.....And in yet another very good and insightful news article by a literary critic, Sarah Stankorb at 'GOOD' magazine delivers the goods!
‘Cli-Fi’ is the Hottest New Literary Genre Around Now, writes literary critic Sarah Stankorb
Sarah Stankorb's articles and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, TheAtlantic.com, and Salon, with regular contributions to CNNMoney and GOOD Magazine. Her beat spans social enterprise, women's rights, the environment, health, motherhood, religion and cultural commentary.
Sarah grew up in Northeast Ohio. Her influences include a Rust Belt upbringing among people who, despite everything the world had shown them, believed hard work would result in the American dream.
TEXT EXCERPTS with minor edits for clarification and amplification...
Apocalypse used to seem like a dubious future outcome, the stuff of Revelation or cheesy sci-fi movies. But if you are even grudgingly willing to acknowledge scientific evidence, you recognize the year-over-year record high temperatures, drought, melting glaciers, and a predicted temperature increase that will swell the seas, swallowing island nations and coastal cities. We’ve all heard the bad news. So you recycle, maybe ride a bike, but what is a person to do with that sense of practically unavoidable doom? How are we to emotionally compute global devastation for which we are all, to varying degrees, culpable?
One tool for coming to terms with climate change—and perhaps conceiving ways to personally adapt to its new realities—might come in one of our oldest human practices: storytelling. The growing new genre of climate fiction (cli-fi) is treated by some as an offshoot of science fiction, by others as a standalone category, and has become the literary subject du jour in courses at Temple University, Vanderbilt, University of Oregon and the University of Cambridge. Work under this umbrella offers a peek into the (often not so distant) future; by entering a fictional, altered world and imagining everyday life in a hotter, more politically fractious, extreme planet, readers can come to grips with climate change in ways that extend beyond data and charts.
“We have to turn to fiction, because people get so freaked out, they go into denial. They don't want to know because they feel helpless,” says Ellen Szabo, author of Saving the World One Word at a Time: Writing Cli-Fi.
The term cli-fi was first coined by book publicist and former journalist Dan Bloom, whose blog and Twitter platform heap accolades upon novelists who use their art to spotlight the implications of climate change. (Bloom also stands up with persistence and dedication for the genre term he is working to promote.) Author Margaret Atwood retweeted a tweet that Bloom had sent her in a 2012 tweet, popularizing the genre designation even more broadly (with a name like Atwood!), and since, cli-fi has continued its rise, -- via a long series of news articles and commentaris at NPR, the New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Room for Debate at the New York Times, the AP, Reuters and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among more than 100 other articles worldwide since 2013 -- and also becoming the subject of a growing number of literary curricula and conferences.
The emerging genre—which runs the gamut from Marcel Theroux’s man in search of humanity in Far North, to Antti Tuomainen’s noir The Healer, to Barbara Kingsolver’s contemporary monarch butterfly survival story in Flight Behavior, and Margaret Atwood’s epic trilogy MaddAddam—offers tools beyond the persuasive reach of scientific observation and prediction. One of the great gifts of this kind of fiction could be its ability to make the unthinkable more proximate, or even intimate. It lets us into the truth of climate change in a new way, and it gives a new space to interrogate the forces that define our culture and changing world.
Truth matters differently in science than it does in literature, and there are truths that lie outside scientific verification. Most of us cannot imagine what climate change will mean for us personally, how it will change what we eat, where we live, whom we love—and lose. What will it mean to be a good person in an era of climate devastation? How will we find and redefine meaning? As Ted Howell, a professor at Temple University who’s taught courses on cli-fi, puts it, it’s “the truth that could be lived or experienced, seeing how people live and adjust has the potential for a larger impact.”
Of course, the truth of climate change, in real life or in fiction is as terrible as it is compelling: writing a world rocked by climate change often results in a kind of dystopian vision. As Edward L. Rubin, author of the cli-fi novel The Heatstroke Line and professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt notes, before 1900, imaginative portrayals of the future tended toward utopia, then in the 20th century with the rise of science fiction, more dystopian novels—like 1984 and Brave New World—began to appear, envisioning a world clutched by oppressive, powerful forces stemming from fears about fascism and communism.
But the cultural anxieties that produce our visions of the future began to change. Rubin explains that future-oriented fiction shifted, warning instead of the threats of private corporations and resource depletion, with books like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. “Since about the turn of the 21st century, there's been a further shift to focus on climate change. And now quite a number of the books that portray a disastrous future, either explicitly deal with climate change or incorporate climate change as background,” says Rubin.
When Howell taught cli-fi at Temple last spring, he noticed that once his students shared a basic vocabulary for climate science, reading and discussing cli-fi together gave them tools to debate what it would be like to live and adapt to various futures. At least once a week, weighed down by the lack of political and social willpower directed toward mitigating climate change, “we would sort of have these moments where a discussion would develop, and we would all just start feeling very, very bleak and worried,” says Howell. He would take a moment and note that it was happening, try to move on. “But, yes, that was definitely the dominant affect of the class at times, that distress.” Unless efforts are made by authors to insert hope, reading cli-fi can leave one feeling profoundly powerless.
