Climate-change fiction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

[hide]This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2013) This article uses bare URLs for citations, which may be threatened by link rot. Please consider adding full citations so that the article remains verifiable. Several templates and the reFill tool are available to assist in formatting. (reFill documentation) (March 2015)

Climate-change fiction, sometimes bbreviated as "cli-fi", is a literary and movie genre that describes novels and films about climate change and global warming issues.^[1] Climate change themes are found within many genres and may be set in the past, present, or future. Some movies and novels raise awareness about the major threats that climate change and global warming present to life on Earth, although not all of them have that kind of impact and are released or published merely as entertainment.
A global community of novelists, journalists, bloggers, and activists have promoted this genre, including Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood,^[2] American cli fi activist Dan Bloom,^[3] British cli fi novelist Sarah Holding,^[4] American novelist Barbara Kingsolver,^[5] American sci fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson,^[6] American media critic Scott Thill,^[7] American journalist Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow,^[8] and Canadian-American archivist Mary Woodbury.^[9] §

Contents

[hide]

• 1 History and origin
• 2 The "cli-fi" term
• 3 Climate-change fiction in the classroom
• 4 References
• 5 External links

History and origin[edit]

In the past, prior to current understandings of man-made global warming, authors such as JG Ballard, John Wyndham and Jules Verne delved into climate themes. In modern times, writers such as David Brin, John Atcheson and Liz Jensen have novels that could be deemed as working the climate-change fiction genre. When scientists began to develop current theories about anthropogenic global warming (AGW), modern climate-change fiction was born.^[10] An early example would be Arthur Herzog's Heat.^[11]

The "cli-fi" term[edit]

The cli-fi term is an abbreviation of "climate-change fiction." The abbreviated nickname has caught on worldwide with newspapers and websites featuring the term in headlines and articles, from the New York Times to the Guardian, but it is just a shortening of "climate-change fiction" and not a genre of its own.

"Cli-fi" is also a cultural term that signifies a way of seeing the world we live in now, where climate change and global warming are major issues of the day worldwide. As such, in addition to being an abbreviation for the climate-change fiction genre, it also serves as a kind of "cultural prism" -- a concept popularized by media critic Scott Thill in a November 2014 Huffington Post piece headlined "Cli Fi Is Real."

Climate-change fiction in the classroom[edit]

As the genre gains widespread exposure in the media, via newspaper stories and book reviews, more and more universities are offering literature classes featuring novels and films with climate change themes. From Columbia University to Temple University, the genre is reaching into the academy by leaps and bounds.^[12]

(CFR) - THE CLI-FI REPORT:
Over 50 academic & media links:
http://cli-fi.net

 

On the Need to Detail "Cli-fi" terminology on YIKI 

Please help keep this article democratic rather than promoting just one or two people's ideas.§