As cli-fi goes global, novelists and literary critics are adopting the genre term in several non-English languages as well.

As cli-fi goes global, novelists and literary critics are adopting the genre term in several non-English languages as well.

[An oped by Dan Bloom]


As cli-fi goes global, novelists and literary critics are adopting the genre term in several non-English languages as well. We are beginning to see the term being used by journalists in Italy, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Spain. Reporters writing in Brazil and Mexico and Norway are using it, too.

Cli-fi has become an international rallying cry now, and literary criticism in the cli-fi vein is staring to appear in Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese and Chinese. Just as sci-fi developed first in English and then spread around the world in a variety of languages, the same thing is happening now, slowly, with the rise of cli-fi. It's a good thing, and it's something to watch and observe.

Even scientists sitting down to try their hands at writing a cli-fi novel, and several such novels are due out this year. And in 2017 as well. And not just in English. See the works of Antii Tuomainen and Emmi Itaranti in Finland, Jesper Weithz in Sweden, Bruno Arpaia in Italy and Carlos Calle in Mexico.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16045039-the-healer

As sea levels rise and the world grows warmner over a long period of time, we will be seeing more and more cli-fi novels appearing in non-English speaking countries as well. And this is a good thing. Cli-fi knows no borders, and is borderless. In the Anthropocene, we are one.

And just as Nevil Shute in Australia wrote the novel ON THE BEACH in 1957 about the perils of nuclear war and nuclear winter, with a movie following two years later -- and that book changed the world in its own small way! -- so too will the coming wave of cli-fi novels and movies over the next 100 years change the world and our view of it, too.

Not every novelist will write in the cli-fi vein and that is to be expected. Those who chose to follow the rise of this new genre will be rewarded in their own ways, and those who don't want to follow it are certain to find artistic expression for their novels in other genres. Every novelist has work to do, if they choose to work in the vein of Anthropocene Fiction. If they want to knight their novels as cli-fi books, fine; and if they choose to write in other genres, that's fine, too. What matters is that literature, in all languages, matters. And at this point in human history, it matters all the more.

I'm with cli-fi. But not everyone has to be. In the end, the ''story'' is everything. Tell your story!