A source in the U.S. book industry tells this blog that Amitav Ghosh's new DERANGEMENT book does mention 'cli-fi.' But his target was specifically the realism of mainstream literary fiction, not the rise of the cli-fi genre.

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A reliable source in the U.S. book industry TWEETS TO THIS BLOGGER: 

 

''Dr Ghosh's brilliant essay book 'THE GREAT DERANGEMENT' does mention 'cli-fi.' Briefly. In passing. But he does not focus on cli-fi. Instead, his target is specifically the realism of mainstream literary fiction and not the rise of the cli-fi genre. But he does briefly talk about it.''

Other sources in the book industry in North America also tell this blog:

''Hey there. I'm glad to see you're excited about Dr Ghosh's book. Has someone told you that he, as an Indian man of letters,  basically ignores American "cli-fi"? I don't think that's quite right. I think Ghosh is making a deeper argument about how imperialism shapes the modern novel, and how climate change may profoundly upset that. He's not talking about cli-fi as content, but as form, and I think he's right that we don't know what that looks like yet, because it's only now happening.

Another literary source in Manhattan asked by email: "Other than the fact that he only mentions cli-fi in passing in the book and never mentioned it all in the lectures that were the genesis for the book, do you have a particular issue with his quote to Indian journalist Shreya Ila Anasuya:  ‘'When you actually have a different genre for climate change fiction, it becomes something separate that is not connected with the seriousness of everyday life. But it is absolutely integrated into our everyday life.’' [This blog replies: Yes, this blogger has an issue with that quote. Dr Ghosh does not know what he is talking about and when he arrives in the USA for his book tour in September, if he continues spouting such utter nonsense, he will become the laughingstock of the American literary world.]

 

Or when he tweeted publicly while on his India book tour: "Any literary term that is hypenated is complete nonsense, from sci-fi to cli-fi. Hyphenated literary terms are an abomination and will never be accepted in India." [This blog replies: Yes, this blogger has an issue with that quote. Dr Ghosh does not know what he is talking about and when he arrives in the USA for his book tour in September, if he continues spouting such utter nonsense, he will become the laughingstock of the American literary world.]

Another literary source in the middle of the USA tells this blog: "I think it was William Burroughs who said anybody writing about the contemporary world honestly was writing science fiction. And that was in the 1960s. I think the same is true of "cli-fi" today. I think part of Ghosh's resistance to the cli-fi term and the older sci-fi term is that they suggest a ghettoized genre with specific limits, whereas the reality of our situation is that ANY novel that purports to describe the world today must include climate change."

Amitav Ghosh tells this blog through an intermediary: "Dan, I'm not sure why you're so attached to this term "cli-fi," but I think it actually limits our understanding of how climate change and literature are connected.'' 

And another literary source in North America tells this blog over Dr Ghosh's refusal to accept or recognize hyphenized literary terms with hyphens in them such as sci-fi or cli-fi: "Although Dr Ghosh  does not mention Margaret Atwood in his book at all, and he does write at length specifically about the ''cli-fi'' genre, -- although very briefly and only in passing, as an afterthought -- and that's too bad. But you should definitely read the book when it is released in the USA in September. I think you would find it interesting. He mentions Barbara Kingsolver and Ian McEwan. But he leave Margaret Atwood out of his book entirely and I don't know why. I think it's good to have these conversations, whatever one's position is on the breadth and depth of climate fiction, or cli-fi as it's been dubbed."

 

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FROM SHREYA ILA ANASUYA's interview with Dr Ghosh:

In a conversation with The Wire, Ghosh answers questions about the most urgent impulses behind the writing of the THE GREAT DERANGEMENT, and how he feels about the framing of climate change as a distant phenomenon in modern cli-fi novels ...

You explore the failure of the contemporary novel, specifically literary fiction, to address climate change. Was ''the novel'' always going to be central to this book and its earlier lectures in Chicago?

I’m looking at the [LITERARY] novel as a symptom of a broader imaginative failure. The novel is one form of writing but I think this failure extends to all forms of writing, including journalism. It’s been very interesting for me because I’ve had so many young journalists come in [to interview me] and some of them have said that climate change is a very distant thing, it’s happening somewhere else.

And I say to them, well, if you’ve been in Delhi these last few weeks, you will have had to live through that incredible heat wave, what have you written about it? None of them have actually written about it. It’s very striking. One can’t help asking oneself why is it that people have just decided to be silent on this.

At the same time, almost all writing on climate change is in non-fiction. I’m a person who is very committed to the novel as a form. When you’re working in a medium which seems unable to recognise the world that’s around you, it raises questions, although I must admit I did not do my homework on the rise of the cli-fi genre in the West and how it has caught on in the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
 
At the same time, there are novelists working today, like your friend Margaret Atwood in Canada or David Mitchell in the UK, who are blurring these boundaries between so-called ‘serious’ fiction and genre fiction, and also dealing with climate in their work.

