What Mark Piesing Missed: Why Cli-Fi is Catching on with Agents, Editors and Publishers Worldwide in this Age of the Anthrocene

What Mark Piesing Missed: Cli-Fi Catching on with Agents, Editors and Publishers Worldwide in this Age of the Anthrocene?

 

Four questions MARK PIESING forgot to ask me:

 

 

 

QUESTION: What is cli-fi fiction?

DAN BLOOM: See the Cli-fi Report at cli-fi.net

 

QUESTION: Why is it so popular?

Because we humans are doomed, doomed, and cli-fi speaks to our predicament vis a via man made global warming. There is no escape and there are no fixes or solutions. So these kinds of novels and movies speak now and will be speaking to the next 30 generations of human families until about the year 2500 A.D. when the Climapocalypse will be in full swing. Cli-fi novels and movies will help future generations prepare to lie down and die with dignity when the End comes. And it is coming, make no mistake about it.

QUESTION: Why do writers want to write it. Why do readers want to read it?

For writers, cli-fi engages their emotions and their minds. They are concerned. They are no longer pussyfooting around with escapist entertainment. Why do readers want to read cli-fi or see if on the screen? Good question. It engages their emotions and minds as readers, that simple. They, too, are concerned about the future and don't want bullshit stories paid for by the powers that be that want everything to have fix or a solution. Man made globsl warming has not fix, no solution. We, as a humanity, 30 generations from now, around 2500 A.D., are doomed, doomed.

QUESTION: What’s going to happen next to cli-fi novels and movies? Will something more cheerful replace it?

No, there's nothing cheerful to replace cli-fi. Cli-fi will merely going on the same path, helping this generation and future generations to cope with the face that the human species is doomed around 500 years from now. So cli-fi can play an important role in helping people prepare for the End. Prepare mentally, psychologically and spiritually. This is serious business. This is not Hollywood entertainment anymore.

 

 

COMMENTS BACK AND FORTH AFTER Mark Piesing's THE EMPTY AND BULLSHIT ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED ONLINE:

July 6, 2016 Reply dan bloom to Porter Anderson and Mark
                    

Nothing about cli-fi in the entire article, Mark? Porter? Or just not enough time or space here? Or no interest on your part? You missed a major component of your assigned story.

Porter Anderson replied online:
                    

Hello, Dan.
Just to clarify a point for you, Mark Piesing missed nothing of what I assigned him in this story.
Your interest in climate fiction is fine, and so are others’ interests in post-nuclear fiction, End of Days fiction, pandemic fiction, comet-collision fiction, and so on.
Our story’s intent was to take a more encompassing view of dystopian fiction in general and to solicit the viewpoints of several specialists on it. That’s exactly what Mark and our interviewees gave us.
All the best,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson

Dan Bloom replied back to Porter, [who being a wellpaid VIP in the posh VIP world has never taken the time in three years even once to answer Dan's emails or tweets. That's how Porter treats people, it seems. Sigh.]-- Thanks, Porter, for the clarification. You are still shilling for the powers that be (PTB), and BAU [business as usual,] because in fact, Porter, these are the guys who fund you and pay you for your speaking fees, and pleasing and sucking up to the PTB with BAU BS is how you pay your bills and earn a living, so you are never going to speak truth to power. You are in bed with the people who killing this Earth and humankind in the next 30 generations. But of course, everyone has to earn a living, and your heart is in the right place. But your mind is on the getting your next round of funding, this this BS article. [SIGH]

AND OF COURSE, CENSOR THAT HE IS, PORTER ANDERSON CENSORED MY SECOND COMMENT AND DELETED IT FROM HIS PAGE. SEE HOW THESE GUYS OPERATE? GATEKEEPERS AND DISHONEST ONES AT THAT! SHAME ON YOU, PORTER, For being a censor. IT proves my point.

