Is climate change due for its own 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'? Cli-fi rises as new literary genre

BY DAN BLOOM

danbloom@gmail.com

CLI FI CENTRAL blog

https://pcillu101.blogspot.com

(c) 2014

Is climate change due for its own 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'?


The 1852 bestseller transformed abolitionism into a mainstream cause,
helping to lay the groundwork for the Civil War. Evocative, simple,
searing, it moved the needle in ways hundreds of meetings, speeches
and reports never could.

Over the last few years, a new brand of "cli-fi" literature has been
popping up. The genre, which grapples with the ways our changing
weather will impact human life, aims to create its own kind of
awareness and action around the issues of climate change and man-made
global warming.

Rising sea levels, increasing numbers of floods and droughts and
global conferences to grapple with the problems call for a response
from novelists and screenwriters.

The climate-change canon dates back to the 1962 novel ''The Drowned
World," by British sci-fi writer JG Ballard. The novel's depicts a
future world where the polar ice-caps have melted melt and global
temperatures have soared, with Ballard showing readers in the early
1960s scenes where some coastal American and European cities are
underwater. submerged.
The author mined the idea that a natural catastrophe could cause the
real world to become a dreamscape.

Ballard wrote and marketed the novel as sci-fi since he had not heard
of the cli-genre yet. Did it reach a large audience or cause much of
any impact on public awareness of coming superstorms and devastatng
floods? No, it was just a novel and it disappeared over time, only to
be rediscovered by a new generation facing the new reality of climate
change and rising sea levels.

Another early book about climate change and rising sea levels was
written in 1987 by Australian George Turner, titled "The Sea and
Summer." While the idea that climate change is a man-made phenomenon
was not current when Ballard and Turner were writing, their novels
were prescient.

Perhaps the first modern novel in the 21st century to address the
issue of man-made climate change was Barbara Kingsolver's "Flight
Behavior" in 2012. Her novel set the tone for how serious climate
fiction can attract a following because she dared to create a
scientist as one of her central characters who did not flinch from the
truth of what we are all facing today.

But the poster boy for the cli-fi genre is Nathaniel Rich, whose "Odds
Against Tomorrow" sold over 100,000 copies in hardback and paperback
and drew major media attention. 'Rolling Stone' called Rich's book
"the first great climate-change novel."


A resident of New Orleans, he believes that more books like his will
be published - not just in English, and not just from the perspective
of Western writers in wealthy nations.

''I think the language around climate change is horribly bankrupt and,
for the most part, are examples of bad writing, really," Rich told NPR
last year. [https://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so-hot-right-now-has-climate-change-created-a-new-literary-genre].
His book aimed to be part of a sea change in American literature.
Let's hope so.

Other 'cli-fi' novelists include Chang-rae Lee ("On Such a Full Sea)"
and Edna Lupecki ("California"). I recently asked Lupecki if one could
refer to her new novel as a cli fi book, and she replied to me in a
tweet: "I myself would not refer to it as cli fi, but if someone
wanted to call it that, I wouldn't argue."



In addition, a growing number of cli-fi novels are targeting a
youthful YA audience - such as Mindy McGinnis' "Not a Drop to Drink,"
"The Carbon Diaries 2015" by Saci Lloyd, and "Survival Colony 9" by
Joshua David Bellin (due out in September from a major New York
publisher).

With the popularity of "Hunger Games" -- both the novels in the series
and the movies -- YA books have been flooding the market and gaining
increased respectability. The trickle has become a flood.

Joe Romm at ThinkProgress recently weighed in on the cli-fi genre
[https://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/08/3456713/snowpiercer-clifi/],
writing: "The Hunger Games" books are clearly CliFi, but it is much
more debatable whether the movies are, since they are stripped of any
climate references."


I know a little about cli-fi because I have been working for the past
few years to popularize it in the English-speaking world and also
among the billions of people who read in Spanish, Chinese, German and
Portuguese. My approach has been through a thorough public relations
campaign to give the term some air.

