The Role of Cli-Fi in Our Understanding of the Climate Crisis
Charlotte Lavin investigates how fiction is shaping public consensus on the reality of the climate crisis…
“When science has led, global SF would follow.”
The data is clear: climate change is here.
The rise in heatwaves and flooding are related to global warming. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in August 2021, proves as such: the Anthropocene has a direct impact on the climate’s irregular changes.
While this issue seems too big to come to terms with for most of us, literature — science fiction, in particular — can give us a plethora of solutions. Or at least, ideas on how to implement the solutions.
There are as many ways to see art as art has ways to make us think. Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement (2016), says literature and other forms of arts are “mechanisms by which human societies come to understand themselves.” Art helps us understand society; supports us in the necessary task of imagining a new reality.
The threat caused by climate change (or global warming, climate disruption, impending doom and gloom - you name it) is read through the prism of a subgenre of science fiction called climate fiction. These stories are tools that help us in the gigantic task of discussing the future and trying to make sense of it.
James Holland Jones, Associate Professor of Earth System Science, and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, says that fiction and stories are more effective than facts at changing people’s minds. He argues that stories provide powerful tools allowing us to model complex systems.
In situations where there is a “real uncertainty”, as is the case of climate change, the reaction is one of defensiveness and close-mindedness. “Fear frequently leads to retrenchment” says Jones. But if we manage to create a better world in stories, it will be easier to implement these models in real life. It’s very much like having a role model: it gives us a direction to follow. And fiction more than facts leads to reflection because it diminishes what we call the confirmation bias: the outcome of the plot is unknown to us, while we as humans have a tendency to seek news from familiar sources.
All the above only works with the condition that climate fiction is read and understood in the socio-historical context in which it is written, and by acknowledging that the human mind’s understanding of its surroundings is limited.
“We badly need literature of considered ideas. Humanity is on a collision course with over-population, ecological disaster, and meteorological catastrophe on the grand scale... Science fiction could be a useful tool for serious consideration, on the level of the non-specialist reader, of a future rushing on us at unstoppable speed,” said George Turner, author of The Sea and Summer in his 1990’s short stories collection A Pursuit of Miracles.
And as Ursula Le Guin, a mainstay in any article about climate change in literature, once said: when the “hard times” will come, “we will need writers who can remember freedom: poets and visionaries – the realists of a larger reality.”
“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets and visionaries - the realists of a larger reality.”
Back to a little definition: what exactly is climate fiction; how did it start; what are the big names of the genre?
Often abbreviated as ‘cli-fi’, it is a literary genre that arguably appeared in the early 1960s with J.G. Ballard 1962’s The Drowned World. But according to certain critics, we could trace its origins as far back as Jules Verne’s Sans Dessus Dessous (1889). We then have Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a book about the human made catastrophe of the Dust Bowl. There are other schools of thought though, which say that for a book to be considered ‘cli-fi’, it does not need the causes to be strictly due to human activity; it simply needs to depict the end of human civilisation as we know it (and consequently, the end of industrial capitalism) as a result of climate change.
And if the cli-fi subgenre can fall under the category of post-apocalyptic literature, the ‘dystopian literature’ label would, in my opinion, be at times more accurate. We can remember the line from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick’s well-loved novel: “A ride, sir? Better get indoors; it’s almost noon.”
In all the above mentioned novels, climate disruption was only one of the storylines, a backdrop. It would not be until a few years later that climate change would first appear as the baseline of a story in the highly impactful 1993 novel from Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower.
“‘This world is falling apart.’”
If you have not read it yet, please do. The main protagonist is feisty enough to drive the whole story, but there are so many other great things about this novel to tempt you to give it a go.
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, which you may recognise from the (very cool) movie adaptation starring Natalie Portman, shows us yet another goal of cli-fi’s motivation: to push the readers out of complacency. In this book, an invisible border between our world and something scientists cannot explain is being investigated. You’ve guessed right: the border can be seen as a metaphor for climate disruption. One sentence of the book stood out for me in particular, about climate denialism: “I took her to mean that it was better to let the border advance, to ignore it, let it affect some other, more distant generation.” Sounds eerily similar to what our governments are doing, no?
Stories influence people, communities, and all generations to think about social, societal and political issues. So is climate change considered to be a political issue; and is science political? Will using narratives and not only information and facts contribute to a change in mentalities, and help in the fight against climate change?
A few extra questions: is cli-fi meant to give us a sense of hope, or a sense of purpose? Does it have an impact on the ‘collective process’, as discussed by Amitav Ghosh? What is its role, apart from trying to give us a sense of what living in a world drastically changed by anthropogenic global warming can look like?
There are as many questions as there are answers, and this article is too short to cover them all, so for now we will simply conclude that cli-fi has been, for over 60 years, an important subgenre of science-fiction literature that has perhaps managed to outgrow the ‘mass’ literature images sci-fi still portrays.
Cli-Fi started discussing the anthropogenic causes of global warming in the late 1980s, arguably much earlier than our politicians did.
It provides an escape through literature, while presenting different possible responses to the climate crisis — and their outcomes. My recommendations? J.G. Ballard, of course; always, Philip K. Dick; Michael Moorcock obviously, but for more ‘proper’ cli-fi books, try Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Brian Aldiss’ Super-State, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Jeff VandeMeer’s Annihilation, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.
Of course, there are about a thousand others too, but we have to start somewhere.
credits
words — charlotte lavin
design — karina so.