2016 was the year when the climate debate seriously kept its entry in the literature, namely the so-called ' cli-fi ' with Charlotte Weitze as Danish contributor.

Author Charlotte Weitze in DENMARK talks about her latest novel 2. March Call:

Author Charlotte Weitze has committed the novel ' the abominable ', as a Small Library in a press release calling for ' a thoughtful novel about love, fanaticism and climate change ' on the occasion of an author evening Thursday 2. March 19:30 pm 

2016 was the year when the climate debate seriously kept its entry in the literature, namely the so-called ' cli-fi ' with Charlotte Weitze as Danish contributor. 

-The novel contains a subtle mingling of climate policy, dystopia and love.

Charlotte Weitze has been called adventure girl in ny, Danish literature and is known for creating universes that mixes realistic everyday stories with a wealth of references to folk tales, myths and literature. Now you get the chance to meet the author and be introduced to her unique, literary universe, writes librarian Stine Marie nordkvist Jullerup. 

Small Library can be found at Alagade 40 in Rings.

「A song from Japan by ハヤシユウ（Mr. Hayashi Yu, age 24）that has gone viral around the world -- "HOW_TO_PLAY"」

​

Dear World!

「A song from Japan by ハヤシユウ（Mr. Hayashi Yu, age 24）that has gone viral around the world -- "HOW_TO_PLAY"」

なんと、「HOW TO PLAY」をきっかけに台湾の記者の方から取材を受けました。めっちゃ褒め倒されてます。

​A Man, A Plan, A Song: Yu Hayashi

I want to tell you about a cute instrumental song from a composer in Japan that is making waves around the world. His name is Yu Hayahsi ( ハヤシユウ in Japanese ) and he is 24 years old and a very humble and modest. [The song is just 1-minute long but it can be extended with editing.]

When I contacted him recently and asked him if there were any English-language news articles about this simple yet catchy song that has gone viral around the world, he answered me right away on the internet and said that there were no English language news reports about his song yet.

So here is the first report in English and I hope you enjoy it, and if you want to translate this news article to French or German or Norwegian or Chinese or Spanish, please feel free to do so.

The amazing thing about this song and its composer is that Mr Hayashi wrote the song at his small studio in his home in Niigata in Japan and released to the world on YouTube FOR FREE!

Yes, he does not charge anyone any royalties or payments to use his song. He is both a genius and a music humanitarian.

My first question to Yu was: "May I interview you for my blog?"

His answer in English and in ''internet time'' was: "Thank you for your message. Yes, I'm the composer of "HOW TO PLAY", you are right."

 

So I asked Yu a few questions online  such as ''who, what, where, when, and why?'

Mr Hayashi answered:

who : ''It's me, ハヤシユウ（Hayashi Yu）(in English style we would call him ''Yu Hayashi ''in the Western style of naming, which is common now in Japan, but in actual Japanese his name is ''Hayashi Yu.'')''

what : ''a song titled ''HOW TO PLAY'' ''

when was the song composed : ''maybe, I think, in December 2013.''
 
where was the song composed : ''at my house''
 
why did he compose the song : ''to practice making a funk music ''

When I asked Yu about payments or royalties to use his music, he said very humbly and modestly:
"The song is free for everyone to use as BGM (background music)."

The song is now very popular around the world, but it is not easy to find out how many people are using it on their websites and personal blogs and as YouTubers for background music, but Mr Hayashi's fans are legion. Worldwide! From Japan to the world!

"I don't know who exactly is downloading the music and using my song, and I do not know what they use it for," he told me. "I cannot receive messages about using it from all of them. However, I have been able to find some videos that use "HOW TO PLAY" on Youtube."


In Japan, Yu explained to me, there is a channel for videos that are famous and created by "You Tubers (people earn some income on Youtube). The channel is here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/MASAIandHamzael

Mr Hayashi told me that now "HOW TO PLAY" is used as ED theme of this channel.

"I'm proud of this," he said.

How old is the quiet, soft-spoken composer with the entire world in front of him?

"I'm 23, and I'll turn 24 in next month in March," he said during our February interview. "I have ben making BGMs since when I was 20."

And Yu added at the end of our interview: "Thank you for your all messages about my song.  It makes me happy, and it's fun.​"

Before I end this short news report about HOW TO PLAY, I want to thank my friend Akane in Japan, and her husband and their daughter Sana, who produce a series of YouTube videos in Japanese about the life of their cute and talkative daughter at their ''Sana37'' channel. that was where I first heard the music being played and after hearing it over 25 times on their channel, the music began to grow on me.

Then one day in Taiwan, where I live, I heard the very same music coming from the lobby of a movie theater, as a kind of advertisment jingle, and I asked the box office clerk if she knew the name of that song or who composed it and she said "No. I have no idea. It's on on computer so it plays in the lobby from time to time. I think the song is on YouTube but I don't know its name."

That's when I became very curious and interested to to know more about this song, so I asked Akane by Facebook and she replied: "The song is called "How to Play" but I don't know who composed it."

So I went to YouTube as soon as I heard the name of the song and found it right away. Here:




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0go11BLmU


Now you know the story behind the song. Pass it on. Tell your friends. Yu Hayashi is a genious and generous as well, because he did not create the song to become rich and famous and he gave it to the world for free. Anyone can use it.

What a nice man he is, creative and generous. BRAVO, YU HAYASHI!

=======================================

P.S. By the way, the song title is written in a special way, with underline marks (_)  between the words How_To .....and..... To_Play. If you are searching for the song, use those marks, too. You will find it that way.

HOW_TO_PLAY

===============

Yu Hayashi also tells me:

My twitter account is 884yuu: https://twitter.com/884yuu
(In Japan, we can call the number 8 (hachi) as "Ha" or "Ya", and 4 for "Shi" so Ha-Ya-Shi my name here!)



