Friday, December 2, 2016

What's new in the world of cli-fi? UPDATE INTERVIEW

Anything new in the cli-fi world?

A major news portal, THE CLI-FI REPORT, with several icon buttons to choose from here: cli-fi.net


Any new interviews or news articles or opeds on the horizon?

A big interview with a literary website in the USA is coming up soon, scheduled now and the reporter is calling next week.

Any good literary articles or book reviews of cli-fi novels recently?

Biggest next big thing is Kim Stanley Robinson's new cli-fi novel titled ''NEW YORK 2140'' and skedded for a March 14, 2017 pub date.

Cli-fi in Hollywood. Any new cli-fi movies in production or pre production or ready for release soon?

The new Nicolas Cage movie is shooting in Canada now, and set in 2030 near future. Dystopian cli-fi. Cage will star in the action thriller “The Humanity Bureau,” with shooting in British Columbia.

Rob King is set to direct from a script written by Dave Schultz. Sarah Lind, Jakob Davies and Hugh Dillon have also joined the cast.

The story is set in 2030 with global warming wreaking havoc in parts of the American Midwest. In its attempt to take hold of the economic recession, a government agency called The Humanity Bureau exiles members of society deemed unproductive and banishes them to a colony known as New Eden.

Cage will play an ambitious and impartial caseworker who investigates a case appealed by a single mother (Lind) and her son (Davies). RELEASE DATE: SUMMER 2017

In academia, any new cli-fi classes set for this semester or next? Any recent academic articles or quotes from them worth highlighting?


Yes, a lot is happening within academia and among academics worldwide now with cli-fi. Symposiums, online forums, academic papers, and more.

  

A professor tells this blog: "I’m awaiting word now on a possible grant for a project on cli-fi where I, in collaboration with two colleagues from another college, will have reading groups read cli-fi novels in their location (so, ''The Water Knife'' in AZ, Kim Stanley Robinson's "NEW YORK 2140"  in NYC), journal about their reading, and discuss it with us. We’ll try to take some measure of the effects of cli-fi novels on their imaginations of the future and their climate politics."  

See ''The Holocene Hangover'' by University of Chicago professor  Fredrik Albritton Jonsson .  

Thomas Davis in the English department at OSU in Ohio notes that he will be teaching a cli-fi seminar in the spring of 2018, adding:  "A bit far off, but I’m collecting materials now."

Some forthcoming cli-fi related papers from the desk of Austrian professor Alexa Weik von Mossner:
Troubling Futures: Cli-fi Modes and the Feeling of Risk
The short article is part of an extended forum on the meaning of the term “cli-fi” for American Studies in the journal Amerikastudien/American Studies. It examines American climate fiction through the lens of risk theory (Beck) and through psychological approaches to the perception of risk (Slovic, Leiserowitz), including both fiction and non-fiction formats in its deliberations as well as a number of hybrid formats that imagines the risks associated with climate change.
(forthcoming in an essay cluster on cli-fi in Amerikastudien/American Studies, edited by Julia Leyda and Susanne Leikam)
Climate Risk and the Thrill of Terror in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife
The Water Knife is perhaps Paolo Bacigalupi’s his most successful attempt to date at conjuring future climatic conditions in a way that allows readers to imaginatively experience them. The essay uses the analytical tools of cognitive ecocriticism to demonstrate how Bacigalupi’s dystopian novel uses the human bodies of characters and their sensual and affective capacities in order to allow readers to imaginatively experience a decidedly unpleasant future world. Bacigalupi uses anthropogenic climate change as a catalyst for drastic developments in the ecological, economic, and social realm, inviting readers to understand on a visceral level that changed climatic conditions will inevitably lead to such conflicts and vulnerabilities.
(forthcoming in Meteorologies of Modernity. Eds. Sarah Fekadu, Tobias Döring, Isabel Kranz and Hanna Strass. REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Tübingen: Narr)
Vulnerable Lives: The Affective Dimensions of Risk in Young Adult Cli-Fi
The article focuses on the psychological dimensions of readers’ engagements with dystopian young adult climate fiction, arguing that the mental simulation of a fictional climate-changed world can offer much more than simple entertainment or escapism. Instead, it might impact teenagers’ understanding of the social, economic and ecological risks associated with climate change. The article builds on research in the psychology of fiction in its examination of the narrative strategies of Paolo Bacigalupi’s YA cli-fi novel Ship Breaker. It demonstrates how the novel invites young readers to an imaginary and yet embodied experience of a dystopian future world that may wish to avoid.
(forthcoming in a special issue of Textual Practice on ““Fiction in the Age of Risk,” edited by. Golnar Nabizadeh and Tony Hughes-D’Aeth)
Touching the Senses: Environments and Technologies at the Movies
The essay explains how film techniques and technologies play on human brains’ embodied simulation to create empathetic responses in viewers, and then analyzes Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice and the results of the reception study about the film that I conducted together with Brigitte Hipfl. It not only shows how the film creates emotional responses in viewers, but also addresses the reasons that those responses do not necessarily translate into action. Despite the ways in which we “live in denial,” the essay argues that such films can contribute to long-term cultural change.
(forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Eds. Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann. New York and London: Routledge)
QUOTE FROM ACADEMIC IN EUROPE: - "The term cli-fi has not only been proliferating at recent international conferences, but also within university curricula as educators in many disciplines embrace the recent spate of fiction and film dealing with climate change in humanities courses and beyond. ...In my study of cli-fi, I consider the proliferation of the term and theorize about its usefulness. If the novelty of the term itself provokes discussion, perhaps that too makes it an asset in generating interest climate change-related fictional and screen texts.''
 

 


Cli-fi novels. Any word on new and upcoming cli-fi novels in the pipeline, either from the publishing world or self-publishers?

The ''next big thing'' is Kim Stanley Robinson's new cli-fi novel titled ''NEW YORK 2140'' and skedded for a March 14, 2017 pub date

Where's cli-fi headed these days?

#Writersofcolor penning ''cli-fi'' novels worldwide - part of our 25-part #CliFi YouTube Video series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4_PbuCnVb8&t=21s

Who's in charge of cli fi these days and who owns the term, if anyone?

Nobody is in charge, it's an open meme, and nobody owns cli-fi or ever has. It belongs to the world,  and has taken on a life of its own after its initial quiet and almost invisible launch. Most people still have never heard of the term yet -- 90 percent of the general public have never heard the term or seen the term in print. It's still early days. But things are cooking, yes. Slowly. Simmering.

Overseas Tweets? Yes!

  1. Jonáš Zbořil @jonaszboril 20 小時20 小時前
  2. neporadíte mi dobrý non-fiction o ekologii, civilizačních kolapsech, dystopickejch vizích a věcech jako je svalbard global seed vault?
  3. Jan Nemček @jan_nemcek 18小時18 小時前
    Moc jsem toho z cli-fi nepřečetl, ale líbil se mi Solar od Iana McEwana.​

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