Climate Fiction and Climate Change

I just read a very erudite essay by Gregers Andersen called "Cli-fi: a Short Essay on its Worlds and its Importance." Andersen, who just received his Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen with a dissertation called "Climate Changed Existence and its Worlds. Global Warming in Fiction and Philosophy" says (though I'm simplifying his argument) that fiction about climate change prepares us for a world changed by global warming. He notes that, though the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes has given us a great deal of information in the reports it has been publishing for the past 25 years, nowhere in them "does one find characters forced to live in the future living conditions sketched." This is because reports are full of data, but "fiction typically depicts human beings in action..."

Not every piece of fiction that shows human beings in extreme climates is climate fiction, Andersen says, and he goes on to define cli-fi as fiction that "depicts or in some other way employs the motif of climate change generated by humanity's emissions of greenhouse gasses in their plot." These fictions have, he goes on to say, five basic and recurring themes: Social Breakdown in which individuals are shown battling over limited resources; Judgment in which Nature revolts and punishes humanity; Conspiracy in which climate change is part of a cover-up to promote private interests; Loss of Wilderness in which climate change is the end of nature; and Sphere in which the biosphere is destroyed but humans create their own artificial atmospheres. Interestingly, he describes fiction that applies Social Breakdown and Judgment themes to show a climate-modified human way of being in the world as "unheimlich" or uncanny. This usually refers to the experience of something familiar becoming something strange.

Recently I made my own small contribution to cli-fi, a short story called "The Relocation Specialist," which is in the current issue (#74) of DoorKnobs & BodyPaint. I suppose it best fits the Social Breakdown theme, as set out by Andersen. It's only a small (450-word) story, but having written it, I am especially interested in what Andersen says about cli-fi – fiction takes the data about what our future can and will hold and converts it into the actions and reactions of human beings. In this way, it helps prepare us for what our future will be like if we don't act now.