''Cli-Fi and Its Distant Cousin Sci-Fi"

''Cli-Fi  and Its Distant Cousin Sci-Fi''
by Professor Darren Harris-Fain
Auburn University at Montgomery USA

*** Slightly edited for clarification and amplification by this blog


One of the first documented uses of “cli-fi,” short for “climate fiction,” was an April 20,
2013 story on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition (produced by Angela Evancie), which on its website titled
the piece “So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created a New Literary Genre?”

The answer
to that question, of course, was yes! Remeber, this was 2013. Now it's 2020.

Climate change has been the topic this new genre for
decades, and that genre is “cli-fi”—climate fiction. It may be true that climate change is an
increasingly frequent topic in contemporary realism; this is part of the reason why TheCult Encyclopedia of Cult Science Fiction says, “Fiction centred on climate change is referred
to as Cli-Fi, a term coined by literary activist Dan Bloom in 2011 at cli-fi.net '' (Langford).

Before cli-fi was a thing, sci-fi was already on the scene.

Before discussing how science fiction has dealt with climate change, it’s worth clarifying
what we mean by “science fiction.” The term, now 90 years old, is misleading because much
of it is not really about science, in contrast with how romance fiction includes romance, crime
fiction includes crime, and Westerns are set in the West. It would be more accurate to call it
“scientific worldview fantastic fiction,” because the fiction in science fiction is informed by the
rationalist, materialist worldview that has developed since the rise of science in the modern era.
It might also be just as accurate to call science fiction “the literature of change,” since it
embraces scientific findings about how the way things are now is not the way they were in the
past. History also tells us this, obviously, but the scientific worldview extends beyond history
and tells us that our world is not only different from previous eras politically, culturally, and
technologically but also, thanks to the disciplines of geology and biology, that our planet and our
very selves are the result of major changes over the course of eons.

Shaped by history as well as science, science fiction tends to project the inevitability of
change into the future. Will we continue to evolve, and if so, how? How might new technologies
change how we live? What if cataclysmic events—of terrestrial, extraterrestrial, or human
origin—threaten our very existence? Science fiction offers imaginative possibilities for such
scenarios and more.

In this way, science fiction is a subgenre within the fantastic, that branch of imaginative
literature that presents readers with situations that significantly deviate from the world we know,
in contrast with contemporary and historical realism. Yet we should recognize that, even though
it is fantastic, science fiction is not to be confused with fantasy, another branch of the fantastic.
Fantasy, according to critical consensus, offers characters and/or situations that depart from the
scientific worldview, whether in the form of ghosts, vampires, and other supernatural creatures
or through the depiction of things like magic or characters like elves, dragons, and the like.
Science fiction, on the other hand, is (mostly) consistent with our current state of scientific
knowledge, even if it imagines characters and situations that do not exist in our world now.
Fantasy could never happen, given what we know of the universe; science fiction conceivably
could.

In projecting possible futures, science fiction thus considers scientific plausibility and
often attempts to extrapolate tenable developments from past knowledge and current situations.
It is therefore not surprising that, in its history from the nineteenth century to the present, its
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authors have considered how the environment might change, either through natural disasters or
human-made ones or through the long passage of time. However, it should be stressed that
science fiction writers are not trying to predict the future; rather, they’re projecting possible
futures based on current knowledge as settings for fictional narratives. As a result, science fiction
writers often get things wrong—but sometimes they get things right.

One of the earliest practitioners of science fiction to envision an altered environment was
H. G. Wells, beginning with his novel The Time Machine (1895). The Time Traveller (his name
is never given) describes his adventures voyaging through the fourth dimension. Most of the
novel occurs in AD 802,701, and this world of the far future does not seem radically changed in
terms of climate, though he does witness the disappearance of his house and its replacement with
a garden. However, it is decidedly different in terms of the ruins of civilization the Traveller
encounters, with much of the former London recaptured by vegetation and the bifurcation of
humanity into two separate species. Threatened by the Morlocks who have stolen his machine,
the Traveller manages to reactivate the device and travel millions of years beyond his late-
Victorian time, there witnessing a dying Earth. The sky is no longer blue, and the air is thinner.
Green vegetation is everywhere, but the only living creatures he sees are a huge butterfly and
dozens of monstrous crustaceans. The sea, ringed with salt, barely moves in this windless world.

