Monday, December 22, 2014
Cli-fi defined: a new genre that zeroes in on climate change and global warming survival or solution issues
Cli-fi defined: a new genre that zeroes in on climate change and global warming survival or solution and has little to do with eco-fiction or ecological fiction or environmental novels or movies. Cli-fi is not about cleaning up polluted rivers or lakes. Cli-fi is not about using LED lightbulbs to save energy. Cli-fi is not about worlds transfigured by environmental disaster or environmental change, as very good and prescient novels such as John Wyndham’s ''The Day of the Triffids'', John Christopher’s ''Grass'', John Brunner’s ''The Sheep Look Up'' or Australian author George Turner’s ''The Sea and Summer.''
No, cli-fi movies and novels, as the genre term implies, are about CLIMATE issues, about climate change and global warming. They are not novels or movies about planting more trees or asking the United Nations to make it mandatory for everyone to use recycled chopsticks or personal steel or aluminum chopsticks that can be re-used again and again. No, cli-fi is about climate change.
No, cli-fi movies and novels, as the genre term implies, are about CLIMATE issues, about climate change and global warming. They are not novels or movies about planting more trees or asking the United Nations to make it mandatory for everyone to use recycled chopsticks or personal steel or aluminum chopsticks that can be re-used again and again. No, cli-fi is about climate change.
And cli fi movies and novels will serve as harbingers of what a changing climate will mean in the years ahead.
Cli fi novels and movies are not about environmental crises, accelerating species loss,
collapsing fish and bird populations or acidifying oceans. [Well, maybe acidifying oceans, yes. Margaret Atwood is a big proponent of fighting the good fight against ocean acidifcation, and I support her on this. The issue is directly connected to AGW and climate change.]
It's not surprising that our literary culture has become suffused with cli-fi narratives about the end of the world due to AGW and climate change, or unfortunately, at the same time, that so few of them ever get reviewed and noticed by the mainstream media in English-speaking countries. Cli-fi is still a tough sell to publishes and media observers, if only because most people still don't understand what cli-fi is all about. [Note to readers: if you want to know what cli-fi is really all about, ASK ME: my number is in the phone book and my door is always open: danbloom@gmail.com]
Margaret Atwood,
whose ''MaddAddam'' trilogy of speculative fiction and which takes place against the backdrop of a world despoiled
first by human rapacity and later by a genetically engineered plague is not really a cli-fi trilogy per se. Nor is American author Edan Lepucki’s debut, ''California'' part of the emerging cli-fi genre, since her novel depicts an America
sliding back into tribalism in the aftermath of peak oil. And American Nathaniel Rich’s surreal actuarial
comedy, ''Odds Against Tomorrow,'' the second half of which features a flooded
Manhattan, has never been classified by Rich or his publishers as a cli-fi work, but merely as ''literary fiction.''
We would argue that the growing library of movies and novels exploring climate-related themes should be understood as a new genre, usually described as ''climate-themed fiction'' or -- to use the lovely, cooing, melodious shorthand preferred by its boosters— ''cli-fi.''
I am convinced of the cli-fi term’s utility. It is here to stay.
We would argue that the growing library of movies and novels exploring climate-related themes should be understood as a new genre, usually described as ''climate-themed fiction'' or -- to use the lovely, cooing, melodious shorthand preferred by its boosters— ''cli-fi.''
I am convinced of the cli-fi term’s utility. It is here to stay.
Sure, novels such
as ''California'' and ''MaddAddam''
Those works are not cli-fi.
"Station Eleven'' and ''The Dog Stars'' for instance,
are novels where civilisation collapses in the aftermath of a flu pandemic -- and have nothing to do with AGW and climate change. Cli-fi is not about the flu pandemics or recycable choptsticks and alien invasions or "Interstellar" trips to outer space to save the remnants of humankind in Christopher Nlolan's twisted dystopiana.
