a subgenre of science fiction concerned with the effects of climate change
Popularized by journalist Dan Bloom, who independently coined it in 2012 to promote the novel Polar City Red, by Jim Laughter. (Various other dates of Bloom’s coinage have appeared in news articles.)
[cli- (in climate) + sci-fi n.]
For climate-change science fiction, 2004 was a bumper-crop year: Michael Crichton’s skeptical State of Fear, a novel about a global-warming conspiracy, and Roland Emmerich’s abrupt-climate-change movie The Day After Tomorrow were crowd-pleasers, though scientists criticized the science in each as faulty at best, misleading at worst. Climate fiction isn’t a new phenomenon, says James Gunn, an author and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas.]
Blurring the boundary between sci-fi and documentary, Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid peers back in time from a climate crisis-wracked 2055 to lament our current inaction…. Killer CGI, dystopian cli-fi, heart-wrenching footage.
Here’s a new term: ‘Cli-Fi’ = SF about climate change. Coined by Dan Bloom.
Over the past decade, more and more writers have begun to set their novels and short stories in worlds, not unlike our own, where the Earth’s systems are noticeably off-kilter. The genre has come to be called climate fiction—‘cli-fi’, for short.
In this time of global warming, cli-fi made an early splash with ‘Waterworld’, Kevin Costner’s campy 1995 vision of a future where the polar icecaps have melted and Earth is almost entirely submerged. It took almost a decade for the next major cli-fi blockbuster to arrive.
Other imaginary societies are evoked in ‘Later, His Ghost’, a haunting piece of cli-fi about a Britain devastated by high winds.
Perhaps the most prescient subtexts of Fortitude are the cli-fi, anti-capitalist undertones expressed through mindless, zombie archetypes and the ever-present potential for impending apocalypse.
By merging cli-fi and nature writing, the novel powerfully demonstrates the spiritual and emotional costs of environmental destruction.
antedating 2009
Last modified 2021-09-02 17:19:23
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