Can cli-fi save us from ourselves? Novelist Alice Robinson in Australia ponders the question

On  March, 10, 2015 ALICE ROBINSON wrote:

http://publishing.artshub.com.au/news-article/features/writing-and-publishing/can-cli-fi-save-us-from-ourselves-247369

Can cli-fi save us from ourselves? An Australain novelist ponders...

SUBHEADLINE: With the grim prospects of climate change, a new genre of narratives can address our cultural anxiety, attitudes and provide comfort for future generations.




Climate-change fiction – known as ''Cli-Fi'' – is still emerging as a cohesive category of fiction writing. Even so, it seems to me that settler Australian storytelling has long been preoccupied with the vulnerability of urban areas to dystopian, climate-related societal and environmental collapse.

Novels such as Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming, Thea Astley’s Drylands, Gabrielle Lord’s Salt and John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began – as well as cult films On the Beach and the infamous Mad Max, to name a few of my favorites – all grapple with what it means for ‘normal’ society to break down under external pressures: political upheaval, weather, war. More recently, apocalyptic films such as the Mad Max sequel Road Warrior, and the apocalyptic film These Final Hours, continue to gesture at some pervasive fear regarding our nation’s potential for longevity, stability, safety and health.

But why are we so worried about things going wrong for us here in Australia?

I think there are two powerful reasons.

First, there is the issue of the damage done to our lands since European invasion.

Second: our grim prospects for weathering the impacts of climate change.

Together, these realities seem to portend ecological uncertainty at best and the destruction for our home places, the lands that keep us alive, at worst. That these concerns are amplified in our national storytelling gestures at an undercurrent of cultural anxiety. It tells me that these issues matter to us.

The Europeans who invaded Australia embodied particular cultural beliefs and understandings. Through these, they positioned and interacted with Australian lands.

The outcomes of these interactions – predominantly in the service of European agriculture – have been largely disastrous for Australia’s unique and fragile ecologies. Devastating and degrading, the extensive de-forestation undertaken in order to create grazing lands for stock, for example, has led to widespread salinity, soil erosion and loss of habitat and biodiversity all across the continent.

Simultaneously, it is unlikely that any part of the globe will remain unaffected by climate change. Disturbingly for us, ecological circumstances here in Australia have already been appropriated as the “canary in the mine” for projected climate change outcomes elsewhere. Troubling conditions including enduring drought and increasingly severe bushfire, illustrate ecological expectations for global futures. It is likely that Australia’s own future will grow exponentially more unstable, perhaps catastrophically so, as climate change continues to manifest.

Given this, what role do narratives, specifically novels, play? In a realm more commonly reserved for scientific enquiry, what can mere stories about climate change and ecological degradation do for us?
It is unlikely that cli-fi alone can temper the significant impacts of climate change on our already compromised lands.

But it does furnish me with some cautious comfort to consider that the novels and stories we write now, depicting imagined climatically altered futures, might help prepare us, at least emotionally if not literally, for what comes next. There is already a long tradition in Australia of writing about the land; the many narratives we have told about our experiences ‘battling’ and ‘taming’ the continent since European settlement highlight, and perhaps even encourage us to come to terms with, the ecological damage already wrought.

If nothing else, our ability to preserve cultural ideas and perceptions about our lands, futures and prospects for survival, through publication, lends us a certain power during what feels like a hopelessly powerless time.

Writing and publishing, as well as other cultural records, like film, afford us the opportunity to send a message through the years.

Even if cli-fi can’t save us from ourselves, there is a measure of comfort in the notion that future generations will read the texts we are producing now. My hope is that, in doing so, they will come to understand that the perilous realities they are grappling with were already troubling to us. A tragedy we could imagine, if not avoid, long before it came to pass.








About the author

Alice Robinson is a lecturer in creative writing at Melbourne’s NMIT. She has a PhD in creative writing from Victoria University. Anchor Point is Alice’s her debut cli fi novel.