Yes, climate change and AGW -- that's man-made global warming, human-caused global warming, is the latest in a long line of fears that have
given rise to apocalyptic imaginings in earlier works of novels and movies. Go back a decade and it was terrorism
we were frightened of, fears that echoed through books and television shows such
as ''The Road'' and ''Battlestar Galactica''; go back three decades and it was our
terror of nuclear war that gave rise to television events such as ''The Day
After'' and novels such as Russell Hoban’s ''Riddley Walker''. Over and over again
fictional narratives have afforded us a medium in which the anxieties of the day
could be engaged with, explored and, hopefully, controlled.
In 1957, we had Nevil Shute's "On The Beach" novel about nuclear war and nuclear winter. Followed by the popular Hollywood movie of the same title.
So yes, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that climate change and AGW issues are in the same boat as earlier novels mentioned above. Cli-fi movies and novels are stories about how climate change impacts the characters and events in those works of art. They are part of a new genre. The new genre does not replace older genres, and it does not erect a barrier or a wall between those other genres. Cli-fi is a couin of those earlier genres, but with a distinct raison d'etre, or as we say in English, "reason for being." And that reason is to serve as a wake up call, an alarm bell, via novels or movies, about the very real dangers that climate change and AGW present to future generations, perhaps some 30 generations from now, perhaps sooner. Perhaps today!
So yes, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that climate change and AGW issues are in the same boat as earlier novels mentioned above. Cli-fi movies and novels are stories about how climate change impacts the characters and events in those works of art. They are part of a new genre. The new genre does not replace older genres, and it does not erect a barrier or a wall between those other genres. Cli-fi is a couin of those earlier genres, but with a distinct raison d'etre, or as we say in English, "reason for being." And that reason is to serve as a wake up call, an alarm bell, via novels or movies, about the very real dangers that climate change and AGW present to future generations, perhaps some 30 generations from now, perhaps sooner. Perhaps today!
The American climate activist Bill McKibben and the British writer Robert
MacFarlane both observed in 2005 -- and Mckibben again in 2009 -- that part of the problem is that climate
change as a subject lacks the charismatic swiftness of nuclear war as in "On The Beach" from 1957 and instead it
“occurs discreetly and incrementally, and as such, it presents the literary
imagination with a series of difficulties: how to dramatise aggregating detail,
how to plot slow change.”
So cli-fi movies and novels, to truly suceed with viewers and readers, are going to have to work extra-hard to make the stories gell. It's not going to be easy. Cli-fi is a hard road to trek and it's a hard moutain patht to climb. And the mainstream media at the present time is not interested in cli-fi, which makes its reception among intellectuals and literary critics problematical.
Still, cli-fi must be; cli-fi is, cli-fi is here, now.
For writers of cli-fi movies or novels, of course, there will be problems. Because fiction in general tends to focus on ''character'' and ''psychology'', cli-fi fictional works will have to struggle to find ways to represent forces that cannot be turned into obstacles for its characters to overcome, or which take place on new kinds of time frames.
For writers of cli-fi movies or novels, of course, there will be problems. Because fiction in general tends to focus on ''character'' and ''psychology'', cli-fi fictional works will have to struggle to find ways to represent forces that cannot be turned into obstacles for its characters to overcome, or which take place on new kinds of time frames.
Will cli-fi works of art fall back on set-pieces and stories we understand, of
which the apocalypse is but one? Some movies and novels will, of course, but others will soar beyond this and go where few literary or cinema works of art have ever gone before. And with a purpose, other than just to make money or serve as escapist entertainment on weekends -- and that purpose will be nothing less than serving as wake up calls and alarm bells about the very real existential threat we human in the 21st century face now and for our descendants in the coming 30 generations of man and woman!!!
Via cli-fi, our passion for these kinds of narratives will grow and grow -- and give shape not only to our sense of loss and vulnerability in future centuries but also to imagining a world where we can hopefully find solutions to the mess we are in.
Cli-fi is not only dystopiana for dystopia fans. Cli-fi can also be a positive look at possible solutions to the vexing climate issues we face.
Cli-fi is a call to arms. It is a cri de coeur. It is a shout from the rooftops.
