What happens when the background of our lives—the weather, the seasons, the very ground beneath our feet—surges into the foreground of our fictions? For generations, literature has treated the natural world as a steadfast, if sometimes tempestuous, stage upon which the human drama unfolds. But as the curtain rises on the twenty-first century, a new and urgent category of storytelling has taken center stage, one that grapples with the unnerving reality that the stage itself is collapsing. This is the world of climate fiction, or 'cli-fi', a genre whose very existence serves as a barometer for our collective anxiety, reflecting a world where the most profound antagonist is no longer a human villain, but the altered climate we have wrought.
To dismiss these narratives as mere speculative diversions or a subset of science fiction would be to miss their cultural significance. They are, in many ways, the emergent folklore of the Anthropocene, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of a planetary shift so vast it otherwise defies comprehension. These are not simply tales of tomorrow; they are palimpsests of our present, where the anxieties of today are written over with the stark possibilities of the future. The rise of climate fiction is not just a publishing trend; it is a literary response to a civilizational crisis, a necessary evolution in our narrative tradition that asks one of the most pressing questions of our time: how do we live, and what stories can we tell, at the end of a world we thought we knew?
What Is Climate Fiction?
Climate fiction, commonly abbreviated as cli-fi, is a genre of literature that deals directly with the causes and consequences of climate change. A play on the term sci-fi, the name was reportedly popularized in the early 2000s by journalist Dan Bloom, who, according to a 2013 article in Literary Hub, also claims to have coined it. At its core, cli-fi presumes that transformational climate change is not an abstract possibility but a foundational reality from which the narrative grows. It is literature that takes the scientific consensus as its inciting incident, spinning tales from the fertile, if terrifying, ground of what comes next. The genre functions like a narrative laboratory, running thought experiments on the human condition under the extreme pressures of environmental collapse.
While it often borrows the tools and tropes of science fiction, cli-fi is distinct in its singular focus. It encompasses a broad spectrum of literary modes, capable of unfurling in a variety of forms:
