THE CLIFFIES - an annual film awards event for best ''cli fi'' movies of the year

THE CLIFFIES will be awarded in March 2015. Nominations welcome here in comments or by email for best movie, best director, best actors, best set design, best costumes, best music, best PR/marketing campaign =========================================================================================================================================================== Seán Ó Heigeartaigh, academic project manager at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, part of the Oxford Martin School, writes in a NYT oped headlined ''Hollywood Global Warming Dramas Can Start an International Conversation" ------------------------------------------------ ''Science fiction prepares us for thinking about the future: many of the sciences and technologies we take for granted today were predicted well ahead of time in sci-fi stories. It can help us imagine deeply changed worlds — like the technology-empowered surveillance state of George Orwell’s "1984" that most of us would want to avoid, or the more optimistic post-scarcity future of Star Trek, where principles of equality are deeply engrained. ==================================== Thankfully, recent cli-fi novels have been much more sophisticated and rooted in science. They focus on the more subtle, early impacts of climate change (as in Barbara Kingsolver's "Flight Behavior" and Saci Lloyd's "The Carbon Diaries 2015"), on the lives of scientists, activists and others working on climate-related challenges (as in Ian McEwan's "Solar" and Nathaniel Rich's "Odds Against Tomorrow"), or on how life will change for ordinary people in the future as the effects of climate change slowly and relentlessly become more severe (as in Hamish MacDonald's "Finitude" or Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl.")========================================= In the end, the greatest contribution of this [new emerging Hollywood genre] may be to cause us to care. Great writing [and movie making] draws us into the lives and circumstances of people we will never, ever meet. We know on an intellectual level that we are the caretakers of the world our great-grandchildren will inherit, a world that will be affected by our present-day actions or inactions. However, it’s another thing to care enough to change our actions now, and to pressure our governments and corporations to do the same. If cli-fi causes us to think both with our heads and our hearts about our responsibility to future generations, it may yet change the world.''