The Cli-Fi Cafe (a global coffee shop where snippets of conversation resonaet worldwide'')

Welcome to the The Cli-Fi Cafe. Have a seat, the waitstaff will be with your shortly. Meanwhile, this is what we have been overhearding lately. And if you have overheard some good things about cli-fi, drop us a line or leave a tip in the comments below. The waitstaff will be happy to receive them.

 

MENU

 

1. FAIR DINKUM: ''Can Cli-Fi save us from ourselves? With the grim prospects of climate change, a new genre of narratives can address our cultural anxiety, attitudes and provide comfort for future generations.''

 

Over heard at the table near the window overlooking the Pacific Ocean: debut Australian novelist -- ''ANCHOR POINT'' -- ALICE ROBINSON's very good Op-Ed on #clifi genre and its relationship to the Australian landmass and history

 http://wangsuyainterview.blogspot.com15/02/2015.html

 

2. POLLY POLLY: "I think we’re seeing more cli-fi themes in popular entertainment because they give substance to an ominous uncertainty that affects every one of us. " Overheard at Don Bredes' table near the door, in response a customer asking:  

''Authors treat climate change in their [novels] differently; some are didactic, some are more subtle. Can you describe your approach in POLLY?'' [RE: ''Polly and the One and Only World'' -- a YA cli fi novel by Don Bredes]

 

3. NEXT CAB OFF THE RANK: ''Australian author James Bradley [in his new cli-fi novel ''Clade''] has found a way to balance the bigger picture with the pattern of human life and love, which continues in all its forms despite the imperceptible yet inexorable change happening all around [in Clade ]. Overheard from a customer from Seattle, who was just dropping by...

4.

2015

ALON's Michael Berry on the 'cli fi' genre and Paolo Bacigalupi's telling quote on how he has now embrcaced it, too!

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/26/the_rise_of_climate_fiction_when_literature_takes_on_global_warming_and_devastating_droughts/

SUNDAY, OCT 26, 2014 10:00 PM +0800

The rise of 'cli fi': When literature takes on global warming and devastating droughts

"THE MORE YOU PAY ATTENTION, THE MORE HORRIFYING THE WORLD IS,"SAYS WRITER PAOLO BACIGALUPI

MICHAEL BERRY

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TOPICS: CLIMATE FICTION, BOOKS, LITERATURE, PAOLO BACIGALUPI, MEDIA NEWS,ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

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Climate fiction is hot right now. Just ask Paolo Bacigalupi, author of  the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning”The Windup Girl” and the young-adult novels “Ship Breaker” and “The Drowning Cities”; there is plenty of narrative potential in depicting global warming, rising seas, peak oil, extreme weather and other aspects of a changing climate. MORE AT LINK

