Move over
Sci-Fi: There's a new genre in town: The 'Cli-Fi.'
Cli-Fi Invades Sci-Fi: A Deluge of Catastrophe for Readers
and Filmgoers (Le Monde, France)
"Today, the
range of apocalyptic fiction is expanding to accommodate a new sub-genre of
science fiction that is all the rage: Cli-Fi, also known as 'climatic fiction.'
Americans, however, are among the most ardent climate-change skeptics on the
planet. This movement, though, is losing momentum. The city of Miami
is threatened by rising sea levels, fires increasingly ravage California, Texas is struck by drought, Hurricane Sandy devastated the east coast two
years ago - the weather is finally changing attitudes - and is boosting the production
of works featuring near-future ecological disaster."
Floods, hurricanes,
drought … climatic change is inspiring American writers. A new genre, "Cli-Fi" (climate fiction),
is raising awareness about environmental issues.
In the United States, apocalyptic fiction has long been a
winning formula. Nuclear war, the last judgment, deadly epidemics, destructive
asteroids, Armageddon, zombie
attacks or extra-terrestrial invasion - the end of the world is a booming
literary niche with infinite potential, most often in the format of a pulp
fiction novel.
Today, the range is expanding to accommodate a new sub-genre
of science fiction that is all the rage: Cli-Fi, also known as "climatic fiction."
Americans, however, are among the most ardent climate-change skeptics on the
planet. This movement, though, is losing momentum. The city of Miami
is threatened by rising sea levels, fires increasingly ravage California, Texas is struck by drought, Hurricane Sandy devastated the east coast two
years ago - the weather is finally changing attitudes - and is boosting the production
of works featuring near-future ecological disaster.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
A Deluge of Books
A click on Amazon’s
Web site opens onto a deluge of titles classified as "climate fiction"
The British site Clifibooks.com,
recently renamed Eco-fiction.com, lists most of the novels in this genre, almost 250. The
first of these ecology-catastrophist works, The
Four Apocalypses by Briton J. G. Ballard, dates back to the 1960s. Every
book in this series is devoted to a different disaster rooted in the destruction
of human civilization: floods in The Drowned
World; storms in The
Wind from Nowhere; a heat wave in The
Drought; fossilization in The
Crystal Forest.
In the 2000s,
science fiction star Kim Stanley Robinson
brought the climactic apocalypse up to current tastes with a new trilogy: Forty
Signs of Rain, Fifty
Degrees Below and Sixty
Days After. Since then there has been a wave. Among other writers of
the genre: Paolo Bacigalupi with The
Windup Girl (2012) and The
Water Knife (2014); Saci Lloyd with TheCarbon Diaries 2015 (2012) and The Carbon
Diaries 2017 - diary entries of a young girl of 16 who lives at a time
when the United Kingdom imposes quotas on CO2 production; and the
celebrated Margaret Atwood with The
Year of the Flood (2012). Even successful authors are investing in this
niche, such as Barbara Kingsolver with Prodigal
Summer (2013) or Ian McEwan with Solar,
a kind of farce based on melting ice, the end of oil and green energy.
Heightened Student
Awareness
A number of U.S. universities, including in Oregon and
Wisconsin (Milwaukee), are equally taken with the phenomenon, using the study
of these novels to raise student awareness about environmental issues. That is
the hope of these authors and activists because scientists and their reports
have failed to move the crowd: by touching the conscience of readers as well as
movie goers, cinema is closely following the lead of literature. Ten years after
Hollywood blockbuster The Day After
Tomorrow, the big screen is now seeing a string of catastrophic
super-productions like Noah (2014) or
Interstellar
(released on November 5), in which the main character, played by Matthew McConaughey, is an astronaut charged with exploring other
solar systems to save a humanity on the brink of extinction.
It is hard to say whether “Cli-Fi” will long endure
as the name of the phenomenon. What was science fiction a few years ago is now
close to becoming reality - to the point that when it comes to ecologically
catastrophic scenarios, some dare to talk about “social realism.”
