''Dan Bloom: How a concern for future generations changed my life..."
I didn't get involved with ''Cli-Fi'' because I had a novel I wanted to write. I'm not a writer. But something pulled me in, something I had never felt in my younger years, a feeling that only came upon me when I turned 60: a deep concern for future generations 500 years from now and how they might cope with global warming impact events then. If there is to be a "then."
That's what pulled me in to ''cli-fi.'' [Cli-Fi is a short nickname for ''Cli''-mate ''Fi''-ction]. I was thinking of children and their parents thirty generations from now. Climate change has not really started yet, but we can see the warnings all around us, not just in government charts or in scientific measurements of the build-up of co2 in the Earth's atmosphere.
You can see in the people around you, their fears, their worries, their anxieties. We know AGW is for real and it's not going to go away. That's what gnawed at me, drew me in.
Now I'm cli-fi 24/7. Now I'm spending part of my days scouting the year 2500, looking into a future that may very well become real sooner than we think. But I'm willing to give humankind 30 more generations before the shit really hits the fan. I want to be generous. I don't want to scare anyone. I don't want to be an alarmist.
But I see dead people, billions of dead people 30 generations from now. I know you don't want to hear this or even see these words in print, but it's what the IPCC reports and other scientific handwriting on the wall has led me to see. I'm not scared, and you shouldn't be scared either.
There's still plenty of time to get our lives in order, 30 more generations of children and grandchildren.
That's how I came to cli-fi, or rather how cli fi came to me. I want to read those novels, both dystopian and utopian. I want to see those movies, both hopeful and unspeakably messy.
Remember the Hollywood movie ''On the Beach'' filmed in Australia in 1959 with Gregory Peck and the stellar cast? I envision a climate themed movie based on a climate themed novel that becomes the ''On the Beach'' of the Anthrocene. A global warning, an alarm bell, a warning flare. Cli-fi.
Someone will write it. In the next 100 years? Or sooner?
See The Cli-Fi Report for news links at www.cli-fi.net
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UGO BARDI in Italy writes:
"So, in this difficult moment of late 2016, we are seeing something moving, out there. A new form of literature that embodies our future, makes it real, tells us about it. And it is not a good future. It is a terrible future. It is a future that most of us refuse to contemplate, even though we know that it is there, even though we refuse to admit it. This new literary genre takes the name of "Cli-Fi" in reference to sci-fi, of which it is in some ways the continuation [as a subgenre of SF].
''It is still an embryonic genre that reminds in many cases the early, naive, science fiction of the 1930s. And yet, it is growing and turning into literature. Italian novelist Bruno Arpaia has written a harsh and unforgiving cli-fi book in Italian titled "Something out There", [also translated for a Spanish language edition now] the story of a group of dispossessed migrants who try to reach Northern Europe, leaving an Italy devastated by climate change and only a few will make it. Surely not an optimistic book, although it has elements of hope. But it is a book that does the work that a literary piece must do: showing to you the change ahead.
''It is not by chance that I cited Dante; a cli-fi novel like Bruno Arpaia's one is comparable to the comedy's first cantica, the one about Hell. It sounds like the very first lines of the Comedy, where Dante tells of having been lost in a "dark wood," with its typical cli-fi theme: people desperately looking to escape from the climate disaster. And it is our situation: we are completely lost; unable to find our way out. Someone still has to write the cli-fi equivalents of the other two canticas of the Comedy, the one about Purgatory and the one about Paradise, and that will make it possible for us to understand what is in store for us. Can narrative take us out of Hell? Hard to say, but it is certain that without a narrative of the future, we can have no future.''
-- UB
''Cli-fi is still an embryonic genre that reminds in many cases the early, naive, science fiction of the 1930s. And yet, it is growing and turning into literature. ''
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