2009

A few days ago Paul Collins in Bristol, UK, asked me whether an emerging fictional genre, namely climate fiction or ''cli-fi'', could help engage people with climate change. I had to confess that I had come across this new genre but had not thought about it in depth.======================== So what I’ll do today is explore the contours of my gap in knowledge of all things cli-fi in the sense of climate fiction. A lot has been written about this genre already, in particular on blogs and in newspapers. But it doesn’t seem to have attracted real scholarly attention yet (nothing on google scholar), although I think this will change as growing interest in cli-fi will converge with interests in environmental humanities, ecocriticism, science fiction studies, and so on. =================== However, I wondered what a new angle on this phenomenon could be, an angle that was more ‘me’... Recently, quite a few posts on this blog have been devoted to responsible research an innovation, and quite a few more are in prospect. Part of this new way of looking at science and technology assessment (plus risk assessment plus public engagement plus the exploration of ethical, social and legal issues around emerging sciences and technologies) is ‘anticipatory governance’. According to the World Future Society this new type of governance merges “foresight with policy” and is intended “ to reduce a people’s susceptibility to future contingencies (aka ‘wild cards’ or ‘black swans’)” (the concept is partially inspired by work on nanotechnology governance by David Guston). ========= This made me think a bit more about ‘anticipation’, so difficult to achieve in real life, so easy to read about in fiction. ================== In the following, I’ll briefly point towards what cli-fi might be and where readers can find more information; I shall then talk about anticipation literature as a (French) sub-genre of science fiction and then get back to anticipatory governance and the question of public engagement with climate change - a question, I should say from the outset, I will not really be able to answer. More research needed! I should also stress that I am no sci-fi or cli-fi expert, so I would like to hear from people who are!=============== = Cli-fi or climate (change) (science) fiction, a new genre of ‘sci-fi’, began to emerge about a decade ago, around 2005 and is gradually gathering speed, growing in popularity and attracting attention especially during periods of extreme weather, such as heat waves. The genre spans novels, games, films and more. Modern cli-fi novels have links to older work, for example J. G. Ballard’s 1962 Drowned World or Frank Herbert’s 1965 epic Dune. ================== As Wikipedia points out, “]c]li-fi novels and films are often set in either the present or the near or distant future, but they can also be set in the past. Many cli-fi works raise awareness about the major threats that climate change and global warming present to life on Earth...The term ‘cli-fi’ was popularized by climate activist Danny Bloom and Wired reporter Scott Thill.” Classics are Michael Crichton’s State of Fear published in 2004 and Paola Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl published in 2009, but everybody will have their own views on this. The former novel engages in a critique of climate change science, whereas the latter accepts its premises, which seems to be the case in many cli-fi novels. Quite a few belong to the post-apocalyptic genre, imagining, anticipating and exploring a future after a climatic apocalypse. Such explorations link back to older Russian writing, according to the sci-fi expert Csicsery-Ronay who is quoted in a blog post: “The Russians... had a category, late 19th century, early 20th century, called the ‘If-This-Goes-On Fiction,’ kind of a warning,’ he says, ‘a particular kind of dystopian fiction, that if a certain trend goes on, and we don’t stop, then this is what’s going to happen.’” This seems to be a characteristic of many recent cli-fi novels. ==================== Anticipation, expectation and visions of the future Similarly, in a 2012 article for the New York Times James Gunn, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, points out that: “Science fiction writers aren’t in the prediction business; they’re in the speculation business, using ‘hasn’t happened’ or ‘hasn’t happened yet’ to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities. They’re wrong more often than they’re right — maybe 9 to 1 — but in the anticipation business, that’s a pretty good ratio.”========== This quote made me think a bit more about ‘anticipation’. This is the stuff we are concerned with all the time, be it as a scientist working on an IPCC report, be it as a social scientist engaged in stimulating responsible research and innovation. Anticipation, forecasting, foresight, prediction, simulation, modelling, speculation, fiction - the boundaries are rather fluid and all entail a hefty dose of imagination - perhaps more controlled in modelling, perhaps less controlled in science fiction, including climate fiction. Anticipation seems to be a particular sub-genre of science fiction, a topic discussed mainly by French scholars. The term ‘anticipation’ was, apparently used as a general term for science fiction before the term ‘science fiction’ was introduced in 1929, but today anticipation novels typically deal with the exploration of a sub-type of futures, namely credible and plausible futures. The anticipation genre emerged from a confluence of other genres such as imaginary voyages, utopian and dystopian fiction and adventure stories. And, of course, Jules Verne’s oeuvre belongs to this genre.=========== As one French blog post points out, “Le genre ‘Climate Fiction’ proposé par Dan Bloom correspond à de l’anticipation climatique, c’est à dire une spéculation romancée des enjeux et changements climatiques attendus à l’aube de ce nouveau millénaire, ainsi que la discussion de leurs impacts sur l’environnement et nos sociétés.” (The genre ‘Climate Fiction’ proposed by Dan Bloom corresponds to climate anticipation, that is, a fictionalized speculation about issues regarding climate change expected at the dawn of this new millennium, and the discussion of their impacts on the environment and our societies.”) Anticipation shares certain semantic and conceptual properties with ‘expectation’ and thus perhaps might become a concern for the sociology of expectations. This type of sociology examines how anticipated futures (hopes, fears, uncertainties) are used to shape and manipulate the present. I have not seen sociology of expectation scholars engage with anticipation yet. However, I found one Science and Technology Studies course at Cornell devoted to ‘anticipation’. It asks for example: “How are society and subjectivities reoriented in anticipating these impending futures?” These are questions that sci-fi and cli-fi literature addresses. And these are also issues that cli-fi scholars and Science and Technology or STS scholars could try to examine together (with science fiction etc. scholars). Engagement? So, why is cli-fi important? First of all its growth attests to a growing concern amongst ‘ordinary’ people, readers, gamers about climate change, at least a growing curiosity. Second, it attests to the vitality of sci-fi as it gives birth to a new genre which, according to Dan Bloom, rather then looking “outward at the stars and the cosmos, … looks inward, at our warming planet, this third rock from the sun, a planet in trouble” and tries to anticipate, imagine and, to some extent, prevent its future. According to Bloom cli-fi is “where data meets emotions”. It might be that cli-fi brings modelling from the laboratory bench (imagine rows of supercomputers) to people’s bedside (imaging reading a cli-fi novel in bed). Unlike scientific modellers it is ‘allowed’, indeed, it is its task to extrapolate from modelling certain futures to exploring political futures. They provide a space for engaging in and with science as well as politics, albeit in a fictional way. This brings us to the question that Paul posed. Can cli-fi be useful for public engagement with climate change (and thus contribute perhaps to anticipatory governance, responsible innovation etc.)? It certainly ‘engages’ a growing community of readers, it seems. However, this community is still quite a niche community. I don’t know how ‘engaged’ readers within this community or out in the wider world become with issues of climate change after reading cli-fi novels or watching cli-fi films…. Of course, one should not forget that cli-fi of the States of Fear type might also lead to disengagement with climate change. There must be some research out there. If anybody knows about cli-fi readership and public engagement let me know.

