It’s Cli-Fi’s Time -- an oped by Daniel Zeigler

It’s Cli-Fi’s Time

an oped by novelist Daniel Zeigler in New Jersey

Daniel Zeigler is writing a cli-fi novel and hopes to publish
it in the coming years.

webposted on February 22, 2020

Enfant terrible, Greta Thunberg, sheriff of sustainability, CEO of
Climate Change, @Time’s ''Person of the Year,'' patrols the globe from
protest to march, timorously shrieking her raw (as Walt Whitman
wrote) “barbaric yawp across the roofs of the world.”

Acid-tongued, foul-faced, she scorns: listen to the all-knowing
scientists -- you who claim to be sentient citizens. While imprinted on
her waif’s face, with venal verve, is a dour magnum opus, easily
articulated in all languages on the planet: ''I am disgusted with you
adult dolts, to the very core of my being.''

At the other end of the spectrum, and affable, is Joy Lo Dico, a British opinion
writer for the inimitable Financial Times. She suggests that if the
scientists can’t budge the balustrade of indifference among the
global sovereignties, it’s time for the novelists to scale the parapets.

In her estimation, it’s time to open the public’s mind with a new
branch of inculcation.

Enter the birthing mitosis of Cli-Fi (''Climate Fiction'') and Sci-Fi.

The dreary, escalating fate of the world is no longer a Sci-Fi world view.
From Sci-Fi, Cli-Fi metamorphized as its own storyline; emerging as
its own entity, opportunely.

Legions of scientists hawk the coming of age of Climate Change; but
the public has demurred from this homecoming.

Writers have written books about Climate Change (as ''Cli-Fi'') that the public has
cavalierly waved off. The topic, like a bad headline, has been
sophomorically ignored. Cli-Fi hasn’t exactly caught on, planet-
wide.

In whose hands does this blunder belong? Has Cli-Fi’s paucity, all
along, matched its readers lack of trepidation to a seemingly dubious
threat?

Have publishers dimmed the prospects of writers engaged with its
burgeoning curricula? Are we as backwards about Climate Change,
as we once were about the Earth being flat? Isn’t the pen mightier
than stratospheric CO2? More publishing, please!

Joy Lo Dico in London claims that Cli-Fi is now a ‘growing’ genre of urgently
enlightened lit. But no novel has garnered acclaim like a killer
Stephen King plot or the Mommy-Porn of Fifty Shades of Grey.

https://www.ft.com/content/3d614e5c-4d91-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5


No author has become a championed laureate. The breakthrough
bestseller hasn’t been born or bronzed yet.

Dico’s FT Op-Ed is a languorous, content missive like a melliferous
comb of sun-infused nectar. On the other hand, Thunberg has
thrown down the gauntlet like an iron anchor. She’s an angry
adolescent.

Her message has no mercy, it is a blunt cudgel that she carries in a
child’s rueful heart. She parries her crucifix like a baton at the front
of a parade. The nails in her extremities are evident as the
Australia’s conflagrations.

Her mantra, to the powers everywhere, is
an early maturation of an august vision: ''You have failed us.''

She condemns the lassitude of world leaders as thoroughly as a
Cardinal’s dictum. Extirpate the establishment if you have to, she
avers; start fresh and ecological.

She rails against the scoundrels who have perpetrated this colossal, polarizing predicament.

Greta is, for an ungravitas seventeen-year-old, grimly polished about
her message to the world: ''if you listen to me, then listen to the
scientists'' (is the refrain). The facts have been unchallenged for 30
years, known for 40, suspected for a 100.

Cli-Fi niovels have been written since 1962, beginning with British sci-fi author J.G. Ballard’s novel, ''Drowning.''

But according Dico, Cli-Fi’s time is now. The scientists haven’t hit
the bullseye.

The line quoted in the first paragraph is from Walt Whitman writing
about himself, eons ago, as he loafed and spied a leaf of grass.

Greta’s clarion echoing belongs to a generation ready to storm the
Bastille about Climate Change.

In contrast to Greta’s lonesome soliloquy, Dico wonders hopefully,
can the writers living today, in the Anthropocene ethnology of the
21st century, usher out the delaying insanity of the world, the
spurious mindlessness poking at the truth about climate change like
a headless chicken, awash up to their disembodied eyeballs, in the
waters the North and South poles liquefaction.

Dico ponders credulously, if the armies of authors, currently
inhabiting the Earth, can get the truth out, the yawp of this age,
about the arrival of Climate change.

Literary journalist Dan Bloom, one of the originators of the Cli-Fi abbreviation for ''climate fiction,' believes publishers have to step up to the plate.

Corralling writers to tackle Climate Change is only half the battle.

Publishers must lasso the worthy works of literary quality and
dispatch them to the ill-informed populace.

Can current novels sound the alarm about Climate change?

There has been a multiplying appearance of them, but they haven’t
sparked the public yet.

In contrast, Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring, written in 1962, had the
citizenry of America aroused, as if hunting
down Frankenstein with their pitchforks, in the months after its
publication.

Why has ''Cli-Fi'' been received so tepidly?

America has had a number of tomes that compelled the countryside
to wrath and action: Common Sense by Thomas Paine, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

Climate change authors collectively have so far caused the general
electorate to wither like a wilted plant; while Thunberg speaks to
youth like Holden Caulfield has for an eternity. No novelist has had
the nerve to label the politicos as dopey phonies for the Millennials.

Fiction about Climate change still hasn’t breached the imminent
horizon like galloping calvary. What has been written are stories
that don’t match the calamity. People may not have been moved to
action, but they can still recognize the truth. Climate Change is still a
quandary for the man or woman on the street. Its truth is stubbornly hazy.

What is truth, asked Pilate, contemplated Socrates. The truth about
climate change is identical to the footnote in history about the
obliviousness of the Pompeiians living under the smoldering,
inevitable fate of Mt. Vesuvius. They were merry under an ominous
shadow of disaster. Aren’t we?


Millenia later, Pompei's inhabitants are still frozen in their fetal positions
they were reduced to, seconds after the obviousness of their
undeniable miscalculation.

If ever a society waited too long to act, it was the victims of Pompei.

Or in an increasingly short time: us.