He also asked me to add this information:The original source of the BGM is not on Youtube, it is on this site:
http://dova-s.jp/bgm/play2253.html

It's a Japanese site that passes out loyalty-free BGM, there are over 100 composers like me. They upload their music on this site, as free BGM.


P.S.
You knew "HOW TO PLAY" on sana37 channel! I know the channel, too!

UPDATE ---- The Cli-Fi Report" has been retitled as "The Cli-Fi Report from Taiwan"

 

 

 

UPDATE ---- The Cli-Fi Report" has been retitled as "The Cli-Fi Report from Taiwan"

HOW Michael Crichton in STATE OF FEAR (2004) got climate change and global warming issues wrong blnd-sided by the times he was living in then

HOW Michael Crichton in STATE OF FEAR (2004) got climate change and global warming issues wrong blnd-sided by the times he was living in then. VANITY FAIR mag has this:


...''One needs only to look at the sheer number of books and movie tickets sold to get an idea of how popular — even beloved — Crichton was throughout his 40-year career. But there was controversy as well, in the wake of his novel State of Fear (anti-global warming). That novel took a jaded look at the politics of climate-change science at that time in USA history and has as its villains a group of environmental activists. He got hate mail after State of Fear was published to mostly negative reviews.

“He was ready for the ridicule; he was ready for the conversation,” said his widow Sherri Crichton, when asked about why Crichton tackled this subject in the way that he did. “He challenged science and the models.”

Steven Spielberg believes that when the book was written in 2004 the science wasn’t as settled as it is now, and what Crichton was really arguing for was a less emotional approach to the topic. When the book came out, “people were not talking about global warming. And I think Michael was trying to shake things up and get people to listen, and I think he had to go out on a limb to get people to pay attention.”

On Charlie Rose’s show, Crichton described environmentalism as a kind of religion and argued for a coolheaded approach to the subject.

When asked about the writer’s conservative views in this area, Charlie Rose said, “I would hope that Michael would look at the world today and say, Whatever I did in terms of creating that piece, we’re living in a different world, and I see more evidence—and it is one of the great challenges in our world that I see now. At least I hope he would say that.”

Paul Lazarus, producer of the original Westworld and Crichton’s closest friend during his early years in Hollywood, and currently on the faculty of Santa Fe University of Art & Design, recalled a long discussion he had with Crichton about the issue. He remembers telling him, “Michael, you’re on the wrong side of history on this one.”

The editor Robert Gottlieb worked on Crichton’s novels while at Alfred A. Knopf. In his 2016 memoir, Avid Reader, excerpted in the September 2016 issue of V.F., Gottlieb recalls, “Michael had a strong background in science. And he had a keen eye, or nose, for cutting-edge areas of science—and, later, sociology—that could be used as material for thrillers while cleverly popularizing the hard stuff for the general public. You got a lesson while you were being scared. What Michael wasn’t was a very good writer. The Andromeda Strain was a terrific concept, but . . . eventually I concluded that he couldn’t write about people because they just didn’t interest him.” Gottlieb adds, “Michael, for all his weaknesses as a writer, was unquestionably the best of his techno breed, and easily deserved his tremendous success.”

Still, Crichton was plagued by feelings that his books all fell short of the mark. “I’ve never worked on anything, either a book or a movie, without, in some really deep way, feeling disappointed in myself—feeling that I missed it,” he admitted in his Great Train Robbery commentary.''

SEE FULL TEXT AT VANITY FAIR

ADAM MORGAN THE EDITOR Introduces BURNING WORLDS, Amy Brady's new monthly literary column about cli-fi trends nationwide.

ADAM MORGAN THE EDITOR Introduces BURNING WORLDS, Amy Brady's new monthly literary column about cli-fi trends nationwide.

It's been a busy year at the Chicago Review of Books, an online literary journal that is just one year old.

Since January, weveve launched a lot of new columns and features — all of which are aimed at expanding our mission to make the literary conversation more inclusive, in every sense of the word.

In case you missed them, here are our new ongoing features at the CHIRB.

---

Burning Worlds is Amy Brady’s new monthly column (named after JG Ballard) examining trends in climate change fiction, or “cli-fi.”

In her first piece, she spoke with the man who coined the term “cli-fi” (Dan Bloom) about his reading suggestions.

Next month, in MARCH, she'll speak with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson about his forthcoming novel, ''New York 2140,'' set in a partially submerged Manhattan.

 https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/02/15/whats-new-at-the-chirb/

Climate science and cli-fi – where data intersects with art, an Oped by Cat Spark in Australia, author of her debut cli-fi novel LOTUS BLUE

 

NOTE: Amy Brady, one of America's top litrary critics, has launched a monthly lit column , ''BURNING WORLDS,'' about cli-fi novels and trends. SEE LINK: https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/02/08/the-man-who-coined-cli-fi-has-some-reading-suggestions-for-you/

 

 

 

SEE ALSO :http://cli-fi-books.blogspot.tw/2017/02/climate-science-and-cli-fi-where-data.html

Bio

Cat Sparks was fiction editor of Cosmos Magazine from 2010-2016. She managed Agog! Press, an Australian independent press that produced ten anthologies of new speculative fiction from 2002-2008. She’s known for her award-winning editing, writing, graphic design and photography.

Cat was born in Sydney and has traveled through Europe, the Middle East, Indonesia, the South Pacific, Mexico, North America and China. Her adventures so far have included winning a trip to Paris in a Bulletin Magazine photography competition; being appointed official photographer for two NSW Premiers and working as dig photographer on three archaeological expeditions to Jordan.