As the Traveller says:
I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the
world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony
beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-
looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s lungs: all
contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and there was the
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same red sun—a little larger, a little duller—the same dying sea, the same chill
air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green
weed and the red rocks. (Wells, The Time Machine 65)

The Traveller moves even further into the future, “watching with a strange fascination the
sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last,
more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure
nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens” (65). Wells imagines a far-future world where life
may go on, but the climate changes due to the inexorable forces of nature—a natural world not
designed with any endpoint in mind by a God for whom humanity is a special creation.
Wells also questions the existence of a supernatural being whose providence governs
human affairs in his short story “The Star” (1897). In the near future (near to the late Victorians,
that is), Earth is threatened by a celestial object hurtling through the solar system that, after
colliding and merging with Neptune, continues toward the sun, looking like a new star in the
heavens. As it heads toward Earth, it increases in size, and eventually the heat of the object is
felt. Scientists fear it will collide with Earth as well, but complete catastrophe is averted as the
“star” instead passes by the Earth and heads toward the sun. Even so, such a massive object
passing so near the planet brings forth extreme meteorological disasters as it approaches: storms
and floods, earthquakes and volcanoes, and intense heat; its gravitational pull also alters Earth’s
orbit. Even after the “star” is gone, “men perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of
yore, and the sun larger …” (152). Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin Bay become “green and
gracious” (152), the ice at the poles is considerably melted, and humanity moves “northward and
southward toward the poles of the earth” (152) because of the planet’s increased warmth. The
calamity is not of human origin, but Wells’s story nonetheless reveals a scientific view about the
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precarious nature of our climate. Later writers would pick up the theme of an altered climate due
to astronomical phenomena, among them Larry Niven in “Inconstant Moon” (1971).

A changed climate caused by calamity is also present in Richard Jefferies’s novel After
London; or, Wild England (1885). The nature of the disaster, vaguely understood from the
perspective of the twenty-first century, is never made clear (though some suspect it was caused
by a celestial body passing near the earth, as in Wells’s story), but its results are manifest:
England’s climate has been altered, a vast lake covers much of the center of the country, and
most of the country has been reclaimed by forests except for London, which has become a toxic
swamp.

In these three works and many others found in the history of science fiction, climate
change is presented as a natural phenomenon, with humanity helpless in the face of powerful
physical forces to do anything about it. However, Victorian writers earlier than Wells noted how
industrialization was affecting the world around them, thus implicating civilization for its
discontents. In chapter 5 of Book 1 of Hard Times (1854), for example, Charles Dickens
famously depicts the smoke-filled sky of his fictional northern industrial village of Coketown,
with its “black canal” and “a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye…” (17).
Other Victorians extrapolated the effects of industrial pollution into the future. These
include William Delisle Hay in The Doom of the Great City (1880) and Robert Barr in “The
Doom of London” (The Idler, 1892), both describing a London poisoned by smog from the
futuristic perspective of the mid twentieth century. However, the Victorian belief in progress
often extended to an optimistic view that, while the nineteenth century might have lived under
the cloud of the pollution generated by industrialism, further advances would lead to cleaning up
the mess. This view would be continued by many authors into the twentieth century.
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It is remarkable that in the utopias and other futuristic projections created by science
fiction authors in the late Victorian period and into the first half of the twentieth century, future
cities are routinely depicted as well organized and spotlessly clean—kind of like the Disney
parks’ Tomorrowland, only without Space Mountain. Even in early dystopias like Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the “bad
places” imagined by these authors are bad because of their social and political structures, not
because they’ve damaged the planet.

It is not until the 1950s that science fiction writers consider climate change a realistic
possibility for the future, and they do so within a specific historical context: the end of World
War II and the beginning of the Cold War, both presenting the threat of nuclear war and the
concomitant altering of the environment through radiation and radioactive waste. Scores of short
stories and novels were written imagining how climate change wrought by nuclear war could
render the planet either entirely or partially toxic. Similarly, the publication of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring in 1962 and subsequent discussions of the effects of a variety of pollutants spurred
science fiction writers to extrapolate present-day concerns into futuristic depictions of a polluted
planet.

These developments in the 1950s and 1960s coincide with a broader development in
American and British science fiction: the debate between optimism and pessimism. In contrast
with British dystopias like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, American science
fiction of the first half of the twentieth century tended to follow Jules Verne and progress-
minded Victorians as a model in imagining futures filled with technological and economic
advances. After the war, however, many writers, both American and British, began approaching
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the human future more pessimistically, and possible devastation of the environment was just one
avenue they pursued.

A key figure in this shift was J. G. Ballard. The first of Ballard’s early novels about post-
apocalyptic scenarios, The Wind from Nowhere (1961), does not explain the cause of the
catastrophes: a powerful global wind eventually dries the seas and the Great Lakes. However, in
The Drowned World (1962) it is clear global warming is the precipitating event. The year is
2145, and much of the planet has been flooded due to increased temperatures. Likewise, in The
Burning World (1964) a massive drought, attributed to the dumping of industrial waste into the
world’s oceans, has dried up smaller bodies of water.
Ballard was not the only British writer to tackle the topic of disasters and catastrophes.

