7 Speed Reading Software | » The Rise And Rise Of ”Cli Fi”

Mar
11th

The Rise And Rise Of ”Cli Fi” — Birth Of A New Genre (Guest Post)

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Dan Bloom

When I began to popularize the term “cli fi” in 2013, after first coining it on a blog in 2008 as part of my PR work as a climate activist, I hoped it would be a good way to categorize the multiple offerings of fiction that dealt with climate change — and also to bring attention to the fact that our world climate is warming day by day, year by year, decade by decade.

It’s working and the term is catching on worldwide now. Both the New York Times newspaper and TIME magazine are poised to publish news articles about cli fi in the coming weeks.

I am popularizing cli fi mostly it seems to be a good way to alert novelists and short story writers that they can focus on climates the same that sci fi novels and movies made it more palpable to write about science.

I also believe that the term makes it easier for readers, librarians, book agents, store buyers, and publishers to find novels on these topics.

When Manhattan-born writer Nathaniel Rich wrote ”Odds against Tomorrow,” a cli fi novel about a
disaster prediction expert who forecasts the flooding of New York City by a Category 3 hurricane, the NPR radio network in North America did a long segment on the new genre of cli fi. This was a year ago. Now cli fi is gaining momentum in the media and among a growing global community of cli fi
writers and readers.

Cli- Fi has now entered our lexicon of genres. It has been picked up by Word Spy and Wired’s Jargon Watch.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, in an essay for ”Dissent” magazine in the summer of 2013, wrote that cli fi is basically when a writer uses fiction to bring climate change to life, or when a writer uses change to bring their fiction to life. She said it well.

And sci fi writers such as David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson– and sci fi historians such as H. Bruce Franklin, Gerry Canavan and Andrew Milner — have told me that that they like the new term but that as they see it, cli fi is best seen as a subgenre of sci fi. And that’s okay, too.

There are novels, like Barbara Kingsolver’s ”Flight Behavior”, that deal with the change in migration habits of monarch butterflies as a result of f climate change, that simply tell the story of what happens to the species as our climate changes.

Read it if you haven’t read it yet.

Cli fi novels like Clare Hume’s ”Back to the Garden” or S.D. Crockett’s ”After the Snow” treat climate change as the actual apocalyptic event, revolving their stories around those who are left behind to cope with the aftereffects.

Cli fi novels are not always about the end of the world. Mindy McGinnis’s book, ”Not a Drop to Drink”, is based on the idea of a limited and coveted supply of potable water on the planet,
something that is a very real possibility, according to the United Nations at October 2013 Open the Water Summit. Her characters are living in a world where water is scarce, and protecting resources can mean life or death, sher says. And she told a magazine reporter recently that she is thrilled to have the designation of cli fi i to depend on when the media is classifying her book.

“My novel is based on a slow waning of resources, and the reaction of humans is what drives the plot,” McGinniss said. “I’d love to have my title touted as cli fi. It captures more thoroughly the
concept of the book.”

And she is working on a sequel to the novel now.

Fiction should, Nat Rich believes, reflect the most pressing questions of our time.

“Novels can ask the difficult, thorny questions: what are we supposed to make about all of this scary information? Do we ignore the bad news completely, tune it out? Do we live in denial? Do we become environmental activists?”

Rich wrote in a New York Times oped last year. “Or do we just worry about improving our own lot and not worry about anyone else? I tried to explore these questions (and others) as deeply as possible in ‘Odds against Tomorrow’.”

Mary Woodbury runs a webzine called ”Cli Fi Books” where she archives and categorizes climate
fiction books.

So whether or not the new literary genre is well known, cli fi exists. And it’s here to stay.

See my ”cli fi central” blog here:
http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

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