Yes, it's true, imagining alternative futures has traditionally been the preserve of sci fi writers, so perhaps it’s not coincidental that one of SF's luminaries, Neal Stephenson, recently issued a challenge to his contemporaries, calling on them to give away their passion for dystopias and rediscover the belief in technology’s transformative power that underpinned science fiction’s golden age. And sci fi novels and movies can also explore the climate issues discussed above in this essay. Many already have and many will do so in the future, so long live sci fi.
But cli-fi is different and serves a more precise, directed purpose.
As Australian novelist James Bradley has observed: "We need to find ways of representing not just the everyday weirdness of a world transformed by climate change, but also the weirdness of the everyday, to find ways of expressing the way climate affects not just the natural world but our own worlds, our own imaginations."
Bradley goes on: "In many ways that is a revolution that has already begun, visible in the flood-haunted visions of novels as different as Australian author Kathryn Heyman’s comic yet tender ''Floodline'' and Simon Ings’s ''Wolves'', the bleakly brilliant vision of near future Britain, both of which explore the way the changing environment infects our consciousness, dissolving social bonds and altering our sense of who we are as much, if not more, than it alters the world around us. But it is equally visible in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, the deeply impressive ''Flight Behaviour'', in which a swarm of monarch butterflies whose migration has been disturbed by climate change descend upon a community in America’s Appalachian Mountains, throwing the lives of the locals into disarray. The theme is also present in books such as Ruth Ozeki’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted ''A Tale for the Time Being'', which explores time, loss and globalisation, and science fiction author Monica Byrne’s dazzling debut, ''The Girl in the Road'', in which the main character elects to walk from India to Africa along a floating wave-power installation, a structure that symbolises both the possibilities of the future and the way history divides the rich from the poor, the fortunate from the unfortunate. For despite their differences both seek to open up a conversation about the degree to which our thinking about climate change is framed by the privilege of our lives in the West, the way our wealth inoculates us from the consequences of our lifestyle.''
Auden famously said, Bradley reminds us, ''poetry makes nothing happen''. Yet people tend to forget he also said it survives, giving voice to our experience, bearing witness. In much the same way, Cli-Fi movies and novels will make nothing happen. And yet they will, by their very existence and distribution via paperback books and digital cinematography, give popular voice to our experience of climate change and AGW, bearing witness.
Cli-fi movies and novels will help us repossess our future, take imaginative control of it. In time that could mean big change. As Bradley also reminds us, sci fi writer Ursula Le Guin has observed: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
As Australian novelist James Bradley has observed: "We need to find ways of representing not just the everyday weirdness of a world transformed by climate change, but also the weirdness of the everyday, to find ways of expressing the way climate affects not just the natural world but our own worlds, our own imaginations."
Bradley goes on: "In many ways that is a revolution that has already begun, visible in the flood-haunted visions of novels as different as Australian author Kathryn Heyman’s comic yet tender ''Floodline'' and Simon Ings’s ''Wolves'', the bleakly brilliant vision of near future Britain, both of which explore the way the changing environment infects our consciousness, dissolving social bonds and altering our sense of who we are as much, if not more, than it alters the world around us. But it is equally visible in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, the deeply impressive ''Flight Behaviour'', in which a swarm of monarch butterflies whose migration has been disturbed by climate change descend upon a community in America’s Appalachian Mountains, throwing the lives of the locals into disarray. The theme is also present in books such as Ruth Ozeki’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted ''A Tale for the Time Being'', which explores time, loss and globalisation, and science fiction author Monica Byrne’s dazzling debut, ''The Girl in the Road'', in which the main character elects to walk from India to Africa along a floating wave-power installation, a structure that symbolises both the possibilities of the future and the way history divides the rich from the poor, the fortunate from the unfortunate. For despite their differences both seek to open up a conversation about the degree to which our thinking about climate change is framed by the privilege of our lives in the West, the way our wealth inoculates us from the consequences of our lifestyle.''