About the Author

 

HE is a freelance journalist (and teacher) based in Oxford, UK, writing about technology, culture and the intersection between the two. I contribute to some of the biggest brands in the global media such as The Economist, Wired (UK), The Guardian,  The Independent/ i and now BBC Future. I had my first piece in The FT Weekend last year.
The stories I pitch are usually exclusives, original ideas or creative takes on existing stories. I never use press releases.
I also write regularly for Warwick Business School’s Core magazine. I have two pieces waiting to come out in the next edition. WBS is one of the top business schools in the UK. I am finishing a popular technology book proposal under for an agent.
A couple of years ago I was headhunted by Porter Anderson to write about technology for the New York based – and Frankfurt Book Fair owned – Publishing Perspectives. I now have a regular gig covering a wider beat that takes in ed-tech, marketing and management as well. I cover both the London and Frankfurt Book Fair for Publishing Perspectives.

From time to time I give advice to business leaders on giving that tricky speech and appearing on panels, written copy for them, helped start-ups on how to tell their stories, and run workshops for small groups on topics like story telling or how-to-pitch.

Want to see a sample of what I have written?

Here are six to get you going
Virtual Reality: The Next Frontier was one of three stories about tech in The FT Weekend Magazine – one by the amazing Douglas Coupland, another by the FT’s US editor and then mine! It shared the front cover with the Douglas Coupland story.
Copping a ‘Copter: Dealing with rogue drones for The Economist which was one of five stories flagged up on the front cover (second time in a month), number three story on Editor’s choice email and main double page feature of the Science and Technology section
Amazon is a more modest beast was the first of four previews of the Publishing for Digital Minds conference/ the London Book Fair that I wrote this year for Publishing Perspectives and made quite a stir in the world of publishing on the eve of the LBF.
Oxford aims for “number one” tech hub title was an exclusive feature for Wired.co.uk and included my first and exclusive interview with a UK government cabinet minister.
Medical robotics: Would you trust a robot with a scalpel? covered 3 colour pages in The Observer Tech Monthly and was originally commissioned at 2,500 words and ended up being 3,700 words long – an editor from a rival publication called it a mammoth piece of work.
How technology could spell the end of animal drug testing? was a double page colour feature in The Observer’s Discovery section and was liked almost 9000 times on Facebook.
You can check out journalisted.com for a longer but still not complete list of what I have written – it excludes my work for the likes of The Times Educational Supplement (TES) and Mark Ellen’s The Word.
If you want to get in touch with a story idea, a writing project or a training engagement then please do so via Twitter, LinkedIn or the comment section of this site.

Mark Piesing

Mark Piesing is a freelance journalist (and teacher) based in Oxford, UK now writing mainly about technology, culture and the intersection between the two for some of the biggest brands in the UK media such as The Economist, Wired.co.uk, and The Guardian. He also contributes to Warwick Business School's Core magazine. WBS is one of the top business schools in the UK. COOL!~

AND PORTER? See how he is deeply connected to the POWERS THAT BE who want to keep everyone sleepingwalking toward the Climapocalypse in 30 generations. He is part of the BAU of our world. and he profits from it everyday. He doesn't want to change the world ot stop AGW. He wants to keep his many paychecks coming so he can add even MORE to his resume in the future. RE

About

Porter Anderson / Image: Bob Timpson

Porter Anderson is a ''career'' [journalist] whose venues have included three of Time Warner’s CNN networks, the Village Voice, Thought Catalog, Publishing Perspectives, The Bookseller, The FutureBook, the Dallas Times Herald, Dallas Observer, D Magazine, the Tampa Tribune, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and other media.

 

Anderson is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, and now is based in Tampa, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He is a longtime supporter of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). As part of his interest in the potential impact of serious music and writing on each other, he has made the first challenge grant to listeners of Q2 Music, the 24/7 live-streaming contemporary classical Internet service of New York Public Radio flagship WNYC/WQXR.

 

 

You can follow his latest writings most easily using this feed in your reader.

He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the Frankfurt Book Fair-owned magazine focused on the international publishing scene and founded in 2009 by the German Book Office in New York City. Anderson gave a keynote address at Frankfurt’s Singapore Publishing Symposium in late 2015 and for several years has programmed events in Frankfurter Buchmesse’s Business Club and author-training programs.