A graduate of the inaugural Clarion South Writers’ Workshop, she was a Writers of the Future prize winner in 2004. She has edited five anthologies of speculative fiction and sixty-five of her short stories have been published since the turn of the millennium.

Cat has received a total of nineteen Aurealis and Ditmar awards for writing, editing and art including the Peter McNamara Conveners Award 2004, for services to Australia’s speculative fiction industry. She was the convenor of the Aurealis Awards horror division in 2006, a judge in the anthologies and collected work category in 2009 and the short SF division in 2013.

An active member of Science Fiction Writers of America, her fiction is represented by Jill Grinberg Literary Management, New York.

Her short story collection The Bride Price was published by Ticonderoga Publications in May, 2013. The book was nominated for an Aurealis Award and won the Ditmar for Best Collected Work in 2014.

Her story ‘All the Love in the World’ was reprinted in Hartwell and Kramer’s Years Best Science Fiction, Volume 16.

In January 2012 she was one of 12 students chosen to participate in Margaret Atwood’s The Time Machine Doorway workshop as part of the Key West Literary Seminar Yet Another World: literature of the future. Her participation was funded by an Australia Council emerging writers grant.

She is currently studying for a Doctorate of Philosophy – Media, Culture and Creative Arts through Curtin University.

Her debut novel, Lotus Blue, will be published by Talos Press in March 2017.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catriona_Sparks

 

    

 

Earth’s climate functions as its life support system. That system is under heavy threat from over 7 billion people and the bleeding heat of industry: as jungle and forest are rendered into farmland; greenhouse gases belch and fume, destabilizing the environment, shrinking biodiversity, pushing the limits of the Earth's natural mechanisms.

2016 was the hottest year in the modern temperature record. Climate change is a long-term issue on a massive scale – from shrinking glaciers, changes in rainfall patterns, severe heat waves and other irreversible conditions. The worldwide scientific community has issued warnings for years about the present and future impacts of climate change linked to fossil fuel use. 

Earth faces unprecedented challenges caused by human agency, yet here we stand, like a deer in headlights, knowing something big and bad is coming, too dazzled to do anything to stop it.

Science fiction has long been the literature that speculates on scientific change while reflecting contemporary societal concerns.

Climate change is happening now, and we need a literature of now to address its issues.

As glaciers melt, corals bleach, typhoons kill and forest fires rage, a new genre called cli-fi has emerged as a subgenre of science fiction to stand out on its own. Cli-fi  focuses on anthropogenic climate change rather than natural unstoppable ecological catastrophes, such as supervolcanos, solar flares or large, Earth impacting meteorites. And most importantly, climate fiction uses real scientific data to translate climate change from the abstract to the cultural, enabling readers to vicariously experience threats and effects they might be expected to encounter across their own lifetimes.

Cli-fi  highlights the hard-impacting economic and interpersonal realities of climate change. It encourages us to understand that climate change is a problem we have brought upon ourselves and that changes to our economic and energy systems are required if we are to survive it.

Cli-fi straddles genre boundaries: science fiction, utopia, dystopia, fantasy, thriller, romance, mimetic fiction, nature writing, and the literary, from fast-paced thrillers, to inward looking present day narratives.

Climate change is emerging as a set of philosophical and existentialist problems as well as physical challenges. It is yet to receive the crisis response and treatment it deserves from world leaders.

Cat Spark's Lotus Blue is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Fiction – and indeed all art -- has a role to play, by humanising the effects of climate change; by illuminating the human dimensions of technological futures; by encouraging people to challenge ingrained confirmation bias and become climate voters -- active on the issue, making their views known loudly to politicians.
Storytelling has the power to give climate change a human focus by translating complex and evolving scientific concepts into tales reimagining human interactions with the world. Non-didactic, people-centric narratives stressing the social aspects of climate change as much as the technical and scientific encourage societal long-term thinking about the power and potential of clean energy. Cli-fi's growing popularity proves that we desire narratives showing how we might adapt to a changing world as ice melts and seas rise. Stories appealing to social ethics, questioning established hierarchies, and addressing our responsibility for fashioning an ecologically sustainable future.
The coming decades will see problems of increasing complexity, such as permanent political and social instability, dangerous weather, food and water insecurity, and an increase in displaced persons as more and more land is swallowed by the sea. Cli-fi tackles these topics, detailing the practical domestic implications of carbon rationing and renewable energy, and exploring how practical changes might be implemented across ordinary lives. Some cli-fi stories investigate nascent technologies and their integration into business and culture, questioning how far our growing dependence on technology might end up detrimentally estranging us from nature. The topics are wide ranging, and use topical, political and scientific bases, ensuring that while it feels like fiction, it is applicable to current events and daily life.

While much realist and literary fiction continues to focus inwards on individual identities and challenges, cli-fi takes on the task of envisioning physical and cultural landscapes facing uncertainty through processes of transformation and adaptation. Cli-fi forms a bridge connecting scientific information with people preparing to face an uncertain future the past can no longer be relied upon to guide us through.

Art possess inherent empathetic value. Entwined with technological and social change, cli-fi functions as a universally understandable language while serving as a catalyst for forging new trans-disciplinary alliances, shifting debates and values, inspiring and motivating legal and institutional action, opening hearts and minds to new ways of thinking, encouraging resilience, resistance and resolve while continuing to imagine possible futures.

More than anything, we must learn from these possible cli-fi futures, rooted in what we scientifically know today -- if we actually believe such futures might conceivably come to pass. Based on the science, those futures are closer than we think.

Cat Sparks, author of the upcoming cli-fi novel Lotus Blue, available from Talos Press, an imprint of Skyhorse, in March 2017.