“I know Naomi Klein often makes that argument, this way of approaching and imagining the future in fiction is too often very bleak and therefore paralyzing, in terms of thinking about how we can begin to adapt and adjust and negate this potential, whole horrifying future,” says Howell.
But as he writes in an essay on Medium, for Howell’s students, that sense of helplessness turned into an acceptance that the future will be radically different than our world, “and that it’s exciting (not just terrifying) to imagine what will happen. With uncertainty about the future comes the potential to change it for the better.”
Cli-fi offers the means for imagining redemption. That inspiration, that hoped for redemption — as well as all the dire warnings — all of it is needed for a doomed-seeming people learning to live on the precipice of a changed world.
=====================
At various day jobs she has worked to support people living with HIV/AIDS, environmental conservation, and workforce development. Sarah has served as a communications consultant for nonprofits including the Natural Resources Defense Council and The School Fund, and she assists other organizations by writing web content, policy papers and newsletters.
A graduate of the University of Chicago's Divinity School, Sarah's current research focuses upon the intersection of gender and apostasy, (i.e., women who've given up on God/religion). She's also working on a collection of short stories about losing faith. Her essays were recently included in Rustbelt Magazine's Youngstown Anthology and Through the Hourglass, published by Gray and Boardman.
“We have to turn to fiction, because people get so freaked out, they go into denial. They don't want to know because they feel helpless,” says Ellen Szabo, author of Saving the World One Word at a Time: Writing Cli-Fi.
The term cli-fi was first coined by book publicist and former journalist Dan Bloom, whose blog and Twitter platform heap accolades upon novelists who use their art to spotlight the implications of climate change. (Bloom also stands up with persistence and dedication for the genre term he is working to promote.) Author Margaret Atwood retweeted a tweet that Bloom had sent her in a 2012 tweet, popularizing the genre designation even more broadly (with a name like Atwood!), and since, cli-fi has continued its rise, -- via a long series of news articles and commentaris at NPR, the New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Room for Debate at the New York Times, the AP, Reuters and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among more than 100 other articles worldwide since 2013 -- and also becoming the subject of a growing number of literary curricula and conferences.
The emerging genre—which runs the gamut from Marcel Theroux’s man in search of humanity in Far North, to Antti Tuomainen’s noir The Healer, to Barbara Kingsolver’s contemporary monarch butterfly survival story in Flight Behavior, and Margaret Atwood’s epic trilogy MaddAddam—offers tools beyond the persuasive reach of scientific observation and prediction. One of the great gifts of this kind of fiction could be its ability to make the unthinkable more proximate, or even intimate. It lets us into the truth of climate change in a new way, and it gives a new space to interrogate the forces that define our culture and changing world.
Truth matters differently in science than it does in literature, and there are truths that lie outside scientific verification. Most of us cannot imagine what climate change will mean for us personally, how it will change what we eat, where we live, whom we love—and lose. What will it mean to be a good person in an era of climate devastation? How will we find and redefine meaning? As Ted Howell, a professor at Temple University who’s taught courses on cli-fi, puts it, it’s “the truth that could be lived or experienced, seeing how people live and adjust has the potential for a larger impact.”
When Howell taught cli-fi at Temple last spring, he noticed that once his students shared a basic vocabulary for climate science, reading and discussing cli-fi together gave them tools to debate what it would be like to live and adapt to various futures. At least once a week, weighed down by the lack of political and social willpower directed toward mitigating climate change, “we would sort of have these moments where a discussion would develop, and we would all just start feeling very, very bleak and worried,” says Howell. He would take a moment and note that it was happening, try to move on. “But, yes, that was definitely the dominant affect of the class at times, that distress.” Unless efforts are made by authors to insert hope, reading cli-fi can leave one feeling profoundly powerless.
But as he writes in an essay on Medium, for Howell’s students, that sense of helplessness turned into an acceptance that the future will be radically different than our world, “and that it’s exciting (not just terrifying) to imagine what will happen. With uncertainty about the future comes the potential to change it for the better.”
Cli-fi offers the means for imagining redemption. That inspiration, that hoped for redemption — as well as all the dire warnings — all of it is needed for a doomed-seeming people learning to live on the precipice of a changed world.
=====================
Sarah Stankorb's articles and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, TheAtlantic.com, and Salon, with regular contributions to CNNMoney and GOOD Magazine. Her beat spans social enterprise, women's rights, the environment, health, motherhood, religion and cultural commentary.
Sarah grew up in Northeast Ohio. Her influences include a Rust Belt upbringing among people who, despite everything the world had shown them, believed hard work would result in the American dream.At various day jobs she has worked to support people living with HIV/AIDS, environmental conservation, and workforce development. Sarah has served as a communications consultant for nonprofits including the Natural Resources Defense Council and The School Fund, and she assists other organizations by writing web content, policy papers and newsletters.
A graduate of the University of Chicago's Divinity School, Sarah's current research focuses upon the intersection of gender and apostasy, (i.e., women who've given up on God/religion). She's also working on a collection of short stories about losing faith. Her essays were recently included in Rustbelt Magazine's Youngstown Anthology and Through the Hourglass, published by Gray and Boardman.
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