tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2356427239794946847.post653883219567386762..comments2023-08-29T02:15:18.094-07:00Comments on Movie directors are ramping up ‘cli-fi’ movies for climate-anxious audiences: Why Hollywood Has Embraced The Emerging ''Cli Fi'' Genre - An Oped by Danny BloomUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2356427239794946847.post-75264460408803174522014-08-31T05:21:39.423-07:002014-08-31T05:21:39.423-07:00I love your passion, Dan, but I tend to think — an...I love your passion, Dan, but I tend to think — and perhaps you do, too, deep dow — that this is somewhat hyperbolic. It’s not either/or. Popular culture is extremely important and influential—hey, it’s “popular.” It reaches everyone, cuts across all strata of income and education and age and cultural background. But even the producers of pop culture need to go somewhere to refill the wells of their imagination, as a poet once said to me.<br /><br />I have had this conversation many times with friends and colleagues. I have friends in L.A. who tell me I should stop writing academic works and try to go on TV with my ideas about environmental literature. I recall a conversation with a colleague, a prominent ethnobiologist and literary essayist who is proudly a mid-list writer, but whose extraordinarily thoughtful work often reaches key thinkers in more mass-audience genres, such as Barbara Kingsolver (central ideas in Kingsolver’s best-selling novel ''Prodigal Summer'', for instance). Again, we’re not talking either/or. I prefer to believe in a ripple effect. We need ways of reaching the broader public. We also need people who are trying to push the limits of science and art in ways that may not be of immediate interest to general audiences.<br /><br />I enjoy reading on an e-reader, I prefer to teach mostly paperless classes (to the extent that that’s possible), and I like listening to popular culture and watching movies. But I also persist in finding print culture, even physical books, to be meaningful, useful veins of communication. It’s not all about sheer numbers of readers, viewers, or listeners.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2356427239794946847.post-55644361407445070632014-08-13T18:32:50.308-07:002014-08-13T18:32:50.308-07:00Hi Dan,
Great spirit behind this work.
I sugges...Hi Dan,<br /><br />Great spirit behind this work.<br /><br /><br />I suggest pushing the ownership over to the University and professor, and you can act as a board member.<br />They would be responsible for raising sponsorships.<br />Similarly, this can't really be run from Taiwan.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />To really scale this, you need to get someone to lead it with Film Festival experience. And it needs to be in a center of movie productions. <br /><br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2356427239794946847.post-84559771209039432332014-08-11T18:13:00.331-07:002014-08-11T18:13:00.331-07:00middle school - Not all of these are directly cli-...middle school - Not all of these are directly cli-fi. Most are concerned with survival in post-collapse Earth rather than with its causation, which is more appropriate for many middle schoolers. Some upper middle school titles appear in the next lists.<br />Ship Breaker (Paolo Bacigalupi) and its sequel The Drowned Cities<br />Green Boy (Susan Cooper)<br />Empty (Suzanne Weyn)<br />The Boy at the End of the World (Greg van Eekhout)<br />The City of Ember (Jeanne DuPrau) - 1st in series <br />Pod (Stephen Wallenfels) - a quirky short novel about earth-collapse caused not by man directly, but by an alien life form that can not abide the actions of Man<br />Life as We Knew It (Susan Beth Pfeffer) - Earth-collapse caused by a relocation of the moon<br />An interesting take on the genre is found in Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, particularly the last two stories: "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "The Million-Year Picnic" - we learn of the collapse of Mars, of human-made Mars, and of Earth. <br />high school & adult - The Dying Earth subgenre is well covered by both Wikipedia and BestScienceFictionBooks.com. <br />The Drowned World (J.G. Ballard) - SF classic that may have started it all, although in this case the disaster is not man-made<br />Stand on Zanzibar (John Brunner) - 1968 classic Earth-collapse fiction<br />The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)<br />Arctic Rising (Tobia Buckell)<br />Forty Signs of Rain (Kim Stanley