Oprah Winfrey lists 7 top ''Cli-Fi'' novels in April 2019 issue of ''O'' magazine

The Day on March 20, 2019 when JEOPARDY TV show with Alex Trebek as host used the cli-fi term as a clue

https://thefutureofreading101.blogspot.com/2019/03/files.html

and

Jeopardy’ goes ‘cli-fi’ on Alex Trebek show, while Oprah Winfrey boosts genre

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jeopardy-goes-cli-fi-on-alex-trebek-show-while-oprah-winfrey-boosts-genre/

and

Oprah Winfrey magazine ''O'' goes ''Cli-fi'' with list of 7 top ''cli-fi'' novels

https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/books/a26811549/climate-change-books/

and

Waiting for another 'On the Beach' novel about climate change in the 21st century

http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2019/03/02/waiting-for-another-on-the-beach/

and

Cli-fi (climate fiction) on the big screen changes minds about real climate change

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/08/world/climate-change-movies-eprise/index.html

and

News.Google.Com for cli-fi news links:

https://www.google.com/search?q=cli-fi&tbm=nws&ei=uS6gXLxumtjzBYCTtsAG&start=10&sa=N&ved=0ahUKEwj8rrqHs6vhAhUa7LwKHYCJDWgQ8tMDCEU&biw=1301&bih=730&dpr=1.05

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For an extensive bibliography, see "Cli-Fi in American Studies: A Research Bibliography'' by Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda

LINK:http://www.asjournal.org/62-2017/cli-fi-american-studies-research-bibliography/

http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2017/05/cli-fi-this-week-may-1-8-2017-news.html

UPDATED DAILY at:

http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2017/05/cli-fi-this-week-may-1-8-2017-news.html

The latest ''cli-fi'' news links

=================

















2,037 page views here since first posting these links

In case you missed it, a new ongoing feature at the CHIRB.

---

Burning Worlds is Amy Brady’s new monthly column (named after JG Ballard) examining trends in climate change fiction, or “cli-fi.”

In her first piece, she spoke with the man who coined the term “cli-fi” (Dan Bloom) about his reading suggestions.

**** Next month, in MARCH, she'll speak with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson about his forthcoming novel, ''New York 2140,'' set in a partially submerged Manhattan.

 https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/02/15/whats-new-at-the-chirb/

SEE ALSO BELOW LINK:

--------------------------------------------------------

“Burning Worlds” is a new monthly literary column by Amy Brady dedicated to examining important trends in climate change fiction, or “cli-fi.” Debut: February 2017
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/02/08/the-man-who-coined-cli-fi-has-some-reading-suggestions-for-you/

Can Cli-Fi Save the Earth? No, but....   

Dan Bloom Hopes "Cli-Fi" Will Sway Some People

A Literary Hub article by Boston journalist James Sullivan:

http://lithub.com/can-science-fiction-save-the-earth/


 ''Climate science and cli-fi – where data intersects with art,'' an Oped by Cat Spark in Australia, author of her debut cli-fi novel LOTUS BLUE -
http://cli-fi-books.blogspot.tw/2017/02/climate-science-and-cli-fi-where-data.html

How the literature of 1816 has inspired the creation of 'cli-fi'

BBC News-2016年9月2日

The last few summers have been the hottest on record, but 200 years ago people experienced a very different problem after the 1815 eruption ...

Climate gadfly coins literary term to save the planet – 'Cli-Fi'

Independent Australia-2016年10月5日

"I'm a cli-fi missionary, and I'm hoping to make it eventually to Australia and end my days there. A cousin of mine from St. Louis, Mark Epstein ...

From Beijing, China newspaper:

气候科幻小说能拯救地球吗？

中国日报-2017年1月29日

这类体裁的作品常称为“气候科幻”（climate fiction, cli-fi ），简而言之，就是探讨气候变化可能带来的极端后果。 其实此类概念也并非新鲜事物。19 ...

So Hot Right Now: Cli-Fi Comes to YA

lareviewofbooks-2016年3月13日

So it is no surprise that science fiction's latest subgenre — climate fiction, or cli-fi — has produced a number of works intended for young ...

"Cli-Fi" as a subgenre of SF gains traction Down Under

http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2017/02/cli-fi-as-subgenre-of-sf-gains-traction.html

Hot Tomorrow: The Urgency and Beauty of Cli-Fi August 24, 2016

The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Subfield That Is Changing the Landscape of Literary Studies

Associated Press: Cli-fi literature in college curricula March 7, 2016

Margaret Atwood in Medium cli-fi package on how to survive the future

Cli-Fi - That's Climate Fiction - Is the New Sci-Fi, Wired magazine

There have even been whispers of cli-fi as a new literary genre

As the weather shifts, cli-fi takes root as a new literary genre

Will the rise of "cli-fi" spur youth into climate action?

'Anthropocene Fictions:' The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Adam Trexler, PhD)

The Huffington Post: Cli-fi is real

Turning Pages: How climate-change fiction is heating up

Associated Press: Climate Change Inspires Rise of 'Cli-Fi' Flicks

The New York Times: Can Cli Fi Change Minds? 6 Experts Speak Their Minds

NPR radio broadcast April 2013: Climate Change Has Created New Literary Genre

TIME magazine: Summer Cli-Fi Thrillers

''You’re reminding me – I cannot begin to say how helpful this is and how deeply I appreciate it – that, as much as our activism in the streets (and in the airports and on the phones and in the elections) matters, writing about all this still matters too. We need to find the way in to people’s imaginations.''

UPDATE:  !!!!
 

A reader who read Amy Brady's recent column in cli fi in the Chicago Review of Books here sent us a brief note today, that read in part: "

Thank you for sending me this great interview. There are books here I’m glad to know about. And I’m really glad to see Amy's new column, too. Your resolute efforts are having an effect. Because how do we get people to wake up? My way of staying hopeful is to think that if we can survive this new regime of madmen climate deniers, it will have the effect of moving us into action on a grander scale than before, hooking up all kinds of new activists and finding the links between movements.
 