Auden famously said, Bradley reminds us, ''poetry makes nothing happen''. Yet people tend to forget he also said it survives, giving voice to our experience, bearing witness. In much the same way, Cli-Fi movies and novels will make nothing happen. And yet they will, by their very existence and distribution via paperback books and digital cinematography, give popular voice to our experience of climate change and AGW, bearing witness.
Cli-fi movies and novels will help us repossess our future, take imaginative control of it. In time that could mean big change. As Bradley also reminds us, sci fi writer Ursula Le Guin has observed: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
So, if
nothing else, let us hope that cli-fi works of art, be they movies or novels, will help us and future generations grasp what is happening in a way that allows us -- and them -- to
comprehend it, and perhaps, to try to do something about it.
# posted by DANIELBLOOM @ 12:50 AM 
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Monday, December 22, 2014
Cli-fi defined: a new genre that zeroes in on climate change and global warming survival or solution issues
Cli-fi defined: a new genre that zeroes in on climate change and global warming survival or solution and has little to do with eco-fiction or ecological fiction or environmental novels or movies. Cli-fi is not about cleaning up polluted rivers or lakes. Cli-fi is not about using LED lightbulbs to save energy. Cli-fi is not about worlds transfigured by environmental disaster or environmental change, as very good and prescient novels such as John Wyndham’s ''The Day of the Triffids'', John Christopher’s ''Grass'', John Brunner’s ''The Sheep Look Up'' or Australian author George Turner’s ''The Sea and Summer.''
No, cli-fi movies and novels, as the genre term implies, are about CLIMATE issues, about climate change and global warming. They are not novels or movies about planting more trees or asking the United Nations to make it mandatory for everyone to use recycled chopsticks or personal steel or aluminum chopsticks that can be re-used again and again. No, cli-fi is about climate change.
And cli fi movies and novels will serve as harbingers of what a changing climate will mean in the years ahead.
Cli fi novels and movies are not about environmental crises, accelerating species loss, collapsing fish and bird populations or acidifying oceans. [Well, maybe acidifying oceans, yes. Margaret Atwood is a big proponent of fighting the good fight against ocean acidifcation, and I support her on this. The issue is directly connected to AGW and climate change.]
It's not surprising that our literary culture has become suffused with cli-fi narratives about the end of the world due to AGW and climate change, or unfortunately, at the same time, that so few of them ever get reviewed and noticed by the mainstream media in English-speaking countries. Cli-fi is still a tough sell to publishes and media observers, if only because most people still don't understand what cli-fi is all about. [Note to readers: if you want to know what cli-fi is really all about, ASK ME: my number is in the phone book and my door is always open: danbloom@gmail.com]
Cli-fi defined: a new genre that zeroes in on climate change and global warming survival or solution issues
Cli-fi defined: a new genre that zeroes in on climate change and global warming survival or solution and has little to do with eco-fiction or ecological fiction or environmental novels or movies. Cli-fi is not about cleaning up polluted rivers or lakes. Cli-fi is not about using LED lightbulbs to save energy. Cli-fi is not about worlds transfigured by environmental disaster or environmental change, as very good and prescient novels such as John Wyndham’s ''The Day of the Triffids'', John Christopher’s ''Grass'', John Brunner’s ''The Sheep Look Up'' or Australian author George Turner’s ''The Sea and Summer.''
No, cli-fi movies and novels, as the genre term implies, are about CLIMATE issues, about climate change and global warming. They are not novels or movies about planting more trees or asking the United Nations to make it mandatory for everyone to use recycled chopsticks or personal steel or aluminum chopsticks that can be re-used again and again. No, cli-fi is about climate change.
And cli fi movies and novels will serve as harbingers of what a changing climate will mean in the years ahead.
Cli fi novels and movies are not about environmental crises, accelerating species loss, collapsing fish and bird populations or acidifying oceans. [Well, maybe acidifying oceans, yes. Margaret Atwood is a big proponent of fighting the good fight against ocean acidifcation, and I support her on this. The issue is directly connected to AGW and climate change.]