1852

Is climate change due for its own 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'? The 1852 bestseller transformed abolitionism into a mainstream cause, helping to lay the groundwork for the Civil War. Evocative, simple, searing, it moved the needle in ways hundreds of meetings, speeches and reports never could. Over the last few years, a new brand of "cli-fi" literature has been popping up. The genre, which grapples with the ways our changing weather will impact human life, aims to create its own kind of awareness and action around the issues of climate change and man-made global warming. Rising sea levels, increasing numbers of floods and droughts and global conferences to grapple with the problems call for a response from novelists and screenwriters. The climate-change canon dates back to the 1962 novel ''The Drowned World," by British sci-fi writer JG Ballard. The novel's depicts a future world where the polar ice-caps have melted melt and global temperatures have soared, with Ballard showing readers in the early 1960s scenes where some coastal American and European cities are underwater. Submerged. The author mined the idea that a natural catastrophe could cause the real world to become a dreamscape. Ballard wrote and marketed the novel as sci-fi since he had not heard of the cli-genre yet. Did it reach a large audience or cause much of any impact on public awareness of coming superstorms and devastatng floods? No, it was just a novel and it disappeared over time, only to be rediscovered by a new generation facing the new reality of climate change and rising sea levels. Another early book about climate change and rising sea levels was written in 1987 by Australian George Turner, titled "The Sea and Summer." While the idea that climate change is a man-made phenomenon was not current when Ballard and Turner were writing, their novels were prescient. Perhaps the first modern novel in the 21st century to address the issue of man-made climate change was Barbara Kingsolver's "Flight Behavior" in 2012. Her novel set the tone for how serious climate fiction can attract a following because she dared to create a scientist as one of her central characters who did not flinch from the truth of what we are all facing today. But the poster boy for the cli-fi genre is Nathaniel Rich, whose "Odds Against Tomorrow" sold over 100,000 copies in hardback and paperback and drew major media attention. 'Rolling Stone' called Rich's book "the first great climate-change novel." A resident of New Orleans, he believes that more books like his will be published - not just in English, and not just from the perspective of Western writers in wealthy nations. ''I think the language around climate change is horribly bankrupt and, for the most part, are examples of bad writing, really," Rich told NPR last year. [http://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so-hot-right-now-has-climate-change-created-a-new-literary-genre]. His book aimed to be part of a sea change in American literature. Let's hope so. Other 'cli-fi' novelists include Chang-rae Lee ("On Such a Full Sea)" and Edna Lupecki ("California"). I recently asked Lupecki if one could refer to her new novel as a cli fi book, and she replied to me in a tweet: "I myself would not refer to it as cli fi, but if someone wanted to call it that, I wouldn't argue." In addition, a growing number of cli-fi novels are targeting a youthful YA audience - such as Mindy McGinnis' "Not a Drop to Drink," "The Carbon Diaries 2015" by Saci Lloyd, and "Survival Colony 9" by Joshua David Bellin (due out in September from a major New York publisher). With the popularity of "Hunger Games" -- both the novels in the series and the movies -- YA books have been flooding the market and gaining increased respectability. The trickle has become a flood. Joe Romm at ThinkProgress recently weighed in on the cli-fi genre [http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/08/3456713/snowpiercer-clifi/], writing: "The Hunger Games" books are clearly CliFi, but it is much more debatable whether the movies are, since they are stripped of any climate references." I know a little about cli-fi because I have been working for the past few years to popularize it in the English-speaking world and also among the billions of people who read in Spanish, Chinese, German and Portuguese. My approach has been through a thorough public relations campaign to give the term some air. Using my media contacts as a lifelong reporter, I worked hard over the past 12 months to get news articles about cli-fi published in NPR, the New York Times, The Guardian and Time magazine. As a result, media in Brazil, Taiwan