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Cli-fi is all the rage

December 27, 2015

Cli-fi is all the rage

Apocalypse_vasnetsov

The Four Horsemen: Eco-apocalypse appeals to writers – and readers.
Image: Viktor M Vasnetsov via Wikimedia Commons

Need a last-minute present? Stuck for some new year reading material? Then how about a thriller on a world in climate-caused turmoil?

LONDON, 26 December, 2015 – It’s some time in the not too distant future. The American mid-west has turned into a dust bowl. Birds are dropping out of the sky. Cities are encapsulated in domes so that people can breathe clean, if recycled, air. 

Billions of refugees, victims of drought and famine, are on the move. The streets are full of violent gangs and human traffickers. Pandemics are breaking out. 

Welcome to a new literary genre – climate fiction, or cli-fi. 

Some of it might be sensational, some of it not exactly great literature, and some downright depressing, but there’s little doubting cli-fi’s growing popularity. 

Cli-fi – along with its elder brother sci-fi – is now considered part of modern literature’s classification system. Though some titles make only a passing reference to climate change, while others are more concerned with murder, mayhem and sex than with global warming, others are more thoughtful, science-based works. 

Well-established novelists have used climate change as a backdrop in their books. 

“Whether fictional or factual, the coming decades don’t sound like a picnic. It’s a scary scenario, and we’re largely unprepared”

The prize-winning writer, Ian McEwan, in his 2010 novel Solar, describes the world of physicist Michael Beard – a man of apparently insatiable sexual and culinary appetite – and his invention of a system for solving the global energy problem. 

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian poet and novelist, has often used environmental catastrophe as a theme in her work: her trilogy MaddAddam graphically describes global floods and battles with criminals. Ultimately civilisation – and the environment – is rebuilt.

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