In a recent blog post at Goodreads, Mr Burt wrote:
"SF writers have always drawn inspiration from emerging scientific trends and developments, especially those that spark popular controversy. It's not surprising, then, that quite a few writers have set recent novels in worlds turned upside down - or at least sideways - by global warming. My own first novel, Aquarius Rising: In the Tears of God, has climate change as its central theme, and enough books and authors have used global warming as a story driver that media sources like NPR proclaim a new literary genre [or subgenre of sci fi] called "climate fiction" or "cli-fi" (see So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created A New Literary Genre?). Dan Bloom at CLI FI CENTRAL has been popularizing the term since 2008, which of course is just a borrowing and a riff on the original rhyming sounds of sci fi] has prompted many speculative fiction veterans to sigh, roll their eyes, and point out (with muted disdain) that this is nothing new: SF has a rich history of tackling environmental themes, and "cli-fi" is at best a loose subcategory of classic science fiction.
I definitely see why the SF community bristles at the implication that this style of fiction represents something completely new. Great SF writers have indeed explored the territory that includes climate change, environmental disaster, and ecological imbalance for decades and have found fertile ground there. (Fertile for the writers' imaginations; perhaps not so fertile for the story's characters who may be left wandering through parched and barren hellscapes.) As I mentioned in a prior post, Frank Herbert's Dune series is a perfect example. Kim Stanley Robinson has mined this rich story vein brilliantly for years. And I still remember being mesmerized by Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest.
So, for SF fans, this is nothing new. What's changed, then (besides the melting polar ice, rising seas, violent weather patterns, and mean Earth temperature)? I'd say two major factors contributed to the emergence of "cli-fi" in the public eye. First, the evidence for global warming has become dramatically visible to people in their everyday lives. Extreme weather events and the nearly unanimous consensus of climate scientists have gradually shifted popular perception of this issue. Even the deniers grudgingly admit that something is happening, although they might argue about the root causes. Second, the theme of climate change has begun appearing in the work of acclaimed "mainstream" literary fiction writers like Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, and Margaret Atwood, to name a few. Although this rankles some SF folks who feel that we're treated like "second-class literary citizens," the reality is that mainstream literary writers carry more weight with many media sources.
New genre or simply newly recognized SF sub-genre, this can be a positive development for writers of speculative fiction with a passion for environmental themes. And, for those of us who also feel impassioned about environmental causes, it's a win-win. I believe fiction can communicate messages (like "we're mortgaging our planet's future for short-term economic gain") in ways that are more visceral than nonfiction books addressing similar concerns. Facts can move the mind, but fiction can move the spirit. Fiction writing is not activism... but infusing core beliefs into a story can make that tale more vivid and thought-provoking if it's not done in a preachy, heavy-handed way.
Is it really cli-fi or just good ol' sci-fi? Ultimately, I don't care, as long as readers enjoy the books and consider the implications. SF has a proud history of presenting cautionary tales about possible dystopian futures, and I for one think that just might help humanity avoid them!
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