A Short Pre-History of Climate Fiction

This chapter argues that catastrophic climate change fictions have been organised around three main tropes: the new ice age, the burning world and the drowned world. Of these, only the last has a deep history in the Western mythos, dating back to stories of a Great Flood in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. When modern science fiction (SF) began to take shape in the early nineteenth century, it inherited a preoccupation with the Flood from its parent cultures, for example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Richard Jefferies’s After London and Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous. This flood motif continued to be important in American pulp SF. Cooling and warming are more recent preoccupations, dating from the widespread acceptance of ice age theory and greenhouse theory in the late nineteenth century. For most of the twentieth century both science and SF were more interested in cooling. But in the closing quarter of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, widespread scientific concern that anthropogenic warming might more than offset longer-term cooling led to the development of contemporary ‘cli-fi’, concerned primarily with the effects of global heating.

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Maja Lunde: între apocalips și speranță

Transilvania ◽

10.51391/trva.2021.06.08. ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 65-70

Author(s):

Rodica Grigore

Keyword(s):

Climatic Changes ◽

Western Society ◽

Water Shortages ◽

Contemporary World ◽

Non Fiction ◽

History Of ◽

Climate Fiction ◽

Contemporary Western Society

Born in 1975, the Norwegian Maja Lunde, widely known as a gifted children’s writer, surprised the literary world by her first novel, The History of Bees (2015), an ambitious dystopian book meant to put into question some of the greatest challenges our contemporary world has to face: the climatic changes and the threatening idea of a future and hypothetic disappearance of bees. Even if some critics considered her writing dangerously close to non-fiction or an expression of the so called “cli-fi” (“climate fiction”), Lunde proves to be a convincing author, perfectly capable of expressing deep fears of our contemporary Western society, but also able to offer her readers a symbolic solution to many of the major problems of the present. These preoccupations are also to be found in her second novel, The End of the Ocean (2017), where Maja Lunde perfectly succeeds in dealing with some another stringent nowadays issues, namely desertification and water shortages.

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A Theoretical Interlude

Science Fiction and Climate Change ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789621723.003.0002 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 23-50

Author(s):

Andrew Milner ◽

J.R. Burgmann

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Narrative Strategies ◽

Sociology Of Literature ◽

The Social ◽

History Of ◽

Critical Account ◽

Raymond Williams ◽

Climate Fiction ◽

The Relationship

This chapter begins by discussing the relationship between SF and what Daniel Bloom dubbed ‘cli-fi’. Cli-fi, it argues, is best understood as a sub-genre of SF and the crucial shift between the pre-history of climate fiction outlined in the previous chapter and this contemporary sub-genre has been the development of a near-consensus amongst scientists about the potentially disastrous effects of global warming. It proceeds to a critical account of how the notion of the Anthropocene was developed in the sciences, misrepresented in ecocriticism, and challenged in the social sciences by rival concepts, such as the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene. As an alternative, it proposes a sociology of literature derived from the work of Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti. The chapter then proposes an ideal typology of climate fictions arranged around five measures of formal utopianism, which derive substantially from the work of Tom Moylan, and six measures of substantive response to climate change, derived from real-world discourse. This results in a grid of thirty logically possible types of climate fiction. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of narrative strategies and tactics available to cli-fi, citing Nevil Shute’s nuclear doomsday novel On the Beach as a model.

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Australian Climate Fiction

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1155 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Milner

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

National Research Council ◽

Short History ◽

Australian Climate ◽

The Us ◽

The World ◽

History Of ◽

Per Se ◽

Climate Fiction ◽

The Tropics

Climate is an important part of fictional scene setting, whether it be geographical—is the scene in the desert or in the tropics?—or seasonal—is it winter or is it summer? And this is perhaps especially true of Australian literature, where the majority of writers are still descendants of Anglo-Celtic settlers, living in more or less uneasy relationship with a distinctly non-Anglo-Celtic natural environment. Climate has thus been a characteristically Australian literary preoccupation: the titles of Vance Palmer’s Cyclone (1947), for example, or Patrick White’s Eye of the Storm (1973) speak for themselves. But “cli-fi” in the sense of the term coined by Dan Bloom in 2007 refers, not to climate per se, nor even to climate change per se, but much more specifically to fictions concerned with the effects of anthropogenic climate change, that is, to the literature of global warming. This is a much more recent preoccupation, which dates only from the late 1970s when the US National Research Council and the World Meteorological Organization first published predictions that then current levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would result in significant increases in average global temperatures. The short history of Australian “cli-fi” can be traced from the first publication of George Turner’s The Sea and Summer in 1987.

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