42] His survey also shows that 37.7% of all American cli-fi readers were between 18 and 34 years old at the time, significantly younger than the general U.S. population.[43]
What does all of this mean? It could mean that the readership of cli-fi is significantly limited. If readers are primarily younger, more liberal, and already concerned, then that means that the benefits of cli-fi are limited to that scope of people who may not be the ones who need it the most. Cli-fi is capable of changing minds and therefore changing the world, as we have seen through personal testimonies, historical movements, and other data thus far. But if not everyone is reading it, the effects can only go so far.
At the same time, perhaps this demographic is not a hindrance. People who are younger, more liberal, and more concerned about climate change are the people who are taking the initiative to act on climate change. They are most often the ones who think it is on them to save the planet they have inherited.[44] They are the ones who are most likely to spring to climate action.
In my own research and study of climate fiction, I have had to dream up an intended audience. As much as I would love to reach every person in the world and convince them all about the benefits of cli-fi, I have had to realize that that audience also likely falls into the categories Schneider-Mayerson primarily noted. This, too, is not necessarily a limitation.
Schneider-Mayerson realizes cli-fi may serve as a way of reinforcing existing beliefs about climate change rather than sparking brand-new interest, but he also highlights the potential of cli-fi to push already interested parties to action. It was true for a number of the readers he surveyed. He writes, “While it might not convert many conservatives, climate fiction might be more effective in nudging liberal and moderates from the ranks of the ‘Cautious’ to the ‘Concerned’ or the ‘Concerned’ to the ‘Alarmed’” (492). This takes the potential limitation of targeted readership and empowers it. There is great potential for cli-fi to make new activists. But there is also this more reliable capability to galvanize pre-existing activists.
In my own work with cli-fi, it is something I have considered at great length. This is work I am passionate about, and I want others to be impassioned with me. However, I do have some concern of preaching to the choir, so to speak. My thesis advisor pointed out, even if I am preaching to the choir, how can we get them to sing?
So, let us find a way to sing.
[1] Which I find adorable and so catchy. Every person I’ve introduced the term to also agrees.
[2] This comes from the foreword of a larger book, which is the fourteenth edition of a series of anthologies of Canadian Tales of Climate Change, written by a collection of emerging Canadian authors.
[3] Bloom tends to refer to cli-fi as a new genre, but I believe it more apt to consider it a new term to describe something much older than 2011. The genre has exploded since being named, though.
[4] I have also seen other translations from the French as “Death, like the sun, cannot be looked at steadily or directly” (Maurice Manning) or “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at without winking.” I find the winking one amusing.
[5] I first encountered this quote in a brilliant podcast episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge called “Writing the Climate Change Story,” when John Lancester, British journalist and author of The Wall, made the connection between this thought-provoking idea and climate change. He was the first I saw make the connections between the quote and climate change, I have simply expounded on those, and I hope that others will also follow us.
[6] Guilty.
[7] Also guilty.
[8] Less guilty, but we’ve all been there.
[9] And so do I.
[10] There is a lot one can criticize about this classic novel, especially given the fact that Stowe was a white woman who relied on the stories of others’ traumas to spin her novel. However, Stowe was considered a literary hero, and the influence of the novel cannot be denied.
[11] It was called Appeal to Reason, which ran from 1895 to 1922.
[12] “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings… Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change… The birds, for example — where had they gone? … What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain” (Carson 1-3).
[13] “The world of systemic insecticides is a weird world, surpassing the imagining of the brothers Grimm … It is a world where the enchanted forest of the fairy tales has become the poisonous forest in which an insect that chews a leaf or sucks the sap of a plant is doomed. It is a world where a flea bites a dog, and dies because the dog’s blood has been made poisonous, where an insect may die from vaports emanating from a plant it has never touched…” (32-33).
[14] God flooding the Earth can certainly be considered a climate disaster. It was also caused by the actions of humans. Interestingly, in the long cli-fi novel The Overstory, one of the characters, Patricia Westerford points out that, in all the heroism of Noah’s ark, he neglected to take plants aboard with him. She spends her (fictional) career saving tree seedlings in a storage facility for future times ahead because the trees, our not-so-distant cousins, are invaluable resources for our planet. Other scholars have dedicated more research to how flood stories throughout history, not just in the Bible, can be interpreted as cli-fi
[15] In the epic, an enraged Gilgamesh destroys the stones that would have easily allowed him to cross the Waters of Death. He must then fell 120 trees to use instead. This and other bits go to show how respecting the Earth in the first place would evade disaster.
[16] As well as suggesting this as exactly the kind of climate fiction we need in the present, in this review, Seidel claims, “Reading the news and reading apocalyptic science fiction can feel like the same thing these days. Roads in England are melting. More pandemics are on the way. Scorching temperatures and rising sea levels are fueling a worldwide refugee crisis. Any one of these, or a dozen other examples, would elicit horror. But they are each part of a larger climate crisis that only grows more dire as time goes on…”
[17] Although, as we can explore in the “What Now?” portion of this thingamajig, it is important to do more than watch. At any rate, it is exciting.
[18] As we will dip into more soon, as cli-fi provides incredibly useful opportunities, especially for readers, writers, and theorists who approach it through a feminist, queer, and/or BIPOC lens.
[19] Afro- and African-futurism are oft considered two separate genres, with the latter focused on identity rooted in Africa specifically. Both Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism have made important contributions to the realm of cli-fi. Continue reading to see how BIPOC authors more widely treat cli-fi compared to white and western authors.
[20] Originated by Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon in her 2012 anthology called Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, to function as stories of biskaabiiyang, meaning “returning to ourselves.”