''And I was very moved by your saying, “It’s all I do, and it’s all I think about. It’s my life now.” Yes, it has to be. One of the activist characters in the fictional trilogy I’m currently writing says (actually, my father said it first, but he wouldn’t have minded my borrowing it), “If we work all the time now and manage to stop the catastrophe, if we find the way to change course, then our children, or our children’s children, can sit in cafés and drink lattes. We don’t have time for that.”
 
''Not that his children listen, exactly. Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out, in fiction and in writing about fiction – what are the mechanisms by which people can be persuaded to listen and then to act? Where is the window between “this isn’t happening” and “it’s too late now, so we may as well go dancing.”
 
''But you’re reminding me – I cannot begin to say how helpful this is and how deeply I appreciate it – that, as much as our activism in the streets (and in the airports and on the phones and in the elections) matters, writing about all this still matters too. We need to find the way in to people’s imaginations.
 
''With warm best wishes and with gratitude for your work...''

SEE https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/02/08/the-man-who-coined-cli-fi-has-some-reading-suggestions-for-you/

Some Cli-Fi Reading Suggestions For You -- Amy Brady's new literary column at the Chicago Review of Books

 

Some Cli-Fi Reading Suggestions For You -- Amy Brady's new literary column at the Chicago Review of Books

 

UPDATE:  !!!!

A reader who read Amy's article here sent us a brief note today, that read in part: "

Thank you for sending me this great interview. There are books here I’m glad to know about. And I’m really glad to see Amy's new column, too. Your resolute efforts are having an effect. Because how do we get people to wake up? My way of staying hopeful is to think that if we can survive this new regime of madmen climate deniers, it will have the effect of moving us into action on a grander scale than before, hooking up all kinds of new activists and finding the links between movements.
 
''And I was very moved by your saying, “It’s all I do, and it’s all I think about. It’s my life now.” Yes, it has to be. One of the activist characters in the fictional trilogy I’m currently writing says (actually, my father said it first, but he wouldn’t have minded my borrowing it), “If we work all the time now and manage to stop the catastrophe, if we find the way to change course, then our children, or our children’s children, can sit in cafés and drink lattes. We don’t have time for that.”
 
''Not that his children listen, exactly. Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out, in fiction and in writing about fiction – what are the mechanisms by which people can be persuaded to listen and then to act? Where is the window between “this isn’t happening” and “it’s too late now, so we may as well go dancing.”
 
''But you’re reminding me – I cannot begin to say how helpful this is and how deeply I appreciate it – that, as much as our activism in the streets (and in the airports and on the phones and in the elections) matters, writing about all this still matters too. We need to find the way in to people’s imaginations.
 
''With warm best wishes and with gratitude for your work...''

Some ‘Cli-Fi’ Reading Suggestions For You

Posted on February 8, 2017February 8, 2017 by Amy Brady

“Burning Worlds” is a new monthly column dedicated to examining important trends in climate change fiction, or “cli-fi.”

