As the climate crisis continues to transform our world, climate literature has become one of the fastest growing genres in literature. But what happens when the catastrophes that dominate the headlines become indistinguishable from fictitious conspiracies?
In a time of perpetual catastrophe, we can be sure that readers will seek solace in escape stories, and yet the literary marketplace continues to reward those who delve into environmental issues. It could be a sign that the climate literature is so convincingly nuanced that readers are turning to these stories to help interpret our new reality.
Often known today as “cli-fi,” this once unnamed sci-fi subgenre has grown into a major, award-winning literary movement. Cli-Fi doesn’t have to be dystopian. But as our fictional dystopias begin to resemble our reality, and reality feels more and more dystopian, the climate crisis has established itself in the usual locations and categories of literature: urban life, college towns, coming of age, infidelity, love, tragedy.
As writer Lydia Millet has written, the climate crisis is now a prerequisite for human life. Through my own writing—often influenced by life in California, where we are daily reminded of our environmental issues—I’ve found that fiction can provide us with a space to engage meaningfully and deeply with current and potential impacts. of the climate crisis, in ways the headlines can’t.
In the spring of 2019, I struggled to write a novel that has since been thrown out. Needing a change of scenery, I got in my car and drove along the coast from Van Nuys to Vancouver. I saw the snow-capped mountains and the crystal clear, fresh water of Lake Tahoe; the rivers and canyons and waterfalls outside of Portland; the untamed pine forests of Olympic National Park; the jungle rainforests of British Columbia.
Novelist Elvia Wilk emphasizes in her collection of essays ‘Death by Landscape’ that in fiction the landscape is often in the background and the characters in the foreground. On this journey, the landscape suddenly came to the fore.
I didn’t take this road trip with the intention of writing about the environment, but the dystopian reality of life in Los Angeles – a city that often feels like the beginning and end of the climate crisis – made me wonder how life can seem, as if all this natural beauty disappears. I ended up writing a cli-fi novel, a speculative story that also felt completely plausible. Even too real.
When I was trying to get this book published, I was often asked, “So, is this serious literature? Or science fiction? Or is it the new . . . CLI-FI?”
I replied, “Why not all three?”
Some recent examples in this genre include Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic, biosphereless The Road; Jesmyn Ward’s rendition of the days before Hurricane Katrina, Savage the Bones; and Ursula K. Le Guin’s universe of interplanetary species, the Hainian novels, popular science fiction books in the 1960s and 1970s. Still, many works with cli-fi elements challenge our notions of sci-fi versus “serious” literature, and can even blur genre boundaries: take Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” (for anything that amounts to preserving an endangered species), and pretty much everything by George Saunders (for all his invented technologies that change the rules of society).
Any genre that can contain such breadth and depth of literature is no longer a trend. And as our daily lives became inextricably intertwined with futuristic technologies and crises, sci-fi and cli-fi became a kind of new realism – too realistic, if you will. How do we represent human suffering for the sake of the story when human activities have put so many non-human lives at risk? Perhaps Cli-Fi can help us rethink familiar dichotomies – man versus nature, utopia versus dystopia, savior versus destroyer – and expand the possibilities of storytelling.
A risk in addressing inherently political issues like the climate crisis is that writers can become didactic. For example, Le Guin, who has written many enduring novels, criticized her own 1972 cli-fi novella, The Word for the World is the Forest, later calling it “harsh” and a “sermon.” It’s a thinly disguised environmental parable where the characters bring back the message, and it suffers from one of Cli-Fi’s biggest pitfalls: clumsiness. What good is fiction if it just reads like one of the headlines?
Neither fiction nor news should lead the reader to imagine the worst case scenario (climate psychologist Jessica Kleczka warns of the harmful consequences of “doomism”). If cli-fi succeeds, the reader will stop on recognition. The story will raise our awareness of our own experience of the world, and we’ll pay a little more attention to reality before reading on.
When I read Jenny Offill’s 2020 “Weather,” a slim yet powerful novel about a librarian who goes down the rabbit hole of disaster psychology as she imagines the end of the world, I felt this recognition and wondered if climate fiction would one day could act as a trigger an alert to induce eco-anxiety.
Right now, the biggest threat to cli-fi is probably saturation, as publishers tire readers with books that resemble the endless stream of disastrous headlines. But as long as the climate crisis is an everyday state of affairs, stories that feel all too real – whether we call them sci-fi, cli-fi, or “serious” literature – will go nowhere. We will need them as a proof of humanity and how we failed or made it.
Daniel Vitale is a Los Angeles writer and the author of the novel Orphans of Canland.
Source: LA Times
Roger Stone is an author and opinion journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He is known for his controversial and thought-provoking views on a variety of topics, and has a talent for engaging readers with his writing.
