BOOKLIST's Sarah Grant chats with THE WATER KNIFE author Paolo B on his new cli fi novel... at major confab in Chicago in early February 2085

Imagining an ''accidental future'' with cli fi novelist Paolo Bacigalupi ....

 

UPDATE! Paolo please try to understand:
 

1. Cli fi is *not* for novelists to use as a genre platform, NO.

2. cli fi is *not* for readers to use as atool for choosing which
books they want to read, NO.

3. CLI FI is....just a media tool of "headlinese" to use to goad media
sites of newspaeprs and magaiznes and online sites to talk more about
climate-themed novels and movies . YES

4. AND..... an astute 20-something media observer of all this named BOB who apparently knows Paolo personally and
has discussed some of this with him informally I guess tells me from his home in Florida that  ''I think it's obvious that Paolo believes in climate change and regards his books as addressing environmental issues, as he suggests all books should address our changing world, else they be historical fiction. It's the term itself which he seems curious about in the quoted Q and A with Sarah Grant at Booklist. She did ask good questions to him: ie,  How does it work? How is it used in either publishing or media? I see you've
explained all this in the 1 - 3 statements above. Cool. Thanks for your blogging.'' [BOB, well said! Good questions! - Dan]

 

BOOKLIST staffer SARAH GRANT in Chicago chatted recently with ''THE WATER KNIFE'' author Paolo B on his new cli fi novel... at major ALA.org  confab in Chicago in early February 2085! and actually popped him the 'cli-fi' question... and Paolo answers it best he can for now, on his terms and it's cool! MORE TO COME OVER NEXT FEW MONTHS!

 

 

On Sunday, Paolo Bacigalupi, author of the new cli fi novel, The Water Knife. stopped by their convention booth in Chicagop to chat a bit. Their BOOKLIST conversation has been edited for length and space reasons.

re

Q. Have you heard the term CliFi? .....

[WOW BOOKLIST ACTUALLY ASKED THAT QUESTION ON THEIR OWN WITHOUT PROMPTING FROM THIS BLOGGER!]

PAOLO answers......"I’ve heard the phrase, yes."

SO: ....next question was: Is it helpful or silly to pidgeonhole (sic) literature that deals with climate change in this way?

PAOLO: It’s a weird thing. Does the term Cli-Fi make this more meaningful and accessible for somebody to pick up? Or does that mean it’s actually, “Oh, I don’t believe in climate fiction, therefore, I’m not going to pick up this text.”

Honestly, I think there’s something a little silly about saying that there’s genre of literature called Cli-Fi. ...[REMEMBER PAOLO WHAT THEY SAID AT FIRST ABOUT THAT GENRE WE NOW CALL SCI-FI? PATIENCE, MY DEAR MAN, PATIENCE.]



The Water Knife is firmly dystopian, though I’ve heard you prefer the term -- GET READY FOR NEW BUZZWORD! -- ''accidental futures''. Could you say a little about why you like that phrase better than the word dystopian?

Paolo Bacigalupi at the Booklist booth.

When I think about things like dystopian literature versus the kind of stuff I write, the thing that stands out to me is that dystopias are technically deliberately crafted places. You’ve got something like Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s about a human environment that’s deliberately built in a certain way with a certain set of values to control the society. Most of the futures I write are more like the unintended consequences of people having a certain set of values. I sort of think of them as accidental futures, futures where we had no foresight.

When I was growing up I thought of myself as a science fiction writer. Flat out—I write science fiction. And science fiction asks the question, “If this goes on, what will the world look like, what happens next?” And you see that with The Windup Girl (2009), with GMO foods—what if big agriculture corporations control food? What happens? How does that look? The same way with The Water Knife—what happens with climate change and a massive drought on the Colorado River? What are the unintended consequences?
But you know, I’m still sort of forming this in my head. .....[DOES THAT MEAN PB is moving over to CLI FI? Stay tuned.]

