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Climate fiction or climate-change fiction, sometimes abbreviated to cli-fi, is a literary and movie genre that describes novels and films about climate change and global warming issues. Climate change themes are found within many genres and may be set in the past, present, or future. Some movies and novels raise awareness about the major threats that climate change and global warming present to life on Earth, although not all of them have that kind of impact and are released or published merely as entertainment.
A global community of novelists, journalists, bloggers, and activists have explored this genre, including Canadian speculative fiction novelist Margaret Atwood, American cli-fi activist Dan Bloom, British cli-fi novelist Sarah Holding, American literary novelist Barbara Kingsolver, Canadian cli-fi novelist Hamish MacDonald (Finitude, 2010), Australian cli-fi novelist Alice Robinson (Ancho Point,. 2015), American sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, American media critic Scott Thill, American journalist Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, Canadian-American novelist Mary Woodbury, and Canadian academic and genre expert Lynn Wytenbroek.
History and origin
In the past, prior to current understandings of man-made global warming, authors such as JG Ballard, John Wyndham and Jules Verne delved into climate themes. In modern times, writers such as David Brin, John Atcheson and Liz Jensen have novels that could be deemed as working the climate-change fiction genre. When scientists began to develop current theories about anthropogenic global warming (AGW), modern climate-change fiction was born. An early example might be, for academic purposes only, Arthur Herzog's Heat, although that novel was written as a sci fi novel, published as a sci novel and read as a sci fi novel and never called a climate fiction novel until recently when climate fiction fans advocated for classifying it that way. §
The "cli-fi" term
The cli-fi term is a shortening of the "climate fiction" term and has taken on a meaning of its own now, beyond genre. Outside its use sometimes as a nickname for climate fiction, it has become a buzzword that signifies a way of seeing the world we live in now, where climate change and global warming are major issues of the day worldwide. In a recent broadcast on climate issues on Minnesota Public Radio, for example, started off this way: Cli-Fi, meet reality. Call it the The Day After Tomorrow scenario. Scientists have been concerned that a freshening of seawater in the North Atlantic from increased meltwater in Greenland could cause changes to critical ocean circulation patterns that can change weather and climates. Now a new study in Nature Climate Change finds that changes in Atlantic Ocean currents are very likely already underway. The use of the cli-fi term this way -- "Cli-fi, meet reality" -- signifies how the buzzword has caught on outside the parameters of genre or academic studies. An upcoming four-part series from Reuters News Bureau in the UK, to be published the first week of April, will explain this more in depth, quoting a variety of sources working the cli-fi beat. §
The "sci-fi" term
Forrest J Ackerman used the term sci-fi (analogous to the then-trendy "hi-fi") at UCLA in 1954. As science fiction entered popular culture, writers and fans active in the field came to associate the term with low-budget, low-tech "B-movies" and with low-quality pulp science fiction. By the 1970s, critics within the field such as Terry Carr and Damon Knight were using sci-fi to distinguish hack-work from serious science fiction, and around 1978, Susan Wood and others introduced the pronunciation "skiffy." Peter Nicholls writes that "SF" (or "sf") is "the preferred abbreviation within the community of sf writers and readers." David Langford's monthly fanzine Ansible includes a regular section "As Others See Us" which offers numerous examples of "sci-fi" being used in a pejorative sense by people outside the genre.
Climate-change fiction in the classroom
As the genre gains widespread exposure in the media, via newspaper stories and book reviews, more and more universities are offering literature classes featuring novels and films with climate change themes. From Columbia University to Temple University, the genre is reaching into the academy by leaps and bounds.
Opposing viewpoints
Two popular websites offer students, university professors and academic researchers varied and opposing views of the issues: cli fi vs climate fiction.
One website, which is not a mere blog but a bondafide professionally curated website, takes an anti cli fi viewpoint and is called Eco Fiction. It was once called CliFiBooks but the owner decided that cli fi was no longer their specific interest anymore and shifted to a broader view of literary things. It archives hundreds of novels classified in the nature writing, eco fiction and sci fi genres in a very comprehensive manner, among other genres surveyed and discused, including climate-change fiction.
The other website, called The Cli Fi Report, is also not a mere blog but a bondafide professionally curated website, and, like Eco Fiction, it is a website created by an IT guy, in this case for a five-year period beginning in early 2015 and continuing at least until 2020 and hopefully longer. The independent curator has assembled a long list of news articles and academic links to cli fi items in order to provide a easy to browse link farm for students writing term papers, professors preparing cli fi literature classes and academics writing learned papers about the term.
References
- Mark, Jason (9 December 2014). "Climate Fiction Fantasy: What 'Interstellar' and 'Snowpiercer' Got Wrong". The New York Times. The Opinion Pages, p. A35. Retrieved 11 December 2014.
- Blunt, Tom. "Margaret Atwood at ASU: 'Climate Change' or 'Everything Change'?". Word & Film. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- "Cli Fi". Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- Holding, Sarah (6 February 2015). "What is cli-fi? And why I write it". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- Walsh, Bryan (8 November 2012). "Barbara Kingsolver on Flight Behavior and Why Climate Change Is Part of Her Story". TIME. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- Beauchamp, Scott (1 April 2013). "In 300 Years, Kim Stanley Robinson's Science Fiction May Not Be Fiction". The Atlantic. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- Thill, Scott (30 October 2014). "Cli-Fi Is Real". Huffington Post. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- Tuhus-Dubrow, Rebecca (Summer 2013). "Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre". Dissent. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- "Eco-fiction". Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- Langford, David (26 February 2015). "Climate Change". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Gollancz. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- Andersen, Gregers (2015). "Cli-fi: a Short Essay on its Worlds and its Importance". Eco-fiction. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
- Bloom, Dan (10 March 2015). "'Cli-Fi' Reaches into Literature Classrooms Worldwide". Inter Press Service News Agency. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
External links
- 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
- The Huffington Post: Cli-fi is real
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