If you start browsing the Web for ebooks and novels about climate change issues, within minutes you will come upon a Goodreads list created by Karl-Friedrich Lenz, a German professsor teaching in Japan and a ”cli fi” novelist himself.
Professor Lenz has set up a page at Goodreads titled ”Cli-Fi: Climate Change Fiction” that currently lists over 50 climate-themed ebooks and novels, with a submit button promising the addition of more cli fi novels listed there in the future.
Lenz told me that anyone can contribute a title, and that he welcomes all cli fi authors to the list, from all countries and in any language.
From Ian McEwan’s “Solar” to Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior,” there are dozens, if not hundreds of cli-fi novels to list at our Goodreads page, according to Lenz.
Cli-fi novels explore climate change themes and are part of a new genre of literature that encompasses climate change fiction, Lenz says.
“I started the ‘Cli-Fi’ list at Goodreads, which may be of interest to people worldwide,” Lenz told this reporter. “I have written three SF novels with climate change as the main theme, and with a view to not only showing the problem, but also a solution. I am distributing these books as free PDF files on my blog.”
With the New York Times embracing the ‘mushrooming’ genre of cli-fi, Lenz hopes to see his list grow.
A graduate seminar at the University of Oregon in America focuses on “films, poetry, photography, essays and a heavy dose of the mushrooming subgenre of speculative fiction known as climate fiction, or cli-fi,” the Times reported. So now it’s official: Sci fi has a new cousin in the literary arena and she’s called cli-fi.
According to the Times account, novels set against a backdrop of climate change are beginning to make their mark on the literary scene, with books such as ”The Wind-up Girl”, by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Cli-fi novels and movies “fit into a long tradition of speculative fiction that pictures the future after assorted catastrophes,” the Times reported.
Thirty-something Nathaniel Rich, who lives in New Orleans and often writes for the Times oped pages, was quoted by the Times as saying: “You can argue that [trying to grapple with the fragility of our existence] is a dominant theme of postwar fiction. It surprises me that even more writers aren’t engaging with it.”
“The climate-change canon dates back at least as far as ‘The Drowned World’ written in 1962 by J. G. Ballard,” the Times reported. It is just “mushrooming” now. The term has been popularized over the past 12 months in a concerted public relations campaign led by a climate activist from Boston.
“I feel that by giving a label to climate-themed novels and movies, it can help readers and viewers focus on the issues involved,” the climate activist said. “The response so far, over the past year especially, has been positive and welcoming. Many writers have written to me and told me about the novels they are writing and that they are glad that there is a genre that they can fit their novels into.”
So Professor Lenz’s Goodreads list fits the bill, exactly. The arts have an important role to play in the way we look at climate change and global warming.
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About Author
Dan Bloom is a freelance writer who blogs
at CLI FI CENTRAL.
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