A cli-fi class in Australia set for summer of 2016 creates reading list of cli-fi novels

A professor of ecology and literature in Australia tells this blog:

Hello Dr Bloom,

 

Thanks for your interest in my cli-fi class for the summer of 2016.

 

The  book selection process for my course is still going a bit badly.  Neither Robinson's ''Forty Days of Rain'' nor McEwan's ''Solar'' are really about global warming.  They are character studies (neither very interesting IMHO) about people whose job involves combatting global warming.  They are no more about the process itself than ''Death of a Salesman'' is about the retail trade. 

 

Winterson's ''Stone Gods'' is marginally about global warming (really about environmental degredation generally) and I think I'll use it for our class, but it get weird and impressionistic without much payoff. 

 

I am at the moment reading Ben Lerner's ''10:04'' now, but that seems to be another  character study (a bit more interesting).  Nathaniel Rich's book ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW involves a better character (although I found the ending of OAT unconvincing, again IMHO) but floods aren't exactly climate change; a book about floods (like the Katrina books, ''Salvage the Bones'' and ''Zeitoun,'' is open to the counterargument that it's about bad weather, which happens all the time.    

 

I suppose I will round out the class with Bacigalupi's "The

 

Windup Girl."

 

 

Cheers,

 

P.

 

Melbourne