It's not surprising that our literary culture has become suffused with cli-fi narratives about the end of the world due to AGW and climate change, or unfortunately, at the same time, that so few of them ever get reviewed and noticed by the mainstream media in English-speaking countries. Cli-fi is still a tough sell to publishes and media observers, if only because most people still don't understand what cli-fi is all about. [Note to readers: if you want to know what cli-fi is really all about, ASK ME: my number is in the phone book and my door is always open: danbloom@gmail.com]
MORE FROM ABOVE:
Margaret Atwood, whose ''MaddAddam'' trilogy of speculative fiction and which takes place against the backdrop of a world despoiled first by human rapacity and later by a genetically engineered plague is not really a cli-fi trilogy per se. Nor is American author Edan Lepucki’s debut, ''California'' part of the emerging cli-fi genre, since her novel depicts an America sliding back into tribalism in the aftermath of peak oil. And American Nathaniel Rich’s surreal actuarial comedy, ''Odds Against Tomorrow,'' the second half of which features a flooded Manhattan, has never been classified by Rich or his publishers as a cli-fi work, but merely as ''literary fiction.''
We would argue that the growing library of movies and novels exploring climate-related themes should be understood as a new genre, usually described as ''climate-themed fiction'' or -- to use the lovely, cooing, melodious shorthand preferred by its boosters— ''cli-fi.''
I am convinced of the cli-fi term’s utility. It is here to stay.
Sure, novels such as ''California'' and ''MaddAddam'' are part of a subset of a much different phenomenon, one that embraces not just the rapidly growing list of movies and novels set against the backdrop of a world devastated by disaster or disease such as Emily St John Mandel’s ''Station Eleven'' and Peter Heller’s ''The Dog Stars'', but television shows such as ''The Walking Dead'', in which the characters are cast adrift in a world almost emptied of other humans, and even movies such as the nonsensical but visually sumptuous Tom Cruise vehicle, ''Oblivion'', in which Cruise's character spends his days exploring the remains of an Earth devastated by alien attack.
Those works are not cli-fi.
"Station Eleven'' and ''The Dog Stars'' for instance, are novels where civilisation collapses in the aftermath of a flu pandemic -- and have nothing to do with AGW and climate change. Cli-fi is not about the flu pandemics or recycable choptsticks and alien invasions or "Interstellar" trips to outer space to save the remnants of humankind in Christopher Nlolan's twisted dystopiana.
Yes, climate change and AGW -- that's man-made global warming, human-caused global warming, is the latest in a long line of fears that have given rise to apocalyptic imaginings in earlier works of novels and movies. Go back a decade and it was terrorism we were frightened of, fears that echoed through books and television shows such as ''The Road'' and ''Battlestar Galactica''; go back three decades and it was our terror of nuclear war that gave rise to television events such as ''The Day After'' and novels such as Russell Hoban’s ''Riddley Walker''. Over and over again fictional narratives have afforded us a medium in which the anxieties of the day could be engaged with, explored and, hopefully, controlled.
Margaret Atwood, whose ''MaddAddam'' trilogy of speculative fiction and which takes place against the backdrop of a world despoiled first by human rapacity and later by a genetically engineered plague is not really a cli-fi trilogy per se. Nor is American author Edan Lepucki’s debut, ''California'' part of the emerging cli-fi genre, since her novel depicts an America sliding back into tribalism in the aftermath of peak oil. And American Nathaniel Rich’s surreal actuarial comedy, ''Odds Against Tomorrow,'' the second half of which features a flooded Manhattan, has never been classified by Rich or his publishers as a cli-fi work, but merely as ''literary fiction.''
We would argue that the growing library of movies and novels exploring climate-related themes should be understood as a new genre, usually described as ''climate-themed fiction'' or -- to use the lovely, cooing, melodious shorthand preferred by its boosters— ''cli-fi.''
I am convinced of the cli-fi term’s utility. It is here to stay.
