Women and children at an internally displaced persons settlement 60km south of the town of Gode, in Ethiopia, reachable only along a dirt track through the desiccated landscape. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, Nov 5 2018 (IPS)

Amitav Ghosh is one of the world’s top novelists writing in the English language today, and Brooklyn-based author of “The Ibis Trilogy” has a new novel set for publication in June 2019.

Billed as a 350-page cli-fi novel set in several locations around the world, it’s historical fiction with a cli-fi theme this time. According to those who have had early peaks at the manuscript, “Gun Island” is about a descendant of a character named Neel who wants to learn more about his ancestry and who first appeared in the author’s earlier trilogy.

The well-received ”Ibis trilogy” was set in the first half of the 19th century and dealt with the opium trade between India and China that was run by the East India Company and the trafficking of coolies to Mauritius. The three books were titled “Sea of Poppies” (2008), “River of Smoke” (2011) and “Flood of Fire” (2015).

There really is a Gun Island off the coast of India, and according to book industry sources, that’s where Ghosh ”might” have taken the title for his much-anticipated new novel, his first in four years. Readers will have to wait for publication day in June 2019 to find out. The novel will appear first in India and Britain in early summer and later roll out in September in New York and Italy, according to Ghosh.

Amitav Ghosh. Credit: Gage Skidmore.

Meru Gokhale, editor-in-chief in the Literary Publishing unit of Penguin Random House India, who has read the book in manuscript form, said on her Twitter feed that “Amitav Ghosh’s new novel ‘Gun Island’ is amazing — lively, humane, fast-paced, almost mystical, contemporary, utterly engaged.”

Meanwhile, a brief online synopsis of the novel sets the scene this way: In Kolkata the main character of the novel named Dr. Anil Kumar Munshi meets, by complete chance, a distant relative named Kanai Dutt, who upends the scholar’s view of the world with a single Hindi word: ”bundook” (gun in English).

In the captivating story Ghosh tells within the 350-page novel, Munshi, a writer and a folklorist, at Dutt’s suggestion realizes that his family legacy may have deeper roots than he imagined, in the tale of a merchant that Munshi had always understood to be the stuff of Bengali legend.

Ghosh describes it as a story about a world wracked by climate change "in which creature and beings of every kind have been torn loose from their accustomed homes by the catastrophic processes of displacement that are now unfolding across the Earth at an ever-increasing pace."
And we’re off in a tale of an extraordinary journey will take readers from Kolkata to Venice and Sicily via a tangled route through the memories of those Munshi meets along the way. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of a man groping toward a sense of what is happening around him, struggling to grasp, from within his accepted understanding of the world, the reality with which he is presented.

By the way, readers and literary critics around the world will be surprised to learn that the main charcater’s name of Munshi is also a fictitious name that Ghosh uses on his personal blog — “A.K. Munshi” — as a virtual pen name for Ghosh himself, which he has given to a ”virtual assistant” who handles the novelist’s reader and media email inquiries online.

The author of a book of essays in 2016 titled “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,” Ghosh, while not a climate activist per se has never-the-less found himself at the front lines of literary circles discussing the role of novels and movies that deal with global warming. In a way, “Gun Island” is the globe-trotting novelist’s attempt to write a cli-fi novel.

A self-admitted fan of some of Hollywood’s cli-fi disaster epics, such as ”The Day After Tomorrow” and ”Geostorm,” Ghosh recently told an interviewer that he enjoys those two films.

“I love them! I watch them obsessively,” he said, adding: “My climate scientist friends joke and laugh at me for this because the practical science in a movie like ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is bad. But I find these movies very compelling. And I do think both film and television are very forward-leaning in dealing with climate change.”

As for his new novel, Ghosh describes it as a story about a world wracked by climate change “in which creature and beings of every kind have been torn loose from their accustomed homes by the catastrophic processes of displacement that are now unfolding across the Earth at an ever-increasing pace.”

“Climate change is the most important crisis of our times and it’s hitting us in the face every day,” he told a reporter in Canada in an email exchange. “Look at these devastating typhoons and tornadoes, or the wildfires in Canada and California. These are deadly serious weather events and lived experiences.”

Two years after publishing “The Great Derangement” to great fanfare among literary scholars worldwide, Ghosh now admits that the essays began as a sort of personal ”auto-critique,” challenging himself for failing to adequately tackle the issues of climate change in his own novels.

The result may very well be “Gun Island.”

When Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood tweets, the world listens.

And when the 76-year-old writer chanced upon a short video of a 6-year-old girl in Australia named “Ruby, the Climate Kid,” talking about how she admires environmental activists like David Suzuki, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sir David Attenborough in a YouTube video she made with her mum Natalie, Atwood turned to one of her popular social media platforms – Twitter – and tweeted the link to her 1.3 million Twitter followers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has also seen the video now and social media is spreading the word tweet by tweet and update by update.

Meet ”Ruby, the Climate Kid,” as she calls herself in the video. With several videos already uploaded to YouTube about protecting the planet and other ecological issues, Ruby plans to continue making short videos in the future and slowly build a fan base, her mum told IPS. These things take time, but with a Tweet from Margaret Atwood making waves across the seas – Atwood also ”Facebooked” theRuby video link– there’s a big future for this young girl with a mind for science.