and Spain picked up the English-language links and rewrote them in various languages. I also targetted science blogs, literary blogs and social media such as Twitter and Facebook to boost the fortunes of this mushrooming little genre. And my daily PR work paid off. If you Google cli-fi today, over 3,000 links come up. A big question that needs to be addressed is this: have cli fi novels and the interest in the cli fi genre sparked any kind of change in the literary world or in society at large? That's hard to say. But a FaceBook group for cli-fi writes,moderated by Paul Collins in London and called "Cli-Fi Central" has over 100 memners, including Edan Lupecki, Joshua David Bellin and literary critic Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow. It's a private FaceBook group comprised of novelists, public relations professionals, academics and critics, it's growing daily. In addition, dozens of blogs now have the cli fi genre as a theme, and have sprung up not only in North America, but in France and Holland as well. When the sea levels rise and the Climapocalypse begins in earnset, the coastal cities of all nations on Earth will be in its path, so this new literary genre, while born in America. has gone global. One of the biggest boosters of cli-fi on Twitter has been Margaret Atwood, who does not call her own novels cli-fi, but has told me in an email that she likes the term and understands what I am trying to do with it: build a platform for future writers to do their own world-building. Atwood first tweeted about cli-fi in 2011. As Sarah Stone put it in a review of Edan Lepucki's post-apocalyptic novel 'California' [http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/California-by-Edan-Lepucki-5596861.php]. "If we survive -- truly, and not in the unhappy ways depicted [in "California'] -- it will be in part because of books like this one, which go beyond abstract predictions and statistics to show the moment-by-moment reality of a painful possible future, the price we may have to pay for our passionate devotion to all the wrong things," Stone wrote. Several U.S. and British universities are now offering literature courses on cli-fi novels and movies, as J.L. Morin recently noted at Huffington Post [ww.huffingtonpost.com/j-l-morin/universities-make-clifi-d_b_5564491.html]. At the University of Oregon, a graduate seminar for students working on degrees in environmental studies and literature, was taught last semester by English professor Stephanie LeMenager. Her class was called "The Cultures of Climate Change," and it was written up last April in the New York Times. In Britain, Jenny Bavidge is offering a class this month called "Cli-Fi? Climate change and contemporary fiction" at University of Cambridge. Cli-fi is having its moment, not only in the media and the publishing world, but in academia,too. Several online academic journals in Australia, the U.S and Britain have already focused on the cli-fi theme. LeMenager told the Times she created the UO graduate seminar not to "marshal evidence for climate change as a human-caused crisis, or to measure its effects." Rather, she said, she wanted to consider the human impact: how we "think about it, prepare for it and respond to it." "Speculative fiction allows a kind of scenario-imagining, not only about the unfolding crisis but also about adaptations and survival strategies," LeMenager said. "The time isn't to reflect on the end of the world, but on how to meet it. I wanted to apply our humanities skills pragmatically to this problem." Los Angeles media observer Scott Thill, a former Wired reporter who used the cli-fi term as far back as 2009, is writing a nonfiction book about the term now, telling me in a recent email that he sees cli-fi not as a marketing buzzword but as a "cultural prism" with which one can look anew at society in terms of not just novels or movies but also in terms of politics, economics and news headlines. Thill tweets almost daily about cli-fi themes and often uses the #clifi hashtag as well. So where is cli-fi headed. We won't know until the reallly hard work is done by more and more novelists and screenwriters. In the end,it's the writers and film directors who will be doing the heavy lifting. So is climate change due for its own 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'? Yes. AUTHOR ID: Dan Bloom is a freelance reporter based in Taiwan. He studied literature at Tufts in the 1960s and has roamed the world, living in France, Italy and Japan. He spent 12 years in Alaska where many of his ideas for the cli-fi genre came to him, admidst the constant rain of Juneau and the frozen seas along the winter coasts of Nome.

