When I first encountered the label “climate fiction,” in the late 2000s, I hated it. It didn’t help that it was shortened into “cli-fi,” a term that still gives me an ick response that I can’t entirely justify. But beyond that, it seemed unnecessary: Climate fiction, I felt, fit under the umbrella of science fiction. Wasn’t that a big enough umbrella? Wasn’t climate science, you know, science?
A decade and a half later, I’ve slowly come around to the fact that I had it backwards. It’s not that climate fiction should huddle under sci-fi’s umbrella. It’s the other way around. Science fiction is climate fiction.
I’ve been reading mostly science fiction this year in order to compile a list of the year’s best SF books. The process has been educational, and fascinating, and at times deeply frustrating; there is simply so much more fantasy than there is SF, at least right now. But there is also a lot of writing being published as literary fiction, by literary imprints and publishing houses, that seems to me that it would, ten years ago, have been published as science fiction. Books that read like realism except for the temperature, the strange flora, the slightly more advanced robots. Stories about the future; stories that might as well take place in the present. Stories deeply concerned with how we’re going to live, and where, and who’s going to get to see the future that is barreling towards us.
(That tricky “us.” These are mostly American and British books, concerned with Western lives and futures. Not all of them. But most of them. This is worth noting, too. A reader is largely limited by what is available to read in one’s language and country.)
Some things I read about: Unspecified apocalyptic conditions. A weather event. A future full of only robots. Immortality. Life on the moon. Life on Mars. Spaceships looking for other livable planets. More spaceships looking for other livable planets. Spaceships that found other livable planets so long ago that the details of where they came from have been lost. Time travel to save the planet. Communities living post-water wars. An Earth you can only live on with masks and filters. An Earth being sentimentally re-greened, centuries in the future. Toxic algae. Toxic clouds. Toxic tech. New kinds of environmental exploitation. Life on a gas giant because Earth is uninhabitable. Life in segregated spaceships, presumably because Earth is uninhabitable. A desert Earth, a baking Midwest.
I am not going looking for these elements. These are all details from the books I’ve picked up that were published this year. These are not not all the climate-related settings or plot points, not by a long mile. And this isn’t new: authors have been writing about our changing world for decades. The quantity, though, is a more recent happening. The fact that these books are coming from literary publishers and not just SFF imprints is relatively new. Science fiction, in the form of climate fiction, has escaped the spaces culture has made for it, provided it is packaged and presented properly. One must wear the right clothes to go to the literary fiction ball.
I feel like I am saying something both obvious and not, but there is a weird, wary space between people who identify as readers of one genre or another; sometimes we get defensive, and the next day we want to share. Are SFF readers venturing forth to read the climate novels in the other bookstore sections? Are litfic readers recognizing that they’re dipped their toes in genre wells? Does it matter? And why do people keep asking what it’s for?
There are a lot of articles about climate fiction, and a lot of them take a sort of educational, slightly activist angle: Climate fiction will show us the way. Climate fiction will make us think about climate differently. Will climate fiction save us? Is climate fiction useful? Is it harmful? Does it make us too despondent to do anything?
Let me rephrase my earlier statement: Climate fiction is just another way of saying fiction. Fiction written now, or in the last few decades, or in this century, or since Frankenstein, which was written in the “Year Without Summer”—however you want to frame it: It’s climate fiction. Lydia Millet wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “To name it as genre is a patronizing act of containment.” (I both agree with this—the basic reality of human lives is not really a genre—and find it frustratingly dismissive about genre. But that is an argument for another time.)
Jeff VanderMeer, in Esquire: “‘Cli-fi’ is often interpreted to be a subset of ‘sci-fi,’ and thus it’s expected to contain a speculative element. Yet, in this moment, cocooned uncomfortably within climate crisis, as if trapped within a porcupine turned inside out, the issue is not speculative. It permeates everything and everyone, even those who have not recognized it yet.”
In 2016, in The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh asked—of himself and other writers—why they did not tackle climate change head on in fiction. His exploration of why that might be is dense and elegant and powerful, a masterful statement on (mostly literary) fiction and how it works. He recognizes literary fiction’s “partitioning” of science fiction, observes that literary fiction has been diminished by this division, and describes what was them being labeled climate fiction as a subset of science fiction “made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future.”
Five years later, in The Guardian, Ghosh said, “I think that the world has changed us, and the inflection point was 2018.” He cites fires, floods, hurricanes, and Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory.
2018 was six years ago, which means that—given the oft-glacial pace of publishing—we are seeing, now, the arrival of books that may have been influenced by, or bought by publishers in the wake of, the success of The Overstory, which was a literary book from a literary publisher. And outside of the pages of books, too, we are also seeing more of what Ghosh saw in 2018: floods, hurricanes, fires. In Oregon, where I live, we have had a record fire season. Again. It feels like every year is a record we didn’t want to set. And things are much, much worse in so many other places.
Do we need to ask what climate fiction is “for,” what it does or accomplishes? It reflects reality. It tells a story we are still learning to tell. Climate change is the water we swim in (or the lack thereof). It affects and informs everything about how we live. Matthew Salesses, in an incredible Literary Hub piece, writes: “If not for climate change, I could roughly predict what kind of racism I will face for the rest of my life, because I have faced the same kind of racism for my entire life so far. What destabilizes that future survivance is precisely the climate.”
I had to sit with that statement for a while.
All those years ago, when I resisted the idea, the label, of climate fiction, I was wrong. It’s not a kind of science fiction; science fiction is a kind of climate fiction. What once seemed speculative becomes existential. What once might have looked like a distant future, hopefully avoidable, now looms, immediate and pressing. It is everyone’s concern. There is no umbrella big enough.
