If you want to know what the climate might be like one or two centuries from now, talk to a climate scientist. If you want to know what it’s like to live in a world transformed by these changes, your best bet is to talk to a climate fiction writer. Climate fiction — referred to as “Cli-fi” by its fans as a play on Sci-fi — is relatively new as a coherently defined genre. While stories of environmental disaster are at least as old as ancient foundational flood myths in China and Mesopotamia, and stories specifically naming climate change as a driver of plot go back at least as far as J.G Ballard’s 01964 novel The Drowned World, climate fiction as a category is no older than a decade and a half. Originally coined by journalist and writer Dan Bloom in the late 02000s, the term reached a broader audience in the early 02010s as a number of prominent authors including Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Kingsolver wrote novels exploring the social ramifications of climate change and ecosystem collapse.
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