1957

Is climate change due for its own "On the Beach'? The 1852 bestseller "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe transformed abolitionism into a mainstream cause, helping to lay the groundwork for the Civil War. Evocative, simple, searing, it moved the needle in ways hundreds of meetings, speeches and reports never could. In 1957, Nevil Shute's "On The Beach" lit a fuse and helped stop the world's race toward nuclear winter. Over the last few years, a new brand of "cli-fi" literature has been popping up. The genre, which grapples with the ways our changing weather will impact human life, aims to create its own kind of awareness and action around the issues of climate change and man-made global warming. Rising sea levels, increasing numbers of floods and droughts and global conferences to grapple with the problems call for a response from novelists and screenwriters. The climate-change canon dates back to the 1962 novel ''The Drowned World," by British sci-fi writer JG Ballard. The novel's depicts a future world where the polar ice-caps have melted melt and global temperatures have soared, with Ballard showing readers in the early 1960s scenes where some coastal American and European cities are underwater. submerged. The author mined the idea that a natural catastrophe could cause the real world to become a dreamscape. Ballard wrote and marketed the novel as sci-fi since he had not heard of the cli-genre yet. Did it reach a large audience or cause much of any impact on public awareness of coming superstorms and devastatng floods? No, it was just a novel and it disappeared over time, only to be rediscovered by a new generation facing the new reality of climate change and rising sea levels. Another early book about climate change and rising sea levels was written in 1987 by Australian George Turner, titled "The Sea and Summer." While the idea that climate change is a man-made phenomenon was not current when Ballard and Turner were writing, their novels were prescient. Perhaps the first modern novel in the 21st century to address the issue of man-made climate change was Barbara Kingsolver's "Flight Behavior" in 2012. Her novel set the tone for how serious climate fiction can attract a following because she dared to create a scientist as one of her central characters who did not flinch from the truth of what we are all facing today. But the poster boy for the cli-fi genre is Nathaniel Rich, whose "Odds Against Tomorrow" sold over 100,000 copies in hardback and paperback and drew major media attention. 'Rolling Stone' called Rich's book "the first great climate-change novel." In it, BRIEF PLOT SUMMARY? A resident of New Orleans, he believes that more books like his will be published - not just in English, and not just from the perspective of Western writers in wealthy nations. ''I think the language around climate change is horribly bankrupt and, for the most part, are examples of bad writing, really," Rich told NPR last year. [http://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so-hot-right-now-has-climate-change-created-a-new-literary-genre]. His book aimed to be part of a sea change in American literature. Let's hope so. Other 'cli-fi' novelists include Chang-rae Lee ("On Such a Full Sea)" and Edna Lupecki ("California"). I recently asked Lupecki if one could refer to her new novel as a cli fi book, and she replied to me in a tweet: "I myself would not refer to it as cli fi, but if someone wanted to call it that, I wouldn't argue." In addition, a growing number of cli-fi novels are targeting a youthful YA audience - such as Mindy McGinnis' "Not a Drop to Drink," "The Carbon Diaries 2015" by Saci Lloyd, and "Survival Colony 9" by Joshua David Bellin (due out in September from a major New York publisher). With the popularity of "Hunger Games" -- both the novels in the series and the movies -- YA books have been flooding the market and gaining increased respectability. The trickle has become a flood. Joe Romm at ThinkProgress recently weighed in on the cli-fi genre [http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/08/3456713/snowpiercer-clifi/], writing: "The Hunger Games" books are clearly CliFi, but it is much more debatable whether the movies are, since they are stripped of any climate references." I know a little about cli-fi because I have been working for the past few years to popularize it in the English-speaking world and also among the billions of people who read in Spanish, Chinese, German and Portuguese. My approach has been through a thorough public relations campaign to give the term some air. Using my media contacts as a lifelong reporter, I worked hard over the past 12 months to get news articles about cli-fi published in NPR, the New York