Climate Fiction: The Emerging Climate Change Genre in Literature
Is it The new point of persuasion?
Illustration by Laura Cuppage.
Climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” is a literary genre that attempts to tell stories our climate futures. Now, I know this doesn’t sound particularly light-hearted. Maybe it’s not the kind of book you relax with in the evenings to escape the chaos of the modern world. But there are real positives to experiencing mirrors of our reality through great stories. We clearly have some work to do regarding the climate crisis, and seeing the consequences of these inadequacies written down, as an allegory or cautionary tale, can help us process the reality of our situation—what we are doing to our planet, and what that will mean for us. These literary works can also help to reach those of us not yet involved in the fight to save our world, and awaken them to the depths of this crisis, and to what needs to be done.
Putting the possibilities of our future on the page, in the present tense as if they were real right now, can trigger a mentality we might not get from reading the science alone. If science can express the nuanced reality of the problem, storytelling can transport, engage and awaken us. How would you feel if you had to flee because your house was eaten away by the ocean, or in a bushfire? Tragically, some of these speculative futures are already the reality for countless communities around the world right now. But for many of us, putting these experiences right under our noses has the capacity to make us much more aware of them, spurring a desire to really act.
Best-selling author Catherine Bush puts it best, describing how some people still have their head in the sand: “It’s very painful, overwhelming and depressing. But I think there’s something very powerful about asking readers to live through a place, through a story, and through the emotional lives of the characters.” Understanding the impacts of climate change through a new perspective can be transformative. Rather than a long, technical report throwing scary, overwhelming facts and data at you, this lens prompts a sense of empathy with the issues unfolding today and helps us to process our new, far from stable reality.
Blending the future with the present is a difficult web to weave. It is a big ask to get people to relate to what could happen in the future—to whole species and ecosystems, and to future people, the “ghostly billions yet unborn” as Rebecca Solnit puts it. Supporting the reader to understand these perspectives could be a way to get more people to understand the severity of what is really going on, and to foster a sense of responsibility for the state of the future.
These kinds of works have been on the fringes of literature for much longer than perhaps recognised, certainly since before the term “cli-fi,” coined in 2008 by Dan Bloom, had really caught on. For example, J.G. Ballard’s 1961 book The Wind from Nowhere tells the story of a civilisation decimated by persistent hurricane-force winds, while Susan M. Gaines’ 2000 book Carbon Dreams charts a devastating human-induced climate change. Much earlier than this, Jules Verne’s 1889 novel The Purchase of the North Pole imagines Earth tilting on its axis and radically transforming the state of the globe.
We are seeing a growth in such concerns today, with key works by authors like Ian McEwan and Margret Atwood. Jeff Vandermeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation has since become a popular film about mutated animals and plants causing serious harm to human life, while Cormac McCarthy’s immensely popular novel The Road charts the journey of a father and son across a grey, barren landscape blasted by something resembling devastating climate change.
There are also some slightly more cloaked representations of this genre, registering a growing cultural awareness of our vulnerability to and reliance on planetary forces. Take Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel Ready Player One, for instance. Despite its focus on a worldwide virtual reality game set in 2045, the root of this dystopia is due to a global energy crisis and global warming, causing a myriad of international social problems and economic stagnation.
A very recent example comes from the acclaimed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. His novel The Ministry for the Future, published last year, imagines not some far-off, speculative world, but the very near future. It charts the horrifying climate disasters looming in our own lives. The book opens with a gruelling description of a heat wave that hits India, prompting, finally, widespread outrage at governments and corporations still failing to act accordingly to the scale of the crisis. Robinson goes into wonderful detail about the behind-the-scenes government organisation meetings as some stall and others fight for change. The novel shows us what might be possible in our own lifetimes, breaking the myth that climate change is a slow and far-off threat. It also prompts us to think outside of the brief time-span of our own lives, to imagine the future people we will never meet but who we will effect intimately.
As the genre of climate fiction gains more attention with the rising awareness of the climate crisis, there are questions to consider. Wherein lies the nuanced difference between broader fiction and climate fiction? How do we define those facets that split the genres? The difference today is that imagining our shared climate futures has become extremely prescient. We urgently need help in processing the challenges that we are beginning to face on a global scale. Where the writer Amitav Ghosh argues that fiction has largely failed to address the realities of the climate crisis, calling this a “failure of imagination,” it is clear that novels today are finally starting to take climate change storytelling seriously.
The awakenings that these stories provide can help people make changes, such as switching energy providers, using sustainable banks, being kinder to the natural world, and voting with climate change in mind. They also include actions a little less concrete—simply having meaningful conversations, and getting people to think, is a step in the right direction.
Emma Arnold, a postdoctoral researcher in human geography of the University of Oslo, demonstrates this influence. She hosts an international online book club which focuses on literature that prompts discussion about environmental issues. She explains, “the power of climate fiction is something which can’t be successfully measured. It’s difficult to measure the impact of artwork and literature, because it is so individual.” But despite the lack of hard evidence, it is clear that there is a strong emotional connection to these works. The fact that climate fiction is beginning to grow in popularity is, itself, telling. So many of us are thirsting for stories that might help us process the huge changes happening right in front of our eyes.
Ellie Shearn
Ellie is a BSc Environmental Science graduate, and has a passion for wildlife conservation. She has always been fascinated by nature and is dedicated to giving the natural world its' space back. Ellie was previously a research intern in South Africa monitoring Rhinos and hopes to continue other research in the future. Through her passion for writing, she hopes to highlight the issues of the natural world, and the solutions.