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U.S. literary pioneer pushes ''Cli-Fi'' genre to new heights in 2020s
NEW YORK CITY -- Dan Bloom is upending traditional literary boundaries with an entirely new genre that serves as both a catchy subgenre to science fiction and a portmanteau buzzword that has changed the way book reviewers and literary critics look at novels and movies with strong climate change themes.
Call it ''cli-fi''. It's in the air. It's here to stay.
"With climate change fiction, novelists aim for 'radical empathy,'" is how the French news agency AFP put it in a headline in 2018.
''As alarm bells over global warming ring louder, authors are increasingly turning to climate change fiction to dramatize the catastrophic effects of droughts, hurricanes and floods -- and inspire action,'' reporter Michelle Fitzpatrick wrote for AFP while attending the Frankfurt Book Fair that year in Germany.
Dubbed "cli-fi", the genre has seen an explosion in popularity in recent years as environmental changes sweep the globe and tales of a planet in turmoil appear less like science fiction and a lot more real, she wrote.
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"Climate change is slow-moving and intensely place-based," said US literary expert Elizabeth Rush, a lecturer at Brown University.
"It is difficult for us to notice these things in our day-to-day lives," she told AFP. But with climate fiction, "you can imagine being a person whom flood or drought displaces, and with that imaginative stance can come radical empathy," Rush said.
At the annual Frankfurt book fair, the world's largest publishing event, climate change novels feature prominently now with more to come in the 2020s, according to a publishing source in New York.
"I think we will see more of these books in the years to come," the industry source said.
"People are caring about climate change more and more... and authors write about what makes them scared."
The latest UN climate reports have warned that drastic changes are needed to prevent Earth from hurtling towards an unlivable rise in temperature, and show that the situation is "getting worse", she said.
"But we can still do a lot," she added. "We can all do something. I absolutely think that climate change fiction can change minds."
We have entered ''The age of cli-fi."
US literary journalist Dan Bloom, who started promoting the term "cli-fi" in 2011, describes the genre as a literary cousin of sci-fi, but less escapist and "based on reality and real science".
The earliest examples date back decades with JG Ballard's 1962 novel "The Drowned World", where melting ice caps have partially submerged an abandoned London, considered a classic of the genre, he told AFP.
Bloom said cli-fi was "made for the 21st Century".
"Here we are: floods, heatwaves, water shortages, climate refugees... Cli-fi invented itself."
This year's unusually hot summer, when extreme wildfires ravaged parts of Europe and California, has made the public even more aware of climate events linked to global warming, Bloom said, fuelling "a hunger to read cli-fi novels".
But like any good novel, he stressed, cli-fi stories should at their core "be good storytelling, full of emotion and memorable characters."
Barbara Kingsolver's "Flight Behaviour" (2012), about the sudden arrival of huge flocks of monarch butterflies in a Tennessee forest, and Margaret Atwood's dystopian MaddAddam trilogy count among the must-reads of the genre, he said.
"Literary critics are taking the genre serious now," Bloom said. "We have entered the age of cli-fi."
When done right, cli-fi novels can succeed where "boring" and chart-filled newspaper articles and scientific reports fall short, Bloom said.
"They can serve to help make readers more conscious of what's at stake as the world warms degree by degree. These novels can be wake-up calls, a cri de coeur."
Brown University lecturer and author Elizabeth Rush agrees.
Climate fiction "can be the spark that leads to planetary political transformation," she said.
A veteran New York publishing executive with a finger on the pulse of modern novels says that ''cli-fi'' is a genre that is "on fire.'' ''We will see more cli-fi, in spades, in the 2020s and 2030s,'' she said, adding: "It's still early days."
In March, a New York literary critic who has been writing a monthly ''cli-fi trends" column for the Chicago Review of Books for the past two years wrote an article for the Oprah Winfrey magazine "O," headlined "7 Books That Provocatively Tackle Climate Change: They Each Fit Into a New Genre: Cli-Fi."
"O" introduced the cli-fi aficionado this way: ''This environmental writer identifies an intriguing epidemic: the proliferation of provocative novels in which the enemy is climate change.''
"As news of the oceans warming and icebergs melting grows ever more urgent, the light drizzle of fiction about eco-disaster spawned by J.G. Ballard’s ahead-of-its-time cli-fi thriller 'The Drowned World' (1962) has gone full-on flood, with apocalyptic visions from a diverse array of authors hitting the mainstream," "O" readers learned.
"In Barbara Kingsolver’s 'Flight Behavior,' pollution and other biospheric disruptions throw a colony of butterflies off their migration course to disastrous effect, while in Claire Vaye Watkins’s 'Gold Fame Citrus,' a California besieged by sandstorms illuminates social inequities and the excesses of Hollywood. So robust is the growing genre that it’s earned its own name: cli-fi (short for climate fiction)," readers learned.
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