It astonishes to think just how long humans have known that the Earth is getting warmer. The term “global warming” didn’t enter public consciousness until the 1970s, but scientists have studied our planet’s natural greenhouse effect since at least the 1820s. In 1896, a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrheniussome concluded that human activity (like coal burning) contributed to the effect, warming the planet further.
And yet, here we find ourselves in 2017, still wrestling with manmade climate change like it’s a new phenomenon. Why have we not acted sooner? The answer may lie in what Indian author Amitav Ghosh calls humanity’s “great derangement”: our inability to perceive the enormity of the catastrophe that awaits us.
That’s where fiction writers come in.*
For years, authors have been writing climate change fiction, or “cli-fi,” a genre of literature that imagines the past, present, and future effects of climate change. Their work crosses literary boundaries in terms of style and content, landing on shelves marked “sci-fi” and “literary fiction.” Perhaps you’ve read one of the classics: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain. Then there’s Ian McEwan’s Solar and J. G. Ballard’s 1965 novel The Burning World, from which this column derives its name. Each of these novels—like others in the genre—help us to “see” possible futures lived out on a burning, drowning, or dying planet.
Here at the Chicago Review of Books, we feel it’s time to give cli-fi more attention. To that end, we bring you “Burning Worlds,” a new monthly column dedicated to examining what’s hot (sorry) in cli-fi. It’ll feature interviews, reviews, and analyses of the genre with the hope of generating a larger conversation about climate change and why imagined depictions of the phenomenon are vital to the literary community—and beyond.
Kicking us off is an interview with journalist and former teacher Dan Bloom, the man who coined the term “cli-fi” (read more about Bloom in his interview with Literary Hub). Bloom founded and maintains The Cli-Fi Report, the web’s most comprehensive site dedicated to cli-fi. He is a tireless crusader for the genre, a self-proclaimed “cli-fi missionary.” In this interview, we discuss what inspired his passion for climate change fiction, why he thinks the term “cli-fi” caught on, and what he recommends we all read next.
Amy Brady: You’ve had impressive careers as a journalist and a teacher and have lived around the world. Tell us more about yourself and your love for literature.  
Dan Bloom: I graduated from Tufts, class of 1971, as a literature major. I studied American poetry under Maxine Kumin, read a lot of French, Russian, and Spanish lit (studied in Paris my junior year), and really wanted to be a novelist. I even wrote one! Never published it. After college, I worked in Washington D.C. as a freelance cartoonist for The New Republic, The Washington Star, and The Washington Post. In 1983, I became the fulltime editor of the “Letters to the Editor” section at The Los Angeles Herald Examiner. In the late ’80s I founded a free weekly paper in Juneau, Alaska called The Capital City Weekly, where I served as editor, reporter, humor columnist, and book reviewer. I moved to Japan in the ‘90s and worked at a paper called the Yomiuri Shimbun—I wrote for their English section as a reporter and book reviewer. Then it was on to The Taipei Times—I still freelance there.
In the early 2000s, I taught part-time as an adjunct lecturer in the Taiwanese literature and computer science departments, teaching English composition to Master’s Degree students.
Literature has always been important to me. I’ve read the New York Times Sunday Book Review every Sunday since 1964, and in college was a fan of The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review, back when George Plimpton ran it. I still read Publisher’s Weekly every week—it’s my publishing Bible.
Amy Brady: What brought your attention to climate change fiction specifically?
Dan Bloom: The 2006 report released by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the powerful James Lovelock interview in The Independent in the U.K. that same year. He spoke of there being only a few people left in the arctic after global warming decimates the human population. That bit sent shivers down my spine.  It was a “eureka” moment, a wake-up call.
Amy Brady: You were the first person to coin the term “cli-fi.” What inspired you to use it, and why do you think it caught on?
Dan Bloom: “Cli-fi” came to me after I read the IPCC report and was thinking of ways to raise awareness of novels and movies about climate change issues. I toyed with using such terms as “climafic” or “climfic” or “clific”. But I wanted an even shorter term that could fit easily into newspaper and magazine headlines. So using the rhyming sounds of “sci-fi,” I decided to go with “cli-fi”.
The term started to catch on worldwide on April 20, 2013 when NPR did a five-minute radio segment about “cli-fi” with authors Nathaniel Rich (Odds Against Tomorrow) and Barbara Kingsolver (Flight Behavior). That segment reached academics, literary critics, journalists and headline writers. Why did it catch on? For one, I conducted a prolonged, daily, 24/7 P.R. campaign via Twitter and email to reach media people after the NPR story went viral to keep the momentum going. I contacted all kinds of people in the literary world. About 90 percent of them did not respond to my emails or my Tweets. But 10 percent did, including Margaret Atwood and Michiko Kakutani, and that has made all the difference.
I never give up. This is my life’s work now and has been since I first read that IPCC report. It’s all I do, and it’s all I think about. It’s my life now.
Amy Brady: Why is it important to read cli-fi?
Dan Bloom: Cli-fi serves as a wake-up call. To quote Sarah Stone, who I believe said it best in a review of Edan Lepucki’s novel California for SFGate: “If we survive—truly, and not in the unhappy ways depicted [in California]—it will be in part because of books like this one, which go beyond abstract predictions and statistics to show the moment-by-moment reality of a painful possible future, the price we may have to pay for our passionate devotion to all the wrong things.”
Amy Brady: What can cli-fi novels do that perhaps cli-fi movies can’t? Or do you think they provide a similar experience?
Dan Bloom: Both are important. Novels are often adapted into movie scripts as we see with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the forthcoming Annihilation, which is based on Jeff Vandermeer’s novel of the same name. So there is a nice relationship between novels and movies. Movies, of course, reach millions of people with powerful visual impact. But novels are also discussed widely and treat subjects with more depth.
Amy Brady: What do you make of Amitav Ghosh’s recent book-length examination of cli-fi, The Great Derangement?  
Dan Bloom: I loved that book. It’s a collection of climate-themed essays from a University of Chicago lecture series, and I not only read them, I watched them on Youtube. It’s a very important book, but he got bogged down in the distinction between genre and literary fiction. Novelists today don’t care much about such intellectual distinctions. Using words to tell a good story is all that matters. Genre is only important for organizing library shelves. Truly. Story is everything.
Amy Brady: How do you envision your role in the world of cli-fi moving forward?
Dan Bloom: Me? I see myself as a cli-fi missionary, a cheerleader for novelists and screenwriters, a P.R. guy with media contacts, a literary theorist, and an advisor to novelists seeking publication advice and direction. I get personal emails from novelists wanting to know more about cli-fi and how to place their novels every week.
Amy Brady: What are some of your favorite cli-fi novels?
Dan Bloom: Polar City Red by Jim Laughter, Finitude by Hamish McDonald, Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jean-Marc Ligny’s Acqua TM, a novel in French that should be translated into English. From Germany, I love EisTau by Ilija Trojanow, which was recently translated into English as The Lamentations of Zero. That book is even better than Ian McEwan’s Solar. I’m all in favor of non-English language cli-fi novels. Cli-fi, after all, is a worldwide call to action.
*It’s worth noting that in The Great Derangement Ghosh writes that he feels there’s a lack of literary response to climate change. While many people, this writer included, feel somewhat differently on this point, Ghosh’s arguments are well worth exploring further.

---

Dan Bloom is a 1971 graduate of Tufts University in Boston. He received his MA in Speech and Communications from Oregon State University. Bloom worked as a journalist in Alaska for 12 years and, later, as a newspaper editor and reporter at English-language newspapers in Japan and Taiwan.

UPDATE:  !!!!

A reader who read Amy's article here sent us a brief note today, that read in part: "

Thank you for sending me this great interview. There are books here I’m glad to know about. And I’m really glad to see Amy's new column, too. Your resolute efforts are having an effect. Because how do we get people to wake up? My way of staying hopeful is to think that if we can survive this new regime of madmen climate deniers, it will have the effect of moving us into action on a grander scale than before, hooking up all kinds of new activists and finding the links between movements.
 
''And I was very moved by your saying, “It’s all I do, and it’s all I think about. It’s my life now.” Yes, it has to be. One of the activist characters in the fictional trilogy I’m currently writing says (actually, my father said it first, but he wouldn’t have minded my borrowing it), “If we work all the time now and manage to stop the catastrophe, if we find the way to change course, then our children, or our children’s children, can sit in cafés and drink lattes. We don’t have time for that.”
 