Sure, novels such as ''California'' and ''MaddAddam'' are part of a subset of a much different phenomenon, one that embraces not just the rapidly growing list of movies and novels set against the backdrop of a world devastated by disaster or disease such as Emily St John Mandel’s ''Station Eleven'' and Peter Heller’s ''The Dog Stars'', but television shows such as ''The Walking Dead'', in which the characters are cast adrift in a world almost emptied of other humans, and even movies such as the nonsensical but visually sumptuous Tom Cruise vehicle, ''Oblivion'', in which Cruise's character spends his days exploring the remains of an Earth devastated by alien attack.
Those works are not cli-fi.
"Station Eleven'' and ''The Dog Stars'' for instance, are novels where civilisation collapses in the aftermath of a flu pandemic -- and have nothing to do with AGW and climate change. Cli-fi is not about the flu pandemics or recycable choptsticks and alien invasions or "Interstellar" trips to outer space to save the remnants of humankind in Christopher Nlolan's twisted dystopiana.
Yes, climate change and AGW -- that's man-made global warming, human-caused global warming, is the latest in a long line of fears that have given rise to apocalyptic imaginings in earlier works of novels and movies. Go back a decade and it was terrorism we were frightened of, fears that echoed through books and television shows such as ''The Road'' and ''Battlestar Galactica''; go back three decades and it was our terror of nuclear war that gave rise to television events such as ''The Day After'' and novels such as Russell Hoban’s ''Riddley Walker''. Over and over again fictional narratives have afforded us a medium in which the anxieties of the day could be engaged with, explored and, hopefully, controlled.
MORE
In 1957, we had Nevil Shute's "On The Beach" novel about nuclear war and nuclear winter. Followed by the popular Hollywood movie of the same title.
So yes, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that climate change and AGW issues are in the same boat as earlier novels mentioned above. Cli-fi movies and novels are stories about how climate change impacts the characters and events in those works of art. They are part of a new genre. The new genre does not replace older genres, and it does not erect a barrier or a wall between those other genres. Cli-fi is a couin of those earlier genres, but with a distinct raison d'etre, or as we say in English, "reason for being." And that reason is to serve as a wake up call, an alarm bell, via novels or movies, about the very real dangers that climate change and AGW present to future generations, perhaps some 30 generations from now, perhaps sooner. Perhaps today!
The American climate activist Bill McKibben and the British writer Robert MacFarlane both observed in 2005 -- and Mckibben again in 2009 -- that part of the problem is that climate change as a subject lacks the charismatic swiftness of nuclear war as in "On The Beach" from 1957 and instead it “occurs discreetly and incrementally, and as such, it presents the literary imagination with a series of difficulties: how to dramatise aggregating detail, how to plot slow change.”
So cli-fi movies and novels, to truly suceed with viewers and readers, are going to have to work extra-hard to make the stories gell. It's not going to be easy. Cli-fi is a hard road to trek and it's a hard moutain patht to climb. And the mainstream media at the present time is not interested in cli-fi, which makes its reception among intellectuals and literary critics problematical.
Still, cli-fi must be; cli-fi is, cli-fi is here, now.
For writers of cli-fi movies or novels, of course, there will be problems. Because fiction in general tends to focus on ''character'' and ''psychology'', cli-fi fictional works will have to struggle to find ways to represent forces that cannot be turned into obstacles for its characters to overcome, or which take place on new kinds of time frames.
Will cli-fi works of art fall back on set-pieces and stories we understand, of which the apocalypse is but one? Some movies and novels will, of course, but others will soar beyond this and go where few literary or cinema works of art have ever gone before. And with a purpose, other than just to make money or serve as escapist entertainment on weekends -- and that purpose will be nothing less than serving as wake up calls and alarm bells about the very real existential threat we human in the 21st century face now and for our descendants in the coming 30 generations of man and woman!!!
Via cli-fi, our passion for these kinds of narratives will grow and grow -- and give shape not only to our sense of loss and vulnerability in future centuries but also to imagining a world where we can hopefully find solutions to the mess we are in.
Cli-fi is not only dystopiana for dystopia fans. Cli-fi can also be a positive look at possible solutions to the vexing climate issues we face.
Cli-fi is a call to arms. It is a cri de coeur. It is a shout from the rooftops.
