34 | New Scientist | 5 February 2022
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SCIENTIFIC papers, however
well-written, rarely carry the
emotional weight of a good story.
Stories have been the prime
means of imparting knowledge
and warnings throughout human
history. Even in today’s data-rich
world, they hold a visceral clout
that no amount of graphs, charts
or figures can replace.
As a volcanology and climate
researcher, I have spent more
than 30 years communicating the
calamitous future that could lie in
wait should we fail to take action
on climate change. But it wasn’t
until I published my first novel,
Skyseed, in 2020 that I realised the
power of storytelling to get across
the urgency of the situation.
This use of narrative as a means
to galvanise action on climate
change has become increasingly
common, and the rapidly growing
body of work on the subject is
now recognised as its own literary
genre. Climate fiction, or cli-fi (a
term coined in 2007 by journalist
and literary theorist Dan Bloom),
has been around for a while.
However, as global warming
and extreme weather have
become a part of everyday life,
and the appetite for action has
grown, cli-fi has truly come of
age. From the genre’s relatively
slow start in the mid 2000s, the
shelves of bookshops are now
beginning to sag under the
weight of new speculative climate
tales, aimed at both adult and
young adult readers.
As the genre gained ground,
overenthusiastic fans and critics
have reached back into literary
deep time to corral any number of
classics into the cli-fi fold. Notable
examples include The Drought
and The Drowned World by
J. G. Ballard, and Jules Verne’s
The Purchase of the North Pole,
a cautionary tale published in 1889
on the perils of geoengineering.My cli-fi contribution, Skyseed, is
an eco-thriller about a clandestine
climate experiment that goes
disastrously wrong. The message
is that tinkering with an already
failing climate is a very bad idea.
Yet the genre isn’t all wall-to-
wall doom and gloom. Cli-fi is a
broad church, so, alongside the
horrors of The Collapse of Western
Civilization by Naomi Oreskes
and Erik Conway, there is the dark
humour of Karl Taro Greenfeld’s
The Subprimes and the political
focus of Robinson’s Science in
the Capital trilogy.
Others provide tough stories
shot through with seeds of hope,
notably Robinson’s recent The
Ministry for the Future, which
invokes an organisation that
advocates for future generations
and the protection of all life on
Earth, and Blackfish City, Sam
Miller’s addictive, post-climate
collapse tale about a floating
city within the Arctic circle.
I also recommend The High
House by Jessie Greengrass, a
story of ordinary folk against the
background of a flooded East
Anglia in the UK, and Alexandra
Kleeman’s Something New Under
the Sun, set in a desiccated
California, where the corporate
vultures are beginning to circle.
As our lives begin to collide
head-on with the climate
emergency, let’s hope that cli-fi
remains in the world of fiction
and, thanks to the action of
present-day generations, never
comes to represent the reality
of the world around us. ❚Bill McGuire is professor emeritus
of geophysical and climate hazards
at University College London and
author of the novel SkyseedFor me, though, this broadening
of the genre is misguided. It
dilutes a growing body of work
that is, and should remain, very
much of the late 20th and early
21st centuries.
That is because there is an
important difference between
earlier tales of climate turmoil
and more contemporary works.While older stories describe
environmental outcomes we
are now coming to expect with
climate change, they don’t
necessarily link human activities
to environmental collapse. That
is very much the point of cli-fi.Cli-fi provides visions
of the future that aren’t
yet too late to changeJORN^ GEO
RGTOMTER
/GETT
Y^ IMAGESClimate fiction’s call to arms
So-called cli-fi is galvanising readers into action with dark, yet all-too-possible
futures. Bill McGuire picks some of the best“ Cli-fi immerses its
readers in futures that,
without urgent action,
will face our children
and their children”Without exception, today’s
writers make this connection
abundantly clear and raise
important questions about
what we should do next.
As such, modern cli-fi is fiction
with a purpose: to immerse its
readers in futures that, without
urgent action, will face our
children and their children. By
bringing these horrific scenarios
to life, it seeks to spur us into
action, encouraging us to do
our bit to ensure that they never
come to pass. Climate fiction is
nothing less than a call to arms.
Among the most unsettling
stories are those, such as Paolo
Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and
Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York
2140 , that paint pictures of life
in a future world that, as in the
pandemic, is superficially normal,
yet in a climate-changed world is,
in so many ways, scarily different.