Climate change in fiction
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CLARA HUME WRITES:
Journalist/blogger/climate activist Danny Bloom informally coined the phrase ''cli-fi'' in 2008 as part of his PR work as a climate activist to raise awareness about the power of art and literature to focus attention on climate issues and to describe a new genre of fiction that dealt with climate change.
In 2013, The Christian Science Monitor rewrote an NPR radio piece and went further to say that “Cli-fi describes a dystopian present, as opposed to a dystopian future, and it isn’t non-fiction or even science fiction: cli-fi is about literary fiction.”
''Given that many books discussed as being cli-fi are set in the future, I would go one step further to say that the genre is simply speculative fiction related to climate change, whether or not it is set in the future or the present. And even by saying speculative, I may have gone too far since climate change itself isn’t fiction at all," writes Clare Hume.
Just recently, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow penned an essay for Dissent Magazine, in its summer 2013 issue, which discussed climate change in literature. Something she said about the cli-fi books included in the essay resonated deeply with me:
They refashion myths for our age, appropriating time-honored narratives to accord with our knowledge and our fears.
Our own Back to the Garden (by Clara Hume) was one of the books discussed in the article, and being so close to it we have intimate knowledge of the white fear of the future that accompanies creating such a narrative. Some of the events in the story were just plain tough to write and think about. Hume’s novel not only envisions climate change as an overall destructive force on humankind but sees pollution, abundant resource extraction, dying oceans and fisheries, and other problems as additional, if not correlative, issues that escalate the possibility of a dystopian world in our future.
But Hume’s novel, similar to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, does not really tell the reader flat-out how the future got to be the way it is. While offering some hints, the novel focuses on its characters: their perspectives, backgrounds, relationships, fears, redemptive epiphanies, and hopes. This group of people is learning to adapt to the future–and they document their experiences along the way. If there is one underlying universal trait that humans have, it is that we document our existence and everyday struggle. This book’s characters are no different, and, along with their sometimes frightful experiences, their age-old documentation of storytelling, art, drawing, singing, photographing, writing, and even acting are interwoven with disaster that seems to face them at every turn.
Many other authors are also creatively weaving tales that relate to not just climate change but ecological collapse and all that comes with it: social, economic, and political woes. It’s warming to know that despite climate change being a very scary issue, authors, like the characters in Back to the Garden, are documenting and envisioning it in a multitude of artistic viewpoints–and it’s important that we do so as we continue to contribute to the imaginative and real history of our kind.
The novels presented in Tuhus-Dubrow essay were:
- Far North, by Marcel Theroux: Apocalyptic road novel post climate decimation
- I’m With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet, edited by Mark Martin: Ten writers present their short stories dealing with climate change
- The Healer: A Novel, by Antti Tuomainen: During catastrophic times in Helsinki, a husband goes on a search for his missing journalist wife
- Odds Against Tomorrow: A Novel, by Nathaniel Rich: Set in the future world of ecological collapse, a statistician is hired to help corporations calculate worst-case scenarios; the novel exposes fears as well as love
- Solar, by Ian McEwan: Story of a man involved in a global warming initiative working out his own personal demons
- Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, by Jon Mooallem: A journalist and his daughter uncover the beauty and history of wild animals, particularly those going through extinction
- Back to the Garden, by Clara Hume: A group from an Idaho mountain struggles to survive, while adapting to a new world as they travel across the country to find loved ones and then return home to take care of their habitat
Other cli-fi books commonly discussed are:
- Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver: A woman in the Appalachian Mountains opens her eyes after a large collection of monarch butterflies is found in a nearby valley: the reasoning exposes different perspectives, including science and faith
- The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood: In an ecologically unstable world, a fringe religious group prophesizes a waterless flood
- The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller: A novel that doesn’t mention climate change, this book nevertheless tips its hat to to the genre after a superflu has wiped out most of humankind
- Polar City Red, by Jim Laughter: There are few survivors left after the planet becomes mostly uninhabitable; a doctor and a professor fight to survive
- The Swarm, by Frank Schätzing: What could happen after the continued destruction of our oceans and clean water supplies
- A Friend of the Earth, by T.C. Boyle: Written several year ago, this book tells of love and survival in a world post global warming
- World Made by Hand, by Howard Kunstler: Set in Union Grove, New York, after oil decline and climate change (also see Kunstler’s The Witch of Hebron)
- The Aviator, by Gareth Renowden: Satirical look at what kinds of groups survive in a futuristic world
- FINITUDE by Hamish MacDonald in Scotland
In searching for a good listing of climate change novels, however, it is hard to find anything exhaustive. Wikipedia, unfortunately, does not yet have a good grip on what’s up-to-date on climate change in literature, listing many titles that were written before climate change itself became understood.
However, some titles listed there fall into the category, and, sadly, some fall into the “radical environmental terrorist” perspective popular among those who deny that climate change is happening or, if they aren’t sure about it, are still capitalizing on the idea that people who care about it must be extreme radicals.
An article by Rodge Glass in the UK in June by The Guardian was a little pessimistic, claiming the genre is melting away, if it ever was alive at all. It lists a few books and almost dismisses their importance.
However, thanks to the comments section, many people point out the vast science fiction books dealing with climate change and environmental collapse, including Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather, Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy (Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, James Howard Kuntsler’s World Made by Hand, and Ian McDonald’s River of Gods.
Given that this blog is called “Ecologue,” and is open for community dialog, I invite readers to contribute more fictional books on climate change. I know that they are out there, and certainly I haven’t gotten them all here. Because the genre is fairly new, not one database or source has really begun listing books coherently, though one place to look is Goodreads’ Climate Change Fiction list. Perhaps later it will be called the CLI FI Fiction List.
You can also search Amazon for “climate change fiction,” and for ''CLI FI'' but not all of the search returns are actually novels dealing with climate change. Some of the books deny climate change exists and therefore it is fiction–not really what we’re after here!
Feel free to contribute.