I was reading The Black Swan (2007), by Nassim Taleb, which is all about unexpected events that change everything basically. Typically a “black swan event” is where everybody thinks they understand the risks and then something happens to make them reevaluate everything. The data they were looking at in the historical context was wrong and we get surprised by a new piece of data.
A great example Taleb gives in the book to illustrate this is a turkey on Thanksgiving Day. Imagine a turkey at the turkey farm who, every day, goes and gets fed by people, and, every day, he goes and he gets more food. He thinks, “Well, I got fed yesterday and the day before, and the day before, so clearly tomorrow I will also get fed,” and then—oops! On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, he gets a new piece of data and that data is completely outside of the initial set of data that he was using to anticipate his future. According to that turkey’s history, nothing bad would happen to him, and then it turns out he’s misevaluated the world entirely.
That’s the way I think about the world. The Water Knife really, directly applies. I remember doing some research for it. I was at a water conference in Colorado in 2012—it was actually a drought conference. .......[THIS IS DEFINITELY A CLI FI NOVEL. PREPARE!]

You went specifically to do research?
I ''crashed'' the conference. I happened to be in Denver and was like, “Hey look at that, I think I’d better walk in and see if anyone notices me.” Nobody did, it was great.
But I had a chance to actually ask one of the reps from Denver Water, “Here we are in the middle of this drought—how many droughts like this one can Denver sustain?” And he said, “Well, I think we can probably run about five years. We’ll have to go on water restrictions and a bunch of different consequences but we think we can last it out five years.” And I said, “So what are the chances we could have a five-year drought?” And he said, “Well, it’s never happened in the past.” And you think, THERE! That’s the moment! That’s the wedge that you’re going to drive a story into. So going back to the black swan and turkey thing, just because you’ve never had anything different from a feeding before, doesn’t mean you aren’t going to get your head chopped off on Wednesday.

''We as a society will survive based on
whether or not we are able to interpret
the data around us correctly and then
behave as though that data matters.''

I think one of the other things that really influenced me before writing The Water Knife is that when I was in Texas in 2011, they were having a big drought down there. But the thing that really stood out to me was that Rick Perry at that time, who was a legitimate presidential candidate, was praying for rain. He’s holding these big prayer circle things, statewide days of prayer. And you think, here we are, in this situation, which is so dire, and this is how he moves towards a solution set? He moves toward magical thinking? This was actually the moment when I knew I was going to write The Water Knife. We as a society will survive based on whether or not we are able to interpret the data around us correctly and then behave as though that data matters.
Have you heard the term CliFi? .....

[WOW BOOKLIST ACTUALLY ASKED THAT QUESTION ON THEIR OWN WITHOUT PROMPTING FROM THIS BLOGGER!]

PAOL aanswers......"I’ve heard the phrase, yes."

SO: ....next question was: Is it helpful or silly to pidgeonhole (sic) literature that deals with climate change in this way?

PAOLO: It’s a weird thing. Does the term Cli-Fi make this more meaningful and accessible for somebody to pick up? Or does that mean it’s actually, “Oh, I don’t believe in climate fiction, therefore, I’m not going to pick up this text.”

Honestly, I think there’s something a little silly about saying that there’s genre of literature called Cli-Fi.  ...[REMEMBER PAOLO WHAT THEY SAID AT FIRST ABOUT THAT GENRE WE NOW CALL SCI-FI? PATIENCE, MY DEAR MAN, PATIENCE.]

I think there’s reality-based literature or there’s denialist literature.

I think those are the only two things and any even contemporary novel, if it doesn’t have some understanding of the fact that it’s describing a changing world, it’s kind of in denial, it’s kind of a historical fiction.

 Everything about our contemporary world is becoming more and more destabilized and you want to see that infuse all stories because that’s describing our genuine world.

So labeling something CliFi sort of hides it in a way. [...[REMEMBER PAOLO WHAT THEY SAID AT FIRST ABOUT THAT GENRE WE NOW CALL SCI-FI? PATIENCE, MY DEAR MAN, PATIENCE.]]

I just engage with the world. This is the world.

MORE at BOOKLIST Twitter feed. BRAVO for good q and a!
...[REMEMBER PAOLO WHAT THEY SAID AT FIRST ABOUT THAT GENRE WE NOW CALL SCI-FI? PATIENCE, MY DEAR MAN, PATIENCE.]