Using my media contacts as a lifelong reporter, I worked hard over the
past 12 months to get news articles about cli-fi published in NPR, the
New York Times, The Guardian and Time magazine. As a result, media in
Brazil, Taiwan and Spain picked up the English-language links and
rewrote them in various languages.

I also targetted science blogs, literary blogs and social media such
as Twitter and Facebook to boost the fortunes of this mushrooming
little genre.
And my daily PR work paid off. If you Google cli-fi today, over 3,000
links come up.

A big question that needs to be addressed is this: have cli fi novels
and the interest in the cli fi genre sparked any kind of change in the
literary world or in society at large? That's hard to say. But a
FaceBook group for cli-fi writes,moderated by Paul Collins in London
and called "Cli-Fi Central" has over 100 memners, including Edan
Lupecki, Joshua David Bellin and literary critic Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow.
It's a private FaceBook group comprised of novelists, public relations
professionals, academics and critics, it's growing daily.

In addition, dozens of blogs now have the cli fi genre as a theme, and
have sprung up not only in North America, but in France and Holland as
well. When the sea levels rise and the Climapocalypse begins in
earnset, the coastal cities of all nations on Earth will be in its
path, so this new literary genre, while born in America. has gone
global. One of the biggest boosters of cli-fi on Twitter has been
Margaret Atwood, who does not call her own novels cli-fi, but has told
me in an email that she likes the term and understands what I am
trying to do with it: build a platform for future writers to do their
own world-building. Atwood first tweeted about cli-fi in 2011.


As Sarah Stone put it in a review of Edan Lepucki's post-apocalyptic
novel 'California'
[https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/California-by-Edan-Lepucki-5596861.php].


"If we survive -- truly, and not in the unhappy ways depicted [in
"California'] -- it will be in part because of books like this one,
which go beyond abstract predictions and statistics to show the
moment-by-moment reality of a painful possible future, the price we
may have to pay for our passionate devotion to all the wrong things,"
Stone wrote.


Several U.S. and British universities are now offering literature
courses on cli-fi novels and movies, as J.L. Morin recently noted at
Huffington Post
[ww.huffingtonpost.com/j-l-morin/universities-make-clifi-d_b_5564491.html].
At the University of Oregon, a graduate seminar for students working
on degrees in environmental studies and literature, was taught last
semester by English professor Stephanie LeMenager. Her class was
called "The Cultures of Climate Change," and it was written up last
April in the New York Times.

In Britain, Jenny Bavidge is offering a class this month called
"Cli-Fi? Climate change and contemporary fiction" at University of
Cambridge. Cli-fi is having its moment, not only in the media and the
publishing world, but in academia,too. Several online academic
journals in Australia, the U.S and Britain have already focused on the
cli-fi theme.

LeMenager told the Times she created the UO graduate seminar not to
"marshal evidence for climate change as a human-caused crisis, or to
measure its effects."


Rather, she said, she wanted to consider the human impact: how we
"think about it, prepare for it and respond to it."

"Speculative fiction allows a kind of scenario-imagining, not only
about the unfolding crisis but also about adaptations and survival
strategies," LeMenager said. "The time isn't to reflect on the end of
the world, but on how to meet it. I wanted to apply our humanities
skills pragmatically to this problem."

Los Angeles media observer Scott Thill, a former Wired reporter who
used the cli-fi term as far back as 2009, is writing a nonfiction book
about the term now, telling me in a recent email that he sees cli-fi
not as a marketing buzzword but as a "cultural prism" with which one
can look anew at society in terms of not just novels or movies but
also in terms of politics, economics and news headlines. Thill tweets
almost daily about cli-fi themes and often uses the #clifi hashtag as
well.

So where is cli-fi headed? We won't know until the reallly hard work
is done by more and more novelists and screenwriters. In the end,it's
the writers and film directors who will be doing the heavy lifting. They will be the real heroes and heroines of the mushrooming new genre!

Do we need an "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of climate change? Yes. Do you need an "On The Beach" of climate change? Yes. I can envision them being written right now and in the future.