''Not that his children listen, exactly. Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out, in fiction and in writing about fiction – what are the mechanisms by which people can be persuaded to listen and then to act? Where is the window between “this isn’t happening” and “it’s too late now, so we may as well go dancing.”
 
''But you’re reminding me – I cannot begin to say how helpful this is and how deeply I appreciate it – that, as much as our activism in the streets (and in the airports and on the phones and in the elections) matters, writing about all this still matters too. We need to find the way in to people’s imaginations.
 
''With warm best wishes and with gratitude for your work...''

TSD -- Trump Stress Disorder: For many people, continual alerts from news sources, blogs, social media and alternative facts feel like missile explosions in a siege without end. That's Trump Stress Disorder.

As Year 1 of the Trump Era in the USA continues, and it's Day 18 today I think, a new term has been coined dubbed Trump Stress Disorder.

That's Year 1 A.D. "Anno Donaldo"

A couples’ therapist specializing in anger and resentment says he was overwhelmed with distress calls during the recent USA election cycle last fall. The vitriol and pervasive negativity of the campaigns, amplified by 24-hour news and social media, created a level of stress and resentment that intruded into many people’s intimate relationships. It's been dubbed Trump Stress Disorder.

What is Trump Stress Disorder?  For many people, continual alerts from news sources, blogs, social media and alternative facts feel like missile explosions in a siege without end. That's Trump Stress Disorder.

Women seem especially vulnerable to Trump Stress Disorder. Many feel personally devalued, rejected, unseen, unheard and unsafe. They report a sense of foreboding and mistrust about the future. They fear losing the right to control what happens to their own bodies. Their male partners are disappointed and angry by the news but don’t feel the same kind of personal betrayal. Because they don’t get it, they have a hard time sharing the emotional burden, which makes their partners feel isolated. The shock and anger anger that followed the election threatens to give way, as shock and anger usually do, to anxiety or depression. Thus: Trump Stress Disorder.

​The very thing that renders women particularly vulnerable to the aftershocks of Trump Stress Disorder is also their greatest strength: the desire to connect, affiliate, nurture, grow and protect. Shelley Taylor at UCLA first developed the model of “tend-and-befriend” as the typical female response to stress, just as the primary male response is fight-or-flight. Female animals, including humans, band together under threat for mutual protection and support. Women create, maintain and use social networks — especially friendships with other women — to manage stressful conditions.​

 

So many therapists advise their clients and friends affected by the election and its aftermath to reach out, connect, affiliate and show compassion for those similarly affected.

There are three levels of connection, and research shows that women in general are particularly skilled in all three. The first is community, where emotional connection is based less on personal relationships than shared values, goals or experiences. So, many therapists advised most of their female clients showing signs of Trump Stress Disorder
to participate in the Women’s March on Washington.

The second level of connection is intimate — friends and loved ones. In every cross-cultural study, the healthiest and happiest women have a strong network of girlfriends. Reach out to friends and loved ones. But don’t just text or email them. Meet them, call them, hear their voices and see their faces to combat Trump Stress Disorder.

The third level of connection is spiritual, which has a variety of manifestations, among them religious or meditative and appreciation of natural or creative beauty. Whatever means the most to you, do more of it in this unsettling time of Trump Stress Disorder.

​
Depression and anxiety share two ugly heads; they engender a sense of powerlessness and undermine our ability to create value and meaning in our lives. To shield yourself from Trump Stress Disorder, be sure to act in accordance with your deeper values. Now more than ever it’s important to be the person, partner, parent, friend and citizen you most want to be.

Feelings of powerlessness are not punishments, they’re motivations to empower ourselves. Stand up for what you believe. Write letters, demonstrate, lobby Congress and so on, remembering that you’ll be most effective (and feel better) when focused on the change you want to see rather than merely reacting to what you don’t like. For optimal psychological health, take the moral high ground and resist the urge to react to a jerk like a jerk.

Finally, try to see the bigger picture over time. Our brains play temporal tricks on us when it comes to feelings; we can scarcely remember feeling other than what we feel at the moment. When you have a toothache, you can’t recall a state of painlessness. When you feel happy, you’re unlikely to recall sorrow.

In fact, feelings are biologically transitory; they cannot last very long, unless you keep focused on them or fail to act on their motivations. We’ve learned in neurology that whatever you focus on is amplified and magnified and seems more important than what you don’t focus on. When you think, “I feel helpless,” your brain loads into implicit memory lots of other times you felt helpless and selects behaviors you did in the past when you felt that way, which probably didn’t help for very long. But if you focus on how you want to feel — valuable, empowered, connected — your brain will load into implicit memory other times you felt that way and is more likely to select behaviors conducive to how you want to feel.

Historians note that meaningful social change follows periods of upheaval. What will Trump Stress Disorder bring?

To learn more about Trump Stress Disorder contact Steven Stosny, a Maryland therapist and the author of “Soar Above: How to Use the Most Profound Part of Your Brain under Any Kind of Stress.”

Maddie Crum at her Huffington Post blog asked several SF and CF novelists about the future of global warming impacts worldwide

Maddie Crum Asked Some SF and CF Novelists About The Future Of Possible Man-made Global Warming Impacts

Jeff VanderMeer, Lidia Yuknavitch and others discuss solutions to the urgent problem.

02/06/2017

Maddie Crum --    Culture Writer, The Huffington Post writes:

 

The day before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Wired reported on a story that could be misconstrued as a thrilling work of cli-fi. Anticipating the new president’s ambivalence towards climate change, scientists raced to back up their research, fearing that years’ worth of online evidence and solutions could be erased or otherwise marred.
 

The pressure was on. Trump’s team had at this point confirmed that some data would be taken down from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website. So, data was pitted against rhetoric, fact against alternative fact.
 

