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This chapter argues that catastrophic climate change fictions have been organised around three main tropes: the new ice age, the burning world and the drowned world. Of these, only the last has a deep history in the Western mythos, dating back to stories of a Great Flood in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. When modern science fiction (SF) began to take shape in the early nineteenth century, it inherited a preoccupation with the Flood from its parent cultures, for example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Richard Jefferies’s After London and Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous. This flood motif continued to be important in American pulp SF. Cooling and warming are more recent preoccupations, dating from the widespread acceptance of ice age theory and greenhouse theory in the late nineteenth century. For most of the twentieth century both science and SF were more interested in cooling. But in the closing quarter of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, widespread scientific concern that anthropogenic warming might more than offset longer-term cooling led to the development of contemporary ‘cli-fi’, concerned primarily with the effects of global heating.

This chapter begins by discussing the relationship between SF and what Daniel Bloom dubbed ‘cli-fi’. Cli-fi, it argues, is best understood as a sub-genre of SF and the crucial shift between the pre-history of climate fiction outlined in the previous chapter and this contemporary sub-genre has been the development of a near-consensus amongst scientists about the potentially disastrous effects of global warming. It proceeds to a critical account of how the notion of the Anthropocene was developed in the sciences, misrepresented in ecocriticism, and challenged in the social sciences by rival concepts, such as the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene. As an alternative, it proposes a sociology of literature derived from the work of Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti. The chapter then proposes an ideal typology of climate fictions arranged around five measures of formal utopianism, which derive substantially from the work of Tom Moylan, and six measures of substantive response to climate change, derived from real-world discourse. This results in a grid of thirty logically possible types of climate fiction. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of narrative strategies and tactics available to cli-fi, citing Nevil Shute’s nuclear doomsday novel On the Beach as a model.

The chapter opens with a discussion of two early instances of global warming cli-fi, Arthur Herzog’s Heat and George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, and argues that both are more or less oblivious to the wider world beyond their respective national frontiers. It proceeds to elaborate an account of the place of SF in the world literary system, understood in Wallerstein and Moretti’s terms as comprising a core, semi-periphery and periphery. This model is then applied more specifically to cli-fi, distinguishing between structural and conjunctural determinants of the evolution of the sub-genre. The main structural determinant, it argues, will be the world SF system. But this may be either countered or reinforced by one or more of three main conjunctural factors: the degree of perceived vulnerability to extreme climate change of any particular national political economy; the salience of Green politics within any particular national polity; and the salience of climate change within broader environmentalist discussions in any particular national culture. The chapter concludes with critical accounts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Antti Tuomainen’s Parantaja.

This chapter explores cli-fi in other print media (short stories, published poetry, comics and graphic novels), recorded popular music (folk and rock), and audio-visual media (cinema, television and videogames). It identifies rhetorically effective instances of cli-fi from a wide range of media, notably Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Keep It in the Ground’, Brian Wood’s The Massive, Anohni’s Hopelessness, Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid and Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. But it concludes, nonetheless, that it is in cli-fi novels and trilogies, especially those that deal with mitigation and negative or positive adaptation, that the major effort to respond to the climate crisis has taken shape. The more general conclusion, then, is that longer narrative forms seem best suited to climate fiction.