The brave new world of cli-fi? By Alex Marchant
In 2006, I started writing
seriously again (‘seriously’ in the sense of aiming for some sort of goal; ‘again’
in the sense that I used to write in my teens and early 20s, but was
sidetracked by that annoying thing called ‘life’). Little did I know at the
time that I was embarking on an example of what was then a newly coined genre
of fiction. Or in fact, not yet quite coined, as I discovered this week.
That newish genre is ‘climate
fiction’, or ‘cli-fi’ for short – an abbreviation that is rather apt as often cli-fi
appears as a theme within science fiction, although it can be found within many
other genres. The term was apparently coined in 2007 by journalist Dan Bloom,
although it didn’t take off in the literary mainstream until 2013. Climate change was a theme within fiction for many years before either date (for example, Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the
North Pole (1889) and Ursula Le
Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) –
it was just that by 2013 it was recognized as a rapidly growing literary trend,
in poetry and drama as well as prose.
Discussion of cli-fi came to my
notice in a book I’m copyediting as part of my day job (I don’t generally keep
up with trends in the literary world, rarely even reading the review section of
my preferred newspaper). It’s a fascinating volume of essays on the relationship
between climate and literature, from the earliest historical writings to the
present day, covering subjects as diverse as classical attempts to explain
weather patterns, the influence of climate on the Romantics and the rise of the
Anthropocene. I’d not appreciated before just how important climate is in
Shakespeare – despite long ago studying both Macbeth with its ‘hurly-burly’ and The Winter’s Tale with ... well, I guess that’s fairly obvious now
I think about it... (And as for other authors discussed, I will just mention at
this point how much wuthering there is going on outside as I write this, here
in the depths – or I should say, rather, the heights – of the Bronte moors.)
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| Top Withens, thought perhaps to be the model for Wuthering Heights |
I love the variety that my day
job brings. I work on non-fiction books for academic publishers, tackling a
range of subjects, from archaeology and anthropology to history and
international relations. And every so often something crops up that feeds into
my writing - maybe an idea for a new piece of work or a tidbit that provides
background colour for a work in progress. This is the first time, though, that
I’ve discovered I may have been ahead of the curve in terms of contemporary
literature.
Well, maybe I wasn’t, if I’m
being totally honest. Although I began writing my ‘cli-fi’ novel, Time out of Time, in 2006, and even finished
a draft with which I was mostly happy about six years later, it’s still sitting
on a shelf waiting for me to do something more with it. I submitted it to a few
agents and publishers, but then was sidetracked (again) by the idea for the
books that I have now actually published. My aim for this year is to return to and
polish the earlier novel in order to self-publish – when (or if) I complete a
first draft of the third book in my ongoing sequence, The Order of the White Boar. So it might be next year... or the
year after.
When I began Time out of Time, I chose to work on that idea rather than another I’d
had because the theme appeared more timely. A children’s adventure book about
human influence on the environment and climate over several centuries – exactly
what was needed to encourage kids to become eco-warriors, I thought. But here I
am, thirteen years later... Is there a phrase to denote ‘after the curve’?
Maybe it’s ‘missing the boat’.
Having said that, the academic essay
laments the non-realistic nature of much cli-fi. Whether it takes the form of ‘climate
thrillers, science fiction, disaster novels, crime and conspiracy novels, cyberpunk,
horror, or fantasy’, the authors reckon that ‘the extreme scale of climate
change has all too often led writers and film-makers to opt for implausible
tipping-point scenarios [and] engage in an almost comic telescoping of the time
taken for climatic change to unfold’. One genre that is not mentioned anywhere
in the essay is ‘time-slip’ fiction. Given that Time out of Time is just such a novel, perhaps it’s not too late for
me to be a groundbreaker with it. A child protagonist slipping through time and
witnessing the gradual destruction wreaked by human beings on their own planet
over eight hundred years perhaps doesn’t represent either ‘implausible tipping
point scenarios’ or ‘comic telescoping of time’. But then again, maybe the term
‘realism’ doesn’t quite apply either. Nor is a realistic solution to the
problems necessarily offered. (Alternative/splitting universes may not actually
be a plausible answer to our current climate issues....)
Still, perhaps I’ll give it a go.
If nothing else, it might keep me out of the twenty-first century for a while longer
– which at the moment might not be a bad thing.
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| (c) Ellie Foreman-Peck |
Alex's books can be found on Amazon at:
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