Does the state of the environment today worldwide mean we need to develop a new type of [genre] fiction to confront it? Yes, and it's name is Cli-Fi...

 

 

Does the state of the environment today worldwide mean we need to develop a new type of [genre] fiction to confront it? Claire L. Evans, a Portland/Los Angeles pop rock singer in the style of Annie Lennox, seems to think so, but she's wrong. There's already a new type of sci-fi and it's called Cli-Fi. Claire wrote her ideas down at the Guardian's COMMENT IS FREE oped section. An excerpt, slighty edited by our rewrite person:

In recent years the term climate fiction, or 'cli-fi,' has emerged to refer to works dealing explicitly with climate-change [fiction in novels and movies]. Margaret Atwood has championed the term, which has since been applied broadly, and .... retroactively, to writers like JG Ballard and Jules Verne. [But of course neither Verne nor Ballard wrote cli-fi. Verne did not even write sci fi; hecalled his novels "Extraordinary Adventures" and then once used the sci fi term; Ballar wrote sci fi and only sci-fi, he had never ever heard of the cli-fi term in his lifetime.] Cli-fi, with an emphasis on global warming and its attendant anxieties, goes [a long way] toward the ideal of Anthropocene [Age] fiction, [and it is catching on]. ...[Some of the] books most often cited as examples of cli-fi – Kim Stanley Robinson’s ''Mars trilogy'', Paolo Bacigalupi’s [''The Water Knife''], Atwood’s ''Oryx and Crake'' – [do] address issues [of] climate change. They envision futures dictated by human recklessness: as Atwood said this year in an interview with Slate, it’s not climate change; it’s “the everything change.” [Yet she remains a strong champion of the cli fi term.]....[So is there a need for a new term that might be goofily dubbed "Anthro-fi"? No way, no way. Cli fi has arrived. Sci fi is dying. Wait for Scott Thill's nonfiction book about the rise of cli fi comign this December!]