Times, The Guardian and Time magazine. As a result, media in Brazil, Taiwan and Spain picked up the English-language links and rewrote them in various languages. I also targetted science blogs, literary blogs and social media such as Twitter and Facebook to boost the fortunes of this mushrooming little genre. And my daily PR work paid off. If you Google cli-fi today, over 3,000 links come up. A big question that needs to be addressed is this: have cli fi novels and the interest in the cli fi genre sparked any kind of change in the literary world or in society at large? That's hard to say. But a FaceBook group for cli-fi writes,moderated by Paul Collins in London and called "Cli-Fi Central" has over 100 memners, including Edan Lupecki, Joshua David Bellin and literary critic Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow. It's a private FaceBook group comprised of novelists, public relations professionals, academics and critics, it's growing daily. In addition, dozens of blogs now have the cli fi genre as a theme, and have sprung up not only in North America, but in France and Holland as well. When the sea levels rise and the Climapocalypse begins in earnset, the coastal cities of all nations on Earth will be in its path, so this new literary genre, while born in America. has gone global. One of the biggest boosters of cli-fi on Twitter has been Margaret Atwood, who does not call her own novels cli-fi, but has told me in an email that she likes the term and understands what I am trying to do with it: build a platform for future writers to do their own world-building. Atwood first tweeted about cli-fi in 2011. As Sarah Stone put it in a review of Edan Lepucki's post-apocalyptic novel 'California' [http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/California-by-Edan-Lepucki-5596861.php]. "If we survive -- truly, and not in the unhappy ways depicted [in "California'] -- it will be in part because of books like this one, which go beyond abstract predictions and statistics to show the moment-by-moment reality of a painful possible future, the price we may have to pay for our passionate devotion to all the wrong things," Stone wrote. Several U.S. and British universities are now offering literature courses on cli-fi novels and movies, as J.L. Morin recently noted at Huffington Post [ww.huffingtonpost.com/j-l-morin/universities-make-clifi-d_b_5564491.html]. At the University of Oregon, a graduate seminar for students working on degrees in environmental studies and literature, was taught last semester by English professor Stephanie LeMenager. Her class was called "The Cultures of Climate Change," and it was written up last April in the New York Times. In Britain, Jenny Bavidge is offering a class this month called "Cli-Fi? Climate change and contemporary fiction" at University of Cambridge. Cli-fi is having its moment, not only in the media and the publishing world, but in academia,too. Several online academic journals in Australia, the U.S and Britain have already focused on the cli-fi theme. LeMenager told the Times she created the UO graduate seminar not to "marshal evidence for climate change as a human-caused crisis, or to measure its effects." Rather, she said, she wanted to consider the human impact: how we "think about it, prepare for it and respond to it." "Speculative fiction allows a kind of scenario-imagining, not only about the unfolding crisis but also about adaptations and survival strategies," LeMenager said. "The time isn't to reflect on the end of the world, but on how to meet it. I wanted to apply our humanities skills pragmatically to this problem." Los Angeles media observer Scott Thill, a former Wired reporter who used the cli-fi term as far back as 2009, is writing a nonfiction book about the term now, telling me in a recent email that he sees cli-fi not as a marketing buzzword but as a "cultural prism" with which one can look anew at society in terms of not just novels or movies but also in terms of politics, economics and news headlines. Thill tweets almost daily about cli-fi themes and often uses the #clifi hashtag as well. So where is cli-fi headed. We won't know until the reallly hard work is done by more and more novelists and screenwriters. In the end,it's the writers and film directors who will be doing the heavy lifting. So is climate change due for its own 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'? Yes. AUTHOR ID: Dan Bloom is a freelance reporter based in Taiwan. He studied literature at Tufts in the 1960s and has roamed the world, living in France, Italy and Japan. He spent 12 years in Alaska where many of his ideas for the cli-fi genre came to him, admidst the constant rain of Juneau and the frozen seas along the winter coasts of Nome.