Yes, it's true, imagining alternative futures has traditionally been the preserve of sci fi writers, so perhaps it’s not coincidental that one of SF's luminaries, Neal Stephenson, recently issued a challenge to his contemporaries, calling on them to give away their passion for dystopias and rediscover the belief in technology’s transformative power that underpinned science fiction’s golden age. And sci fi novels and movies can also explore the climate issues discussed above in this essay. Many already have and many will do so in the future, so long live sci fi.
But cli-fi is different and serves a more precise, directed purpose.
In 1957, we had Nevil Shute's "On The Beach" novel about nuclear war and nuclear winter. Followed by the popular Hollywood movie of the same title.
So yes, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that climate change and AGW issues are in the same boat as earlier novels mentioned above. Cli-fi movies and novels are stories about how climate change impacts the characters and events in those works of art. They are part of a new genre. The new genre does not replace older genres, and it does not erect a barrier or a wall between those other genres. Cli-fi is a couin of those earlier genres, but with a distinct raison d'etre, or as we say in English, "reason for being." And that reason is to serve as a wake up call, an alarm bell, via novels or movies, about the very real dangers that climate change and AGW present to future generations, perhaps some 30 generations from now, perhaps sooner. Perhaps today!
The American climate activist Bill McKibben and the British writer Robert MacFarlane both observed in 2005 -- and Mckibben again in 2009 -- that part of the problem is that climate change as a subject lacks the charismatic swiftness of nuclear war as in "On The Beach" from 1957 and instead it “occurs discreetly and incrementally, and as such, it presents the literary imagination with a series of difficulties: how to dramatise aggregating detail, how to plot slow change.”
So cli-fi movies and novels, to truly suceed with viewers and readers, are going to have to work extra-hard to make the stories gell. It's not going to be easy. Cli-fi is a hard road to trek and it's a hard moutain patht to climb. And the mainstream media at the present time is not interested in cli-fi, which makes its reception among intellectuals and literary critics problematical.
Still, cli-fi must be; cli-fi is, cli-fi is here, now.
For writers of cli-fi movies or novels, of course, there will be problems. Because fiction in general tends to focus on ''character'' and ''psychology'', cli-fi fictional works will have to struggle to find ways to represent forces that cannot be turned into obstacles for its characters to overcome, or which take place on new kinds of time frames.
Will cli-fi works of art fall back on set-pieces and stories we understand, of which the apocalypse is but one? Some movies and novels will, of course, but others will soar beyond this and go where few literary or cinema works of art have ever gone before. And with a purpose, other than just to make money or serve as escapist entertainment on weekends -- and that purpose will be nothing less than serving as wake up calls and alarm bells about the very real existential threat we human in the 21st century face now and for our descendants in the coming 30 generations of man and woman!!!
Via cli-fi, our passion for these kinds of narratives will grow and grow -- and give shape not only to our sense of loss and vulnerability in future centuries but also to imagining a world where we can hopefully find solutions to the mess we are in.
Cli-fi is not only dystopiana for dystopia fans. Cli-fi can also be a positive look at possible solutions to the vexing climate issues we face.
Cli-fi is a call to arms. It is a cri de coeur. It is a shout from the rooftops.
Yes, it's true, imagining alternative futures has traditionally been the preserve of sci fi writers, so perhaps it’s not coincidental that one of SF's luminaries, Neal Stephenson, recently issued a challenge to his contemporaries, calling on them to give away their passion for dystopias and rediscover the belief in technology’s transformative power that underpinned science fiction’s golden age. And sci fi novels and movies can also explore the climate issues discussed above in this essay. Many already have and many will do so in the future, so long live sci fi.
But cli-fi is different and serves a more precise, directed purpose.
FINAL:
As Australian novelist James Bradley has observed: "We need to find ways of representing not just the everyday weirdness of a world transformed by climate change, but also the weirdness of the everyday, to find ways of expressing the way climate affects not just the natural world but our own worlds, our own imaginations."