Absolutely. I’ve always loved reading science fiction, I’ve even written a book that some people consider science fiction, although I don’t think it is. [NOTE: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/life-un-ltd-feminism-bioscience-race/parasexual-generativity-and-chimeracological-entanglements-in-amitav-ghoshs-the-calcutta-chromosome/ = ''THE CALCUTTA SYNDROME" - 1995
 
What is interesting though is that when people write about climate change, it is almost automatically hived off into a different substandard gutter genre that nobody takes seriously like sci-fi or cli-fi now. So what is actually being said there? One is that climate change is not serious. What happens there is that it brings into question the idea of seriousness itself. If your seriousness is something the excludes mortal threats, in what sense can that be seriousness?

So just the very fact that climate change comes to be treated in the same way as Martians, space apocalypse (he actually laughs in the interview here!). It just tells you about the disastrous nature of our conception of seriousness. This idea of seriousness then itself becomes part of a great derangement. [NOTE: Dr Ghosh, regarding hyphenated literary genres, it is YOU who is deranged and in denial and actiing like a spoiled schoolboy crying to his father!]

Shreya asks: In defence of Martians, though, there’s a certain kind of contemporary genre fiction that deals in two concepts that you’ve detailed in your book: the uncanny and the agency of the non-human, both of which you use to discuss global warming. I’m thinking about weird fiction, as in the work of China Miéville, and the manner in which it introduces the reader to ultimately unknowable creatures. And it is this kind of fiction that also deserves to be taken seriously.!!!!!!!

It certainly does. All these issues come most dramatically into the spotlight in relation to Doris Lessing. She spent the last years of her life writing what other people considered science fiction. But she did not. And she always repeatedly made the case, as Ursula Le Guin has done, that there is no distinction between these genres. I think Ursula is absolutely right on that and Doris Lessing was right on that.

I find Miéville’s work very interesting, and he does address the uncanny in various forms, but what is also curious about it is that he doesn’t connect those things with climate. That’s why to me Barbara Kingsolver’s cli-fi book (Flight Behaviour) is particularly powerful, because it is set completely within a realistic framework, absolutely within our time. While Margaret Atwood and China Miéville’s speculations are set in the future or in alternate universes, this work is about our present day.

In order for this kind of fiction to be effective, you’re saying it should be set in a recognisable universe?

Absolutely. See, this is the problem: when you actually have a different genre for climate change fiction, it becomes something separate that is not connected with the seriousness of everyday life. [This blog notes: WHAT THE FUCK? IS DR GHOSH INSANE?] But it is absolutely integrated into our everyday life. And that is why you have to ask yourself the question of why mainstream LITERARY HIGH-CLASS fiction [LIKE GHOSH WRITES AS HE EYES A FUTURE NOBEL PRIZE] can’t recognise this. What is the form of blindness that it creates, that somehow your inner state is more important than these absolutely real questions of survival.

IN CONCLUSION: Two thirds of  ''THE GREAT DERANGEMENT'' is brilliant. The one-third about literature and climate change fiction is totally bonkers and he will get eaten alive when he arrives in the USA for his book tour in Septemner. In India, where journalist practice PR and never ask pointed questions, especially to a Masterji like Amitavji, the press in India was all gushing and polite PR. That's apparently how Ghosh, who lives most of the year in Brooklyn likes it. But wait till he arrives in America. They will eat him alive for being so arrogant and WRONG about how writers in the West are responding to climate issues and have been for a long long time. America is not backward India. Wake up, Dr Ghosh.

PS: For more on this, see a gentle yet somewhat contrarian preview of the book here: http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2016/07/a-contrarian-view-of-indian-public.html

from PAGE 9 of

THE GREAT DERANGEMENT by Amitav Ghosh

 

"That climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena is not hard to establish." [OH YEAH, DR GHOSH? YOU HAVE NOT DONE YOUR HOMEWORK, SIR!] To see that this is so we need only glance through the pages of a few highly regarded literary journals and book reviews, for example, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)  [LARB HAS MANY CLI-FI book reviews there, Dr Ghosh. Do your homework, sir!] and the New York Times Review of Books [edited by Pamela Paul who has sworn on an oath that she will neve use the cli-fi term in her NYT piece of real estate as long as SHE is editor there, so there!]. When the subject of climate change appears in these publications.....the mere mention of the subject means the book will get reviewed in the gutter genre of sci-fi, which is beneath us great literary writers like me...... [PARAPHRASING the Master's thoughts]