Previously, Anderson served as Associate Editor with TheFutureBook.net—the UK industry’s community for digital development in publishing operated by The Bookseller in London.

Most recently, Anderson co-founded The Hot Sheet with his longtime colleague Jane Friedman, former publisher of Writer’s Digest and now teaching at the University of Virginia. The Hot Sheet is the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, delivered every other Wednesday via email. With a brand promise of “no drama, no hype,” The Hot Sheet is drawing loud acclaim for its incisive analysis of industry news not hobbled by the emotionality that pervades so much of the blog world and author-forum scene today.

Anderson is also followed for his “Writing on the Ether” columns — which were originally created for JaneFriedman.com — at ThoughtCatalog.com in New York.

Thought Catalog has been ranked among the biggest 60 or 70 Web sites in the world for unique users, and a specific feed for Anderson’s columns there is available at this link for your reader.

Anderson’s regular readers at Thought Catalog are following his Music for Writers series of columns, with interviews of some of the most talented, intelligent, and important composers and performers today on the contemporary classical scene. Interviewees include John Luther Adams, Paola Prestini (also here), Michel van der Aa, Tristan Perich, Bryce Dessner, John Supko (also here), Christopher Cerrone, The Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington, Donnacha Dennehy, Andrew Norman, Kaija Saariaho, Kate Dillingham, Ville Matvejeff, Gregory W. Brown, Laura Karpman, Lisa Bielawa, Joby Talbot, Brad Lubman, Maki Namekawa, Jeffrey Zeigler, Agata Zubel, David Krakauer, The JACK Quartet’s John Pickford Richards, The Royal String Quartet’s Michal Pepol, ETHEL’s Ralph Farris, Anna Clyne, Caleb Burhans, and more.

#MusicForWriters is produced in cooperation with New York Public Radio’s 24-hour stream, Q2 Music, and you’re welcome to hear some of its output now as you read:

In special client work, Anderson is introducing to authors the Library Journal and BiblioBoard program SELF-e in 2015.

@LibrarySELF-e, as it’s handled on Twitter, gives independent authors — and traditionally published authors who have the e-rights to their backlists — a chance to submit their ebooks for presentation to their states’ libraries, and to the United States’ library system in a curated offering that assists harried librarians all but overwhelmed by new levels of digitally-enabled publishing. Anderson is proud to welcome SELF-e to his growing list of clients.

Anderson programmed the 2015 Hug the Alien events for Frankfurt Book Fair’s Business Club program at the heart of Buchmesse. In addition, he assisted in the Fair’s new conference, The Markets, which is an innovative and energetic business-born exploration of seven powerful key international markets, and he programmed a day of special events for authors in Halle Six, as well.

In the autumn of 2014, Anderson programmed the Master Class series of the Business Club offering at Frankfurt Book Fair’s Halle 4, engaging world-class speakers to bring their best observations to bear on such key-interest topics as subscriptions in the book world. He also worked again with Authoright in Frankfurt, in a special afternoon of programming for authors at BuchMesse.

In the spring of 2014, he  programmed and led the BookExpo America uPublishU Author Hub, which for the first time placed a working center for entrepreneurial authors on the floor of BEA, itself. In 2015, the Hub became the Author Marketplace.

Anderson became program director with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) Digital Book 2015 Conference, which opened BookExpo America at the Javits Center in New York City. With a theme of “Putting Readers First,” Anderson’s programming fielded more than 80 speakers in some 35 sessions for an audience of more than 1,000 over two days, focusing on publishing’s bid for connection with its consumers.

Anderson spoke in March 2015 at Milan’s IfBookThen conference (#IBT15), and at the IndieReCon event that followed London Book Fair with the Alliance for Independent Authors (ALLi). He covered Klopotek’s  Publishers Forum programmed by Ruediger Wischenbart in Berlin for April. He covered the Publishing for Digital Minds conference at London Book Fair (LBF) as a Media Partner with LBF.  And he spoke extensively at the Grub Street conference, The Muse and the Marketplace in Boston in May.

Anderson programmed the First Word day on international issues for authors for the venerable Novelists Inc. Conference at St. Pete Beach’s TradeWinds Island Grand Resort and will do so again in 2016.