Ruby is a six-year-old Gamilaraay girl, fiercely passionate about saving the planet and alerting everyone to how dire the situation is, even if they have grown complacent, Independent Australia reported last week, in an article Rubypenned — with a little help from her mother, Natalie Cromb, who serves as the Indigenous Affairs editor for the news publication. According to David Donovan, IA’s editor, the online journal bills itself as “the journal of democracy and independent thought.”

Ruby‘s mum says that, from a very young age, her daughter has been influenced by people like Attenborough, Tyson and Suzuki. And now she has a new friend in Dr Atwood.

Natalie told a reporter:

“She is an avid reader of environmental newsletters and non-fiction books about wildlife. She was appalled to find out that five animals have been declared extinct since she was born and has been determined to make a difference ever since.”

In between school – Ruby is currently in Grade One – saving the planet with YouTube videos and making her parents laugh, she enjoys spending time with her dad and mum, family and friends at their home on Tharawal country.

When Natalie told Ruby the news that a famous Canadian novelist named Margaret Atwood, who was once 6-year-old herself and did science projects with her brother and sister in those long ago days before YouTube existed, Ruby told her mum:

“But she’s so smart, how does she know about me?”

Explaining that Atwood had seen the video online and enjoyed watching it and listening to Ruby‘s words and Tweeted it to her one million followers, Ruby told her mum:

“I hope she likes it and thinks that I have good ideas to save our planet.”

Natalie explained why Ruby makes videos as ”the Climate Kid” and writes about the planet, noting:

”From a very young age, Ruby has shown a demonstrable interest in the world around her and she has observed and learnt a great deal.

”She watches Sir David Attenborough, David Suzuki and Neil deGrasse Tyson documentaries which inspire her and educate her greatly. She has a great affinity for planet life which I think is because of her culture and she genuinely believes she can help save this planet.”

Ruby is now planning to make a short video to speak directly to Margaret Atwood in Canada.

An early peak at the transcript looks something like this, according to sources:

”Dear Margaret Atwood,

I am so happy you saw my video about saving our sick planet. And you Tweeted the link to your one million followers and facebooked the link, too. 

You are so kind. I guess you were six years old once, so you understand me, just a little six year old girl in Australia. I can’t believe you watched my video on Youtube!

I know you care about the oceans, too. You are concerned about our warming oceans and ocean acidification.

I support you, Margaret Atwood. You are my new hero. Thank you. You are 76 and I am six. There is no difference! We are kindred spirits. 

I love you, Margaret Atwood.”

"The industrialized North looks with nostalgia and admiration at the false image of the people whose labor and resources fund its comfort, imagining them to be somehow closer to nature." -- Nick Admussen. Photo Credit: Arun Shrestha/IPS

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, Aug 22 2016 (IPS)

A literature professor at Cornell University in upstate New York, Nick Admussen, has recently published an online literary essay about writing novels in the Anthropocene Age.

Titled “Six proposals for the reform of literature in the age of climate change,” the 1500-word essay will change the way you think about how modern novelists need to change they ways they try to tackle climate change themes.

Admussen is an assistant professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell and has an MFA degree in poetry. In the essay, which has reached a larger audience of literary critics and writers worldwide via social media, Admussen uses the negative poetics of an an early 20th century Chinese writer to outline some habits he feels that fiction writers need to break in order to make culture more responsive to climate change. It might be one of the most important literary essays of the 21st century, and whether you agree with all his six proposals or not, Admussen’s piece deserves an international readership.

One of Admussen’s themes is that global culture has not just failed to adapt to the climate change challenges we now face in this age of global warming, it actively prevents us from facing those challenges. That’s a tall order, but the author has his talking points and they’re all worth paying attention to.

Admussen says he wants to speak to those ”who feel an intense responsibility for our shared future on Earth, those casting around for means and methods by which that future might be improved.”

“Today, global cosmopolitan culture [is creating massive ] chaos,” Admussen, 45, opines. “Power is concentrated in the hands of a few independent corporations and states, each strong enough to escape environmental regulation, none with the will or mission to provoke change in themselves or others. Day after day, human activity fills
the atmosphere with carbon, transforming Earth’s climate, melting the polar ice caps, already destroying the homes and habitats of the planet’s many creatures — including ourselves. Yet we lack the ability to visualize these problems, to locate their source in our own actions and lives, to tell and transform the stories of the interactions between our behaviour and our biome.”

“This is not a failing of science, the science is quite clear: it is a failing of culture,” he adds, noting: ”The single most influential artwork of climate change remains former U.S. Vice President Al Gore standing in front of a Powerpoint presentation 10 years ago. Global culture has not just failed to adapt to the challenges we now face: it actively prevents us from facing those challenges. To change this, we need to break with our existing traditions of art and media, even if that means rejecting some of the works we love most.”

Admussen says that the current way that novelists worldwide try to tackle global warming themes is ”a destructive and atomizing act of imagination” that ”erases our radical dependence on each other and on the environment.”

And he doesn’t stop there, adding: ”Reducing literature to a procession of isolated actors (or authors) belies the responsibility readers have to see the disastrous paradigm in which a focus