Book Club - What is Cli-Fi?

As I was casting around for which book we could discuss in this week’s book club I got to thinking about all the ways we organise our reading and think about our books (some more obvious than others) And the thing is, if you’re in the know then you know but for others it can be a mire of acronyms and loosely defined genres. A part of this discussion is inspired by a book I’m reading but haven’t quite gotten to the point that I want to pull it apart for a book club… This book is YA (that’s Young Adult fiction) but it’s probably more accurately described as middle grade. See already there’s all sorts of distinctions around age. Middle grade is books aimed at the 8-12 year old set, while YA hits around 13-18. Now I know that there are plenty of fully adult listeners out there still enjoying wizards and vampires and I don’t want to get proscriptive. These categories are helpful for finding books with relatable protagonists, btu we’d be in a lot of trouble (I think) if people only read books where the lead looks and sounds a lot like them. As well as being a mid-grade/YA novel, this book also loosely falls into the genre of Cli-Fi. I’m sure a few of you have already guessed that Cli-Fi stands for climate fiction. Here again we don’t necessarily have the clearest of delineations but suffice to say that Cli-Fi encompasses books that deal with the impacts and effects of climate change in all its permutations. The label Cli-Fi is credited to the author and freelance journalist Dan Bloom. The term was first used in reference to a novella Bloom had written back in 2011. Of course this doesn’t mean that Cli-Fi magicked into being only a decade ago. Writing that deals with the climate and more specifically changes in the climate have been around for a while (doesn’t the Bible have a climate change story?) I’ve come up against the term numerous times over the years and I have to admit it can seem a little slippery. I believe this more a product of the difficulty in finding some simple way to characterize writing; whether it be aimed at a group, a country, or an age there are always going to be a range of tastes and styles that people gravitate towards. Cli-Fi can variously be realist or speculative. It may be set in the ‘now’ (whatever that means for a constantly evolving world), in the near future or even the distant future. The science in Cli-Fi is usually to some degree credible. Of course science changes as we learn more, but Cli-FI tries to engage with real science more than the purely imaginative or impossible. If you’re looking for Cli-Fi it’s everywhere. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx And Crake trilogy is an example but Australian authors produce some incredible examples including Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, James Bradley’s Clade and Jennifer Mills Dyschronia. And Cli-Fi can be for all ages, which kind of brings us full circle. I know we’ve talked about the work of Mark Smith on book club and his most recent If Not Us pits a teenage protagonist against the polluting business that is the mainstay of his town. In these YA Cli-Fi novels we see narratives of climate change and climate action that centres and empowers young people. We live in a world where legally the minister for climate apparently has no duty of care to protect young Australians from the impacts of climate change. It’s not surprising then that climate anxiety is a real phenomenon amongst young people the world over. I’m not trying to suggest that Cli-Fi, or simply telling noise stories is the way to solve the climate crisis, but I do believe that the adage if you can’t see it you can’t be it can apply to all of us through our life. Climate change operates on a planetary level and that can seem daunting but through genres such as Cli-Fi and its intersection with YA and middle grade novels, young people have a model and an example of their role. It also allows them to explore the science in a way that can be more accessible.