Cat Sparks is a multi-award-winning author, editor and artist whose former employment has included: media monitor, political and archaeological photographer, graphic designer, Fiction Editor of Cosmos Magazine and Manager of Agog! Press. In 2012 an Australia Council emerging writers grant enabled her to participate in Margaret Atwood’s The Time Machine Doorway workshop in the U.S. She’s in the final throes of a PhD in climate change fiction. Her short story collection The Bride Price was published in 2013. Her debut novel, Lotus Blue, will be published by Talos Press in February. I asked her to define Climate Change Fiction for me.
What exactly is Cli Fi?
Cli Fi is a label coined by activist/blogger Dan Bloom in 2008. Other names for it include anthropocene fiction, slow apocalypse fiction, climate fiction and hyperobject fiction.
According to academic Gary K Wolfe, these are “tales that grapple with the emergent realities of climate change, species die-offs, virulent new diseases, and the inexorable pattern of the world going irreversibly to hell in a comparatively pokey handbasket.”
No singular concept, influence or idea connects all climate fiction. It did not emerge from any specific literary movement or school of thought, however it’s easy to see how it could be considered a subgenre of science fiction. As critic Laurence Buell reminds us, “for half a century science fiction has taken a keen, if not consistent interest in ecology, in planetary endangerment, in environmental ethics, in humankind’s relation to the non-human world.”
In the early 20th century the eco-catastrophe emerged as a literary sub-genre, with examples such as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1954), J.G. Ballard’s 1960s drowned world disaster sequence and Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962).
But not all climate change stories are dystopias or post apocalypses — or even classifiable as science fiction, for example, see Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour or Kathryn Heyman’s Floodline. This is why climate fiction can be said to stand as a genre of its own. Author and critic James Bradley suggests that climate fiction “Deals with expressions of deep and pervasive transformations of the world and ourselves” and “embraces the broader disruption of natural and social systems by environmental change and capitalism.”
What exactly is your particular interest in it? What are you looking at in your thesis? Why did you choose it as a topic?
I’ve been attracted to post apocalypse narratives since I was a kid. Something about the aesthetics of wastelands and blasted cityscapes, nature creeping back to reclaim fractured territory, civilization stripped back to its bones. Post apocalypse is a broad and well-studied category when it comes to fiction, so I narrowed my focus to climate fiction — The field began expanding almost from the moment I took an interest in it. I started off studying YA material, but eventually changed tack for various reasons and now I’m examining three identified vectors of short climate fiction.
Many novels incorporating climate change use it as a backdrop against which to set familiar narratives. Short SF has always been concerned with ideas themselves, so I decided to focus on anthologies presenting speculative ecological narratives to examine how responses to concepts of ecocatastrophe have evolved alongside real world science reportage and revelation across recent decades.
Do you think Cli Fi is making an important contribution to the human response to climate change? Or is the dystopian aspect of it just making people feel overwhelmed?
Climate fiction definitely has a part to play. In my eyes the argument that art should be beholden to nothing and no one breaks down when it comes to a situation as dire as this one, where the one planet in the universe known for certain to harbor life is under threat of being rendered uninhabitable.
There’s plenty of data available to explain what’s at stake with global climate. Articles, websites, government reports, books, television, radio, podcasts explain the science and the threats, but data doesn’t seem to be enough. The process has well and truly started. As I write this, an uncharacteristically vicious storm is ripping my backyard to shreds.
Neuroscientists and biologists explain that human brains aren’t wired to respond easily to large, slow-moving threats, that we suffer from “loss aversion”, which means we’re more afraid of losing what we want in the short-term than surmounting obstacles in the distance, that climate change, despite occurring at faster rates than predicted, is happening far too slowly to get our attention.
It’s important to keep the conversation going as we adjust to crazy unseasonal weather events and all the other elements besides. In a few years all non-historical mimetic fiction might end up classifiable as climate fiction to some degree.
As Kim Stanley Robinson commented to fellow science fiction author Terry Bisson in 2009 “Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines.” It’s tempting to view relentless post-apocalypse and dystopian scenarios as a form of contempt pornography. Wallowing in misery is far easier than postulating positive, attainable futures.
What we need is people talking about alternative pathways. We need this in science, politics, government and we need this in art. Because people respond to art differently to the way they respond to facts and figures. Art has the power of becoming personal. Different media speaks to different people in different ways. Art encourages people to think and feel.
Is this a role Science/speculative fiction has always played?
Kim Stanley Robinson says: “You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.”
What science fiction has done — and continues to do — is inspire scientists by developing alongside real science. By imagining future scientific developments, science fiction creates the conditions for emergence, a feedback loop and commentary on the consequences of certain technological pathways and their likely cultural impacts.
Professor Noel Gough argues that critical readings of science fiction texts should be integral to both science and environmental education as the narrative strategies used by educators in these fields rarely encompass the narrative complexities needed to make problems of human interrelationships with environments intelligible (and, thus, amenable to resolution).
In his Hieroglyph Theory, author Neal Stephenson names today’s belief in ineluctable certainty as the true innovation killer of our age. He challenges science fiction authors to stop wallowing in apocalypse and dystopia, to start writing the kinds of stories that will influence future generations of scientists and engineers, inspiring them to get the big stuff done.
Does it annoy you that some cli fi writers try to distance themselves from Science Fiction? Or is it necessary?
At first it did annoy me, the sense that Cli Fi seemed to be being used as a form of subterfuge, to prevent literary types from unwittingly catching Sci Fi cooties. But it’s more complicated than that. Both utopian and dystopian literature are regarded in some quarters as being altogether separate genres from SF and, as I mentioned above, there is an argument for Cli Fi to be considered as a genre of its own. Having said that, most of the climate fiction I’ve read is very clearly classifiable as science fiction.
Science fiction has long been tainted by its populist, pulp heritage, but this is changing fast, partly because the world we live in is a science fictional place. I agree with critic Roger Luckhurst who says “Science fiction is a literature of technologically saturated societies. A genre that can therefore emerge only relatively late in modernity, it is a popular literature that concerns the impact of Mechanism (to use the old term for technology) on cultural life and human subjectivity.”
Science fiction, being fundamentally an outward-looking genre, is sometimes viewed as being in direct contrast to literary fiction, which turns inward to explore the human condition. But as humanity becomes more and more integrated and inseparable from technology, the boundaries between genre and literary fiction are becoming increasingly meaningless for readers.
Perhaps we no longer have the luxury of looking inward in a world into which humanity is pumping climate-warming carbon dioxide 10 times faster than at any point in the past 66 million years. Perhaps this explains why so many so-called “literary” writers have been borrowing our well-worn genre traditions: Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, Claire Vey Watkins, Lionel Shriver. When Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandell became a National Book Award finalist in 2014, the author went to great pains to explain that the literature/genre divide in relation to her work was to do with marketing, nothing more.
Science fiction authors are required to craft and shape entire new worlds complete with functional cultures and economic systems in order to render future projections engaging and believable. Such a skillset is invaluable as we come to the point of requiring new approaches to life on a rapidly warming Earth.
Do you think George R.R. Martian planned the cli fi aspect of Game of Thrones? I mean his is a world in which political battles have distracted humanity from a looming climate disaster.
I cannot speak to GRRM’s intentions, but there is nothing new about looming climate disaster, either in history or in epic fantasy fiction. Climate fiction, cli fi, whatever you choose to call it, deals with anthropogenic climate change. Changes wrought by human intervention.
Does cli fi offer more than a call to arms? Does it also offer solutions? Is there any hopeful Cli Fi out there?
Author Jeff VanderMeer reminds us that novels and stories can be laboratories in which situations may be combined and tested like chemical reactions.
The Solarpunk movement, is as yet fledgling but definitely hopeful and gaining momentum. Researcher Adam Flynn describes it as “an opposition that begins with infrastructure as a form of resistance.” Imagine elegant high-end sustainable technology powered by renewables; Microgrids, stained glass solar panels; decentralised, organic, free-flowing art noveau inspired design. Permaculture and community nudging out corporation and consumerism.
There’s not much fiction to back it up yet – a 2012 Brazilian anthology, the yet-to-be-released Sunvault from Solarpunk Press, Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction, the upcoming Ecopunk anthology from Ticonderoga Publications edited by myself and Liz Grzyb seeking “New narratives of radical transformation and sustainability.” We’re open to submissions now: http://tinyurl.com/zeqaj84
There are definitely stories not yet being written. Stories featuring the abandonment of quarterly capitalism, narratives of fossil fuel divestment and energy transitioning, etc.
If someone was going to start reading Cli Fi, what would you recommend as a starting point?
John Joseph Adams’s anthology Loosed Upon the World. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, recently republished in a single volume called Green Earth. Long, but well worth the time and effort – the guy has been 20 years ahead of the game thus far. James Bradley’s Clade, George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, Saci Lloyd’sThe Carbon Diaries, Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists by Jane Rawson, Julie Bertagna’s Exodus.
What’s your next publication?
My debut science fiction novel, Lotus Blue, will be published by Talos Press in February 2017. It’s set in a far off, climate altered future Australia. The cover image has not yet been released, but the jacket synopsis can be found here.
*****
Interview by Jane Routley – SFFWorld.com © 2016
Great interview, and many good ideas to explore. For more on cli-fi at The Cli-Fi Report see cli-fi.net
Great interview. Really enjoyed reading it and thanks for the tips for further reading. Keen to read Lotus Blue in Feb!
Woot! Great stuff. Cli Fi is a new one to me though certainly I love a good apocalypse. And my gator alter ego is waiting for the Great Flood. I’m collecting interesting things from around the web for my blog so I’ll add a link to here in due course.
Paul Di Filippo the literary critic in the USA, recently linked to this interview in a new essay headlined ‘hot-tomorrow:- the urgency-and-beauty-of-cli.fi’ – http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2016/08/hot-tomorrow-urgency-and-beauty-of-cli.html
A really good article. Thanks for the heads up.