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Words We're Watching: New Adventures in 'Cli-Fi'. Taking the temperature of a literary genre.
Words We're Watching
New Adventures in 'Cli-Fi'
Taking the temperature of a literary genre.
As long ago as the 1950s, we have used sci-fi as a shortened expression of the term science fiction, referring to a genre of storytelling that portrays, in ways truthful and speculative, how advances in science and technology impact our lives for better or for worse. The short form retains the initial syllable of each word in the longer phrase, with the shared long-i creating a nifty, assonant rhyme.
It’s a similar truncation that gives us another genre of book and film that sees increased relevance in our times: cli-fi.
Like sci-fi, cli-fi deals with worlds real and imaginary, but in this case the narrative deals with how humans manage living in environments with severely altered climates. The cli- in cli-fi is short for climate, and cli-fi is fiction that projects how climate patterns, and severe changes in such patterns, affect or will affect our lives.
The genre of climate fiction is not new; in fact, climate change, with a focus on the warming of global temperatures and its likely causes, is not a new area of study. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist who later earned the country its first Nobel Prize, constructed the first model charting the influence of atmospheric carbon dioxide on global temperature levels in 1896. For his work, some call Arrhenius the father of climate science.
....
New Adventures in 'Cli-Fi'
Taking the temperature of a literary genre.
As long ago as the 1950s, we have used sci-fi as a shortened expression of the term science fiction, referring to a genre of storytelling that portrays, in ways truthful and speculative, how advances in science and technology impact our lives for better or for worse. The short form retains the initial syllable of each word in the longer phrase, with the shared long-i creating a nifty, assonant rhyme.
It’s a similar truncation that gives us another genre of book and film that sees increased relevance in our times: cli-fi.
Like sci-fi, cli-fi deals with worlds real and imaginary, but in this case the narrative deals with how humans manage living in environments with severely altered climates. The cli- in cli-fi is short for climate, and cli-fi is fiction that projects how climate patterns, and severe changes in such patterns, affect or will affect our lives.
When it comes to courting the interest of younger generations, it certainly helps that cli-fi is emerging at the movies and on TV. Last year's Christopher Nolan epic Interstellar shows the American Midwest turning into a second Dust Bowl, with a forecast so dire it drives humans to seek a new planet. In 2014's Snowpiercer, a bungled attempt to stop global warming creates a new ice age. Margaret Atwood’s popular cli-fi trilogy MaddAddam is currently being adapted into a series for HBO, whose wildly popular show Game of Thrones also flirts, if unintentionally, with global-warming themes.
— J. K. Ullrich, The Atlantic, 14 Aug. 2015
The genre of climate fiction is not new; in fact, climate change, with a focus on the warming of global temperatures and its likely causes, is not a new area of study. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist who later earned the country its first Nobel Prize, constructed the first model charting the influence of atmospheric carbon dioxide on global temperature levels in 1896. For his work, some call Arrhenius the father of climate science.
....