Bradley goes on: "In many ways that is a revolution that has already begun, visible in the flood-haunted visions of novels as different as Australian author Kathryn Heyman’s comic yet tender ''Floodline'' and Simon Ings’s ''Wolves'', the bleakly brilliant vision of near future Britain, both of which explore the way the changing environment infects our consciousness, dissolving social bonds and altering our sense of who we are as much, if not more, than it alters the world around us. But it is equally visible in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, the deeply impressive ''Flight Behaviour'', in which a swarm of monarch butterflies whose migration has been disturbed by climate change descend upon a community in America’s Appalachian Mountains, throwing the lives of the locals into disarray. The theme is also present in books such as Ruth Ozeki’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted ''A Tale for the Time Being'', which explores time, loss and globalisation, and science fiction author Monica Byrne’s dazzling debut, ''The Girl in the Road'', in which the main character elects to walk from India to Africa along a floating wave-power installation, a structure that symbolises both the possibilities of the future and the way history divides the rich from the poor, the fortunate from the unfortunate. For despite their differences both seek to open up a conversation about the degree to which our thinking about climate change is framed by the privilege of our lives in the West, the way our wealth inoculates us from the consequences of our lifestyle.''
Auden famously said, Bradley reminds us, ''poetry makes nothing happen''. Yet people tend to forget he also said it survives, giving voice to our experience, bearing witness. In much the same way, Cli-Fi movies and novels will make nothing happen. And yet they will, by their very existence and distribution via paperback books and digital cinematography, give popular voice to our experience of climate change and AGW, bearing witness.
Cli-fi movies and novels will help us repossess our future, take imaginative control of it. In time that could mean big change. As Bradley also reminds us, sci fi writer Ursula Le Guin has observed: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
So, if nothing else, let us hope that cli-fi works of art, be they movies or novels, will help us and future generations grasp what is happening in a way that allows us -- and them -- to comprehend it, and perhaps, to try to do something about it.
As Australian novelist James Bradley has observed: "We need to find ways of representing not just the everyday weirdness of a world transformed by climate change, but also the weirdness of the everyday, to find ways of expressing the way climate affects not just the natural world but our own worlds, our own imaginations."
Bradley goes on: "In many ways that is a revolution that has already begun, visible in the flood-haunted visions of novels as different as Australian author Kathryn Heyman’s comic yet tender ''Floodline'' and Simon Ings’s ''Wolves'', the bleakly brilliant vision of near future Britain, both of which explore the way the changing environment infects our consciousness, dissolving social bonds and altering our sense of who we are as much, if not more, than it alters the world around us. But it is equally visible in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, the deeply impressive ''Flight Behaviour'', in which a swarm of monarch butterflies whose migration has been disturbed by climate change descend upon a community in America’s Appalachian Mountains, throwing the lives of the locals into disarray. The theme is also present in books such as Ruth Ozeki’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted ''A Tale for the Time Being'', which explores time, loss and globalisation, and science fiction author Monica Byrne’s dazzling debut, ''The Girl in the Road'', in which the main character elects to walk from India to Africa along a floating wave-power installation, a structure that symbolises both the possibilities of the future and the way history divides the rich from the poor, the fortunate from the unfortunate. For despite their differences both seek to open up a conversation about the degree to which our thinking about climate change is framed by the privilege of our lives in the West, the way our wealth inoculates us from the consequences of our lifestyle.''
Auden famously said, Bradley reminds us, ''poetry makes nothing happen''. Yet people tend to forget he also said it survives, giving voice to our experience, bearing witness. In much the same way, Cli-Fi movies and novels will make nothing happen. And yet they will, by their very existence and distribution via paperback books and digital cinematography, give popular voice to our experience of climate change and AGW, bearing witness.
Cli-fi movies and novels will help us repossess our future, take imaginative control of it. In time that could mean big change. As Bradley also reminds us, sci fi writer Ursula Le Guin has observed: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
So, if nothing else, let us hope that cli-fi works of art, be they movies or novels, will help us and future generations grasp what is happening in a way that allows us -- and them -- to comprehend it, and perhaps, to try to do something about it.
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