Of course, as Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out last week in a letter to The Oregonian, her hometown newspaper, ''alternative facts'' are different from fiction. “A lie is a non-fact deliberately told as fact,” she wrote. “Santa Claus is a fiction. He’s harmless [although the centuries-old anti-semitic religious propanda and lies of Christianity are not harmless]. Lies are seldom completely harmless, and often very dangerous.
 

Fiction, on the other hand, can entertain, inform, and speculate. In the case of cli-fi, which is a subgenre of SF and of course from the main genre of science fiction itself, fiction can provide human context for facts and data, supporting it rather than refuting it.

Possible solutions to urgent issues such as climate change can be explored. Though speculative fiction authors — including Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Barbara Kingsolver — have flocked to the topic in recent years, climate change in fact has been addressed in fiction for decades, dating back to J.G. Ballard’s imagined natural disasters in the 1960s and even Jules Verne in France long ago.
 

In response to the removal of climate change references from the White House’s website, we asked a range of SF and CF authors ― some of them new to the genre and subgenre, others prolific editors of anthologies ― to discuss speculative or fictional solutions to how climate change is discussed (and in some cases ignored) today. Their answers, which range from imagined scenarios to heartfelt pleas, are below:

 

Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and the Southern Reach trilogy

“As we come closer to catastrophe, we know what we need to do: leave fossil fuels in the ground, eat less meat, drive less, develop clean energy while eschewing false solutions in that arena, protect biodiversity, support indigenous people’s claims to the land, understand that environmentalism and social justice are often intertwined, stop treating plastic as disposable, find a model other than ‘growth,’ recognize ‘progress’ as a word that requires interrogation, and understand that business as usual is toxic and costly.
 

“The solutions a fiction writer can provide, the speculation, is perhaps edging toward offensive in a policy context ― because we have scientists telling us what we need to do and they are the experts. What we as writers need to do is better portray the complex truth of our situation.
 

“Other than that, we know that breakthroughs in use of fungi and other soft tech including biomimicry may help us but if they do not ultimately someone will open the Pandora’s Box of a vast geoengineering project. I am unwilling to speculate in that direction given the possible side effects. That fact is, again, we know what we need to do and we know what the consequences are otherwise.”

 

 

Thoraiya Dyer, author of Crossroads of Canopy

“Human overpopulation is a relentless driver of climate change. Yet many believe it’s their inviolable right to reproduce. There’s no point in building high-tech, zero-footprint, energy-generating homes if we’re immediately going to fill them and need more. With robots doing most of the work anyway, families could share children ― not just by alternating weeks of custody, but by mixing genes so that each child has four biological parents.
 

“Today, a child can have three biological parents ― two for the chromosomes in the nucleus and another to replace defective mitochondrial DNA. But that doesn’t seem especially motivational. You can’t see yourself in a child’s mitochondria.
 

“What if we could separate phenotypical and psychological traits in a person’s gametes? You could team up with another couple for a chance at a baby with, say, your couple’s fabulous looks and that couple’s generous and happy-go-lucky personality. Then swap around when it’s time for a sibling. Four humans in one generation, two humans in the next, and a whole lot of pooled resources for getting them to adulthood.”

Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan

“Human mammals need to radically re-envision their relationships to the planet as well as their ability to listen and learn to the living environments around them. We need to learn Earthspeak. The Earth and its eco-systems and the planetary relationship to the cosmos all have a lexicon, syntax, diction. The Earth is screaming its head off. Ask NASA or read what Carl Sagan left us or call up Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking. The Earth has been waiting for us to develop and fully realize an actual relationship rather than a conquering and exploiting act of murder. We need to move away from colonization impulses and toward a radical intimacy with the planet and everything on it. A love that is as deep as the one we claim we have for life partners or children. We need to de-hierarchize our love and compassion and redirect that force as a renewable and sustainable energy. Yes, I’m serious. Humans are not the only thing to love. And it will take fight.

Emmi Itäranta, author of Memory of Water (in Finnish and English)

[Itäranta opted to provide a fictional scene.]
 

“Since private car use was phased out in the city, the soundscape is different. The best place to observe this is a scenic café on top of one of the skyscrapers. You order a cup of shade-grown coffee and find a table at the terrace, among the constant trickle of water, as the building recycles moisture and nutrients in order to feed the gardens in its offices.
 

“A metallic clang catches your attention. Construction workers are removing the scaffolding from a footbridge grown from living sycamore trees. You have watched it take shape. On weekdays you cross it to catch your train.
 

“A murmuration of starlings takes wing from the foliage. The sky, too, speaks in other voices now: those of rain, and wind, and animals. You scan it for planes, but you spot none.
 

“You glance at the news monitor inside the café. You recognize the archive footage. You were there.
 You made your protest sign at home, a wall of a cardboard box on which you painted the words ‘HANDS OFF THE ARCTIC.’
 

“The glistening panels on rooftops turn as they follow the setting sun, whirring like insects’ wings. Soon the street lamps will begin to glow softly, dispel the rising dark.”

John Scazli, author of The Collapsing Empire

“There are lots of science-fictional ways to deal with climate change. My favorite, from a ridiculously overengineered point of view, is the one where we induce global dimming to lower the overall temperature of the Earth, mostly by throwing particulates of some sort, or even tiny little mirrors into the atmosphere or near space. Never mind what that might do to weather patterns and so on ― unintended effects are half the fun!
 

“But it seems to me that one doesn’t have to go into science fiction to significantly deal with climate change. One simply has to commit to remedies we already have available, phasing out energy sources like coal and hydrocarbons in favor or things like solar and wind.
 

“The science fictional idea here is not the technology involved, but the idea that there is a global will to make the switch in the face of (basically) greed and inertia. Let’s see!”