1852

Is climate change due for an "Uncle Tom's Cabin" moment? 

The 1852 bestseller helped transform abolitionism into a mainstream cause. Now, "cli-fi" is trying to do the same for climate activists and like-minded novelists fighting the good fight with a moral imperative leading them forward. 

The emerging genre is a cousin of sci-fi. But its books are set, NPR writes, "in worlds, not unlike our own, where the Earth's systems are noticeably off-kilter." 

And it's gaining both fans and writers. 

The climate-change canon dates back to the 1962 novel ''The Drowned World" by British writer J. G. Ballard. In it, polar ice-caps have melted and global temperatures have soared. Presciently, some coastal American and European cities are under water. But Ballard's work didn't pinpoint humans as the cause of AGW and our Earth's precipitous decline. 

It wasn't until the mid-2000s that authors started grappling seriously with our role in impending environmental catastrophe. 

 In 2012, Barbara Kingsolver's "Flight Behavior" gracefully explored how one town is reshaped by a changing ecosystem. 

As 'The New York Times' wrote in their review of the book:

 How do we live, Kingsolver asks, and with what consequences, as we hurtle toward the abyss in these times of epic planetary transformation? 

Meet the poster boy of cli fi novels: Nat Rich.

Perhaps the best-known "cli-fi" work is Nathaniel Rich's "Odds Against Tomorrow," released in 2013. That book sold more than 100,000 copies and drew major media attention.

 In it, a near-future New York is submerged when a category-3 hurricane hits. As Rich was editing the final proofs, Sandy submerged much of the East Coast, a strange moment of life imitating art. 

 Rich and others say that fiction can stir emotion and action in a way scientific reports and newscasts don't. 

"You know, scientists and other people are trying to get their message across about various aspects of the climate change issue," Georgia Institute of Technology professor Judith Curry told NPR. She went on: "And it seems like fiction is an untapped way of doing this — a way of smuggling some serious topics into the consciousness" of readers who may not be following the science. 

That means finding characters or stories that resonate. 

Rich told NPR last year:"I think we need a new type of novel to address a new type of reality ... which is that we're headed toward something terrifying and large and transformative. And it's the novelist's job to try to understand, what is that doing to us?" 

A growing number of YA books also attack this topic, including Mindy McGinnis's "Not a Drop to Drink," and Joshua David Bellin's "Survival Colony 9". 

Even the post-apocalyptic 'Hunger Games' trilogy hints at a climate-ravaged earth. Academia has begun paying attention to the trend, too. 

Several U.S. and British universities are now offering literature courses on cli-fi novels and movies. And the professors who teach those classes say students are moved by the literature they read. 

According to the 'New York Times': 

"Stephen Siperstein ... recalled showing the documentary “Chasing Ice,” about disappearing glaciers, to a class of undergraduates, leaving several of them in tears. Em Jackson talked of leading groups on glacier tours, and the profound effect they had on people. Another student, Shane Hall, noted that people experience the weather, while the notion of climate is a more abstract concept that can often be communicated only through media — from photography to sober scientific articles to futuristic fiction.

 “In this sense,” he said, “climate change itself is a form of story we have to tell.”