Robinson) - 1st in the Science in the Capital trilogy<br />The Admiral (James Gilbert) - 1st in a series<br />The Carbon Diaries 2015 (Saci Lloyd) - suitable for upper middle school<br />The Other Side of the Island (Allegra Goodman)<br />Odds Against Tomorrow (Nathaniel Rich)<br />The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future (Naomi Oreskes, Eric Conway)<br />Out of the Depths (Noel Hodson) - The Future series - Kindle only<br />California (Edan Lepucki) - review <br />Finitude (Hamish MacDonald)<br />Flight Behavior (Barbara Kingsolver)<br />Waiting for the Flood (Margaret Atwood) - prequel/simultaneous/sequel story to Oryx and Crake and part of the Maddaddam trilogy - although man-made plague is the key SF element, this middle book has a strong environmental message<br />Hot Mess: Speculative Fiction About Climate Change (Brody et all) - stories<br />Inferno (Dan Brown) - included here not because of its pandemic theme, but for its discussions of Why a pandemic is necessary; the answer makes the novel cli-fi<br />mythical/fantasy elements in YA/Adult fiction<br />Love in the Time of Global Warming (Francesca Lia Block) - not for MS<br />Solstice (P.J. Hoover) - suitable for upper middle school<br />Caretaker Trilogy (David Klass) - suitable for upper middle schoolAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2356427239794946847.post-64609279996953718272014-08-11T18:12:24.843-07:002014-08-11T18:12:24.843-07:00vvAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2356427239794946847.post-89639562781279214042014-08-11T18:12:01.070-07:002014-08-11T18:12:01.070-07:00Monday, August 4, 2014
Cii-fi and (some) other Ear...Monday, August 4, 2014<br />Cii-fi and (some) other Earth-Collapse Fiction <br /><br />Pixabay image 7214: Dandelion seeds, from Hans<br />Cli-fi is trending. A subset of the general category earth-collapse fiction within the realm of speculative fiction, cli-fi concerns itself with the collapse of earth-based systems due to climate change. While generally this change is man-made, especially in more recent fictions, it is not always. Climate change in fiction may be caused by random or unexplained catastrophe, intelligent extraterrestrial forces, or even by the natural evolution of the Earth or the universe. <br /><br />By and large, however, contemporary interpretations of the genre focus upon the man-made environmental changes resulting from global warming or war. Husna Haq writes in the Christian Science Monitor of "a dystopian present, as opposed to a dystopian future," and it is, in fact, the immediacy and urgency of the social, personal, governmental, and cultural predicaments found in cli-fi, compounded by the cautionary nature of the stories, that drive the genre's popularity. Survival at its most basic is on the line in cli-fi.<br /><br />Luckily for educators, this fascinating genre is not solely in the domain of literary fiction. In fact, even little children are not unexposed to cli-fi and earth-collapse fiction, often sugar-coated by anthropomorphic metaphor. Consider, for example, the children's films Frozen, Ice Age, Once Upon a Forest and The Land Before Time. Even the picture books Two Bad Ants (Chris Van Allsburg) and Lost and Found (Shaun Tan), and the YA classics Watership Down and The Time Machine embed an environmental message in the text. By thinking a little differently about many of the texts already in the curriculum, you are able to engage students of any age in cli-fi discussions.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2356427239794946847.post-11495074552616029392014-08-11T18:11:38.451-07:002014-08-11T18:11:38.451-07:00You will also find a list with short summary annot...You will also find a list with short summary annotations on Wikipedia. For younger ages, I suggest The Land Before Time, also available in many print formats, and perhaps a discussion of how the life of the townspeople in Frozen was (and was not) changed by the freeze. Thinking forward, it would be a good idea to also ask students, What caused the freeze? What undid the freeze? <br /><br />The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962)<br />Waterworld (1995)<br />Twister (1996) - I am throwing this in because it appears that increasingly violent, large and frequent twisters are a result of climate change (stay tuned to late summer news) - don't bother with current remake<br />The Day After Tomorrow (2004)<br />This is the End (2013)<br />Snowpiercer (review) (2014)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com