Hurricanes, flooded Manhattan canyons, and British nightmares: The current decade in cli-fi fiction (2010 - 2019

A cli-fi novel published in 2012 by Jim Laughter in Tulsa, Oklahoma

 

 

 

Hurricanes, flooded Manhattan canyons, and British nightmares: The current decade in cli-fi fiction (2010 - 2019

Readers rejoice! The novel is far from dead, as fiction from the 2010s points a searing eye at our past and future, says one literary observer.

 

                                                   

The 2010s may not have been a very good decade for print newspapers, what some pundits call ''snail-papers'' -- Google the term -- as well as TV or other old-fashioned media platforms, but the good old reliable novel has clawed its way back to the center of public attention in North America, Europe and Australia.

"Despite endless blogs, "longform" reporting platforms, and other low- or no-cost ways to occupy our eyeballs, we're still turning to books, in both electronic and dead-tree varieties,'' says cultural observer Dan Ackerman.

So long live the modern novel and long live the newly-rising cli-fi novel!

NPR in 2013: https://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so-hot-right-now-has-climate-change-created-a-new-literary-genre

Dan reports that the book publishing industry has booked several years of growth during the past decade, with physical book growth at times outpacing e-books. So far, the first half of 2019 is up an additional 6.9% over the same period last year, driven in part by the increasingly popular audiobook format, he says.

 

The themes of these 2010 - 2019  novels won't be surprising to anyone who has flipped on a newscast during the past decade. Anxiety about climate change have led to a variety of novels and movies about embattled survivors struggling against the odds. See for example, Nathaniel Rich's popular 2013 cli-fi novel ODDS AGAINST TOMOROW.

See also Kim Stanley Robinson's well-received recent cli-fi novel ''NEW YORK 2140.''

A bonus trend to all this is that more and more well-established novelists are said to be ready to try their hand at cli-fi genre fiction.

And add to that the increasing number of literary critics, book reviewers, podcast hosts and academics getting into the act. Cli-fi has been making waves the past ten years and there is more, much more, to come.


PROFESSOR Sarah Dimick‏ @sarahdimick                     

My #clifi students spent the last day of class writing definitions of the genre, and they are stunning. With their permission, I'm posting a few here. @LafCol @LafEnvironment

 

"Climate fiction follows everyday life in a new world based off scientifically plausible circumstances caused by anthropogenic climate change." #CliFi

 

"Authors of this genre use how human actions are changing the climate to imagine how the new climate may change humans." #CliFi

 

"Authors of this genre use how human actions are changing the climate to imagine how the new climate may change humans." #CliFi

"Climate fiction is literary fiction that ties closely to the history of the world and draws connections, extracts morals from such to produce a scenario, that is scientific speculation of how the future might look." (Milena is thinking here of @cherie_dimaline's Marrow Thieves)

 

#CliFi depicts social change parallel to the changing climate

 

#CliFi is about "the future or in a world that may or may not be near."