Among those who do so in connection with climate, John Christopher’s The World in Winter
(1962) imagines the effects of reduced solar radiation on the planet, specifically the United
Kingdom, which becomes an abandoned frozen wasteland from which many flee to Nigeria.
Other British writers imagined environmental catastrophes caused by human efforts to control
the weather, as in John Boland’s White August (1955)—Christmas weather in July!—and John
Bowen’s After the Rain (1958)—time to build another ark! Indeed, one key distinction between
much science fiction and mainstream climate fiction is that the former often follow the
Frankenstein motif of humanity attempting to control nature and creating havoc as a result,
whereas the latter tends to depict climate change not as a result of humanity’s overreaching but
rather stemming from long-term developments and either its resistance to curtailing its industrial
and technological advances, its indifference to the effects of climate change, or its denial of the
scientific consensus.
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The environmental impact of pollution is addressed somewhat in Harry Harrison’s Make
Room! Make Room! (1966) and directly in John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972); both
novels employ multiple points of view, as if to emphasize the effects on humanity as a whole and
not just a handful of characters. Such works coincided with the rise of the ecology movement in
the late 1960s and the 1970s. This movement also influenced the writing of the utopian novel
Ecotopia (1975) by Ernest Callenbach, in which Washington, Oregon, and part of northern
California secede from the U.S. and establish an environmentally conscious state designed to
avert the ecological damage found in a story like James Blish’s “We All Die Naked” (1969), in
which rising carbon dioxide levels, causing the greenhouse effect, lead to melting polar ice and
rising sea levels, with New York City now a new Venice.

Since the 1970s, science fiction authors depicting possible future scenarios—especially if
working in the dystopian mode—have frequently presented settings ravaged by pollution,
radiation, or both. For instance, even though the focus of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale (1985) lies elsewhere, the increasing infertility that drives much of its premise stems from
environmental damage caused by pollution and radiation. Several science fiction novels deal
with the effects of rising sea levels caused by the greenhouse effect. One example is David
Brin’s Earth (1990); in its AD 2038 setting, global warming has contributed to rising sea levels
and increasingly severe storms and threats to a growing number of species.

Regrettably, some science fiction authors, like some segments of the American public
and its politicians, have expressed skepticism about climate change, among them Michael
Crichton’s State of Fear (2004), which was lambasted by scientists for its inaccuracies and
misrepresentations, and Fallen Angels (1991) by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael
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Flynn. The latter ironically is in fact a climate change novel; the authors cast doubt on global
warming only to project another ice age instead. However, such examples are outliers in the
field. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the realities of climate change have
become so accepted “[o]wing to the increasing scientific consensus that our energy-intensive
technological civilization is measurably and in all likelihood irreversibly affecting Earth’s
climate” that “consideration of climate change has become virtually inevitable in serious Near
Future sf of the twenty-first century” (Scott Langford).

The contemporary science fiction writer who has addressed climate change most
extensively is the American author Kim Stanley Robinson. For much of his career he has written
novelistic trilogies, all of which connect in some fashion to environmental concerns. His first, the
Three Californias trilogy, imagines three different futures for Orange County, California. In the
third volume, Pacific Edge (1990), Robinson depicts an ecological utopia comparable to
Callenbach’s Ecotopia, imagining how southern California could change course from its present
state to a greener future. The prospect of transforming an existing landscape is also a key concept
in Robinson’s Mars trilogy, whose middle volume, Green Mars (1993), concerns the
terraforming of Mars’s alien environment into a Terran-friendly world. His third trilogy, the
Science in the Capital series, is the most focused on climate change in his oeuvre. In Forty Signs
of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007), Robinson
depicts a near-future Washington, D.C. that suffers the effects of climate change and characters
who strive to address the matter. Robinson also addresses climate change in standalone novels
like 2312 (2012) and New York 2140 (2017).
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Given the privileging of literary fiction within certain circles and the low opinion some
still have of science fiction, it is understandable that some people think climate fiction is distinct
from science fiction, even if both address climate change. However, if one wishes to get a better
picture of how authors have speculated about the possible effects of climate change, one should
expand one’s view to take in science fiction and not just “literary” authors who have belatedly
joined the discussion.

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Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times, Norton Critical Edition, edited by George Ford and Sylvère
Monod, Norton, 1966.
Evancie, Angela. “So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created a New Literary Genres?”
National Public Radio, 20 Apr. 2013, https://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so-
hot-right-now-has-climate-change-created-a-new-literary-genre
Langford, David. “Climate Change.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3 rd ed., edited by John
Clute et al., e-book, 31 Aug. 2018, http://www.sf-
encyclopedia.com/entry/climate_change. Accessed 18 Nov. 2019.
Wells, H. G. “The Star.” Selected Stories of H. G. Wells, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin, Modern
Library, 2004, pp. 142–52.
—. The Time Machine, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Stephen Arata, Norton,