In September, he covered Nielsen’s new Children’s Book Summit, but spoke at the Matera Writers’ Conference in Italy.

• PubSense Summit in Charleston,
• Writer’s Digest in New York City, and, capping the year, and
• The FutureBook in London, in its fifth annual outing.

Anderson also conceptualized and programmed the inaugural staging of The Bookseller’s Author Day, as the kickoff event in FutureBook Week, 2015.
You can keep abreast of various conference appearances and events on this page and sign up for Porter Alerts! (on this page, upper right) and be notified by email about upcoming coverage.

Anderson’s work in newspapers, magazines, network television, and online network news have included the roles of critic, reporter, editor, managing editor, news anchor, content coordinator and senior producer.

Anderson is also a regular contributor to Writer Unboxed. He is a frequent conference speaker and panel moderator and a live webinar instructor with Writer’s Digest University.
Anderson gave a keynote address to The Next Chapter conference in Stockholm in May 2014 at the invitation of Publit’s Jonas Lennermo, and led a special onstage live interview with Anna  Rafferty, former Penguin Digital Director there. He has written up a particularly powerful address there by publishing entrepreneur Richard Nash.
There is an article here produced from Milan’s IfBookThen programme in March 2015, a high point of the conference year.
In many cases, Anderson’s presentations at conferences are live onstage interviews with newsmakers. These have included Hugh Howey, Emily St. John Mandel, Shanna Swendson, and Josh Malerman.
His Public Presentation for Authors boot camp was debuted in April 2013 at Writer’s Digest Conference East and repeated at Writer’s Digest Conference West. The event, running three hours, brings participants up to the microphone with their own text to read and gain immediate feedback and coaching. Covering not only live-event presentation (readings) but also television, radio, and online presence, the course offers professional training to newcomers to the literary field whose experience of public appearance and performance may be limited.
Anderson is regularly flown to publishing conferences and trade shows by organizers who hire him to “live-tweet” sessions of their events, taking each session from its beginning to end with fully explicated quotes from panelists and a comprehensive delivery of the discussion’s arc. This provides a chance for public engagement — both by event attendees and by others around the world — in a real-time format of cogent interaction and global visibility for the event.

Queen Elizabeth II Centre – Image: Porter Anderson

A Fellow with the National Critics Institute, Anderson has professionally reviewed books, theater, dance, music, and visual arts for several mainstream media for three decades. Most recently his reviews of literary fiction were read at the Reader Unboxed site.
Anderson accepted a United Nations P5 diplomatic posting (with laissez-passer) to Rome as Creative Advisor and Multi-Media Manager to the UN’s World Food Programme. And he was Creative Consultant and Executive Producer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life, the Danish government’s awards program for international humanitarian design in Copenhagen under the royal patronage of HRH Frederik, Prince of Denmark.

Image: iStockphoto – Alien Force

Prior to becoming a journalist, Anderson worked as an Equity actor and as an account executive with Siegerman Associates, Inc., in public relations and advertising. His play script, Bernard Shaw: Weeding the Garden, was based on the religious writings of George Bernard Shaw. It was entered into the permanent Shaw Archives by Dan Laurence. Anderson was granted a limited-time performance license for the piece by the Shaw Estate via the Society of Authors in London.

Image: iStockphoto – FunSand

Anderson holds a BA (William and Mary), an MA (University of Michigan), and an MFA (Florida State University Asolo Conservatory). He has done special readings in the psychology of the arts at the University of Bath, England.
In his 2011 Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) residency, Anderson worked with Master Artist and novelist Victoria Redel of Sarah Lawrence College.
He is a member of the American Men’s Studies Association, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the American Theatre Critics Association (former executive committee member) and the International Association of Theatre Critics (former vice president).
Anderson is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, and now is based in Tampa, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He is a longtime supporter of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). As part of his interest in the potential impact of serious music and writing on each other, he has made the first challenge grant to listeners of Q2 Music, the 24/7 live-streaming contemporary classical Internet service of New York Public Radio flagship WNYC/WQXR.