[21] Thompson wrote about the “Fries test,” created by Kenny Fries. It is similar to the Bechdel test. It asks if a piece of fiction features more than one disabled character, if those characters service the plot beyond educating or benefitting other characters, and whether their disabilities go away by death or cure.
[22] Imagining futures where all genders, sexualities, and identities are embraced and accepted.
[23] Ustopia is a term created by Margaret Atwood as a combination of ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ to acknowledge that it is virtually impossible to have a world with only one. Even in the darkest dystopia, there’s got to be hope.
[24] This was written in spring 2024.
[25] Octavia Butler did not identify as gay publicly or adhere to any particular labels, but both scholars and close friends of hers have called her a Black lesbian author, bisexual, and queer, and she often speculated on her sexuality and gender. I say possibly queer because I do not want to label those who do not wish to be, but I believe queer can be an encompassing term used with flexibility and comfortability.
[26] This idea comes from the 2013 NPR examination of cli-fi by Angela Evancie who says, “But while sci-fi usually takes place in a dystopian future, cli-fi happens in a dystopian present.”
[27] In conducting this research, Schneider-Mayerson recruited 161 respondents who had read at least one of nineteen specific works of climate change fiction. This survey contains a wealth of information, including but not limited to, the readership of climate fiction, what works are being read, the influence of the genre on readers, and the different ways those influences manifest. I encourage all to take a look at his full report.
[28] Schneider-Mayerson credits James Painter who surveyed newspapers in Australia, France, India, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 2010 and 2012.
[29] Bearing in mind that he did so in 2018 and prior.
[30] Although we have amassed a growing variety of solutions in the meantime. Carbon-capturing structures, improved ways of harnessing renewable energy, and more have emerged recently and excite. Not without problems, but still.
[31] A character named Strangman dryly joked, “You know, Kerans, leaving the sea two hundred million years ago may have been a deep trauma from which we’ve never recovered” (Ballard 114). I felt that.
[32] Looking across part of the never-ending lagoon, filled with gloom, Kerans’ companion asks him if he knows the name of the city that used to be there but is now flooded to the point of being unrecognizable. He shakes his head, and Bodkin, the other man, reveals, “Part of it used to be called London; not that it matters. Curiously enough, though, I was born here” (91). It’s one of the more heartbreaking moments of the book. How could a world center so great as London come to such an end? And within this man’s lifetime? What might have humans done to prevent this? (In this world of Ballard’s, could they have?)
[33] It reminds me more of air-conditioned outdoors of places like Dubai and Singapore. Perhaps a necessary evil to combat blazing temperatures, but disheartening nevertheless.
[34] Strangman’s comment here made me sit for a moment. Inner space, outer space, sea, sky, and space… All is connected.
[35] I believe I would be remiss to exclude the beautiful final lines of the sonnet. Donne completes this ode to human connection: “Any man’s death diminishes me, / Because I am involved in mankind. / And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; / It tolls for thee.”
[36] Not every scholar considers War Girls climate fiction, and not every scholar thinks such of The Drowned World either. They are often labeled science fiction instead. I stray from those scholars. Reading each with a cli-fi mindset emboldens the novels’ messages, and they each add something intriguing to the climate change fiction discussion.
[37] Not all advancements are good. As Onyii herself becomes more and more war-torn, “she barely looks human. She looks like something much more evil. The Demon of Biafra” (118-119). To that point, later on, Ify wants to have her Accent and technology removed. She is asked why, as she is surrounded by deadly conflict that she has not played a small role in creating. “Because it led to all of this,” Ify thinks (280). There is a time and place for technological advancements, then. In our industrial, corporate, largely capitalistic global economy, technology has also been seen used for evil. This is a danger we must face.
[38] He tackles a wide range of other issues, too. To just name a few that could easily fill pages each:
- Ecoracism and environmental injustice, as western powers abandon others, as mentioned.
- Additionally and generally, the option of moving to space to avoid “The trouble that plagued us—earthquakes, nuclear disasters, climate change—they cannot follow us [t]here” (352).
- Colonization and identity. Chinelo says, “I am Nigerian because a white man said so. I was Igbo because my tribespeople long ago said so. And I am Biafran because I say so” (237).
- The dangers of technology, too, as mentioned.
- Strained familial relationships and what it means to be sisters.
- Slavery reborn, essentially, as the Biafrans use “abd” (which translates to ‘slave’), young males turned to synths that they treat as disposable soldiers and companions. It’s intensely troubling, including for Onyii, who was hesitant at first and went on to truly care for “her abd.”
[39] However, these frames are under-utilized, he points out.
[40]
Clearly they missed the 2014 World Wildlife Fund Living Planet Report — 2014 as
in TEN YEARS AGO we learned of this — that states:
“Population sizes of vertebrate species—mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians,
and fish—have declined by 52 percent over the last 40 years. In other words,
those populations around the globe have dropped by more than half in fewer than
two human generations.
At the same time, our own demands on nature are
unsustainable and increasing. We need 1.5 Earths to regenerate the natural
resources we currently use; we cut trees faster than they mature, harvest more
fish than oceans replenish, and emit more carbon into the atmosphere than
forests and oceans can absorb.”
Read it in full at: https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2014.
[41] I wish this was all a joke.
[42] Compared to 29.5% of the control group identifying as conservative/very conservative and 39.5% as liberal/very liberal (or just 25% by a separate 2016 estimate). This indicates that cli-fi readers are less conservative and more liberal than the general population.
[43] Due to the survey methodology, including sampling through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) and the somewhat small sample size of 161 respondents, this number may be skewed. Also, he compares this figure to data that states 23.4% of all Americans were of the same age range in 2016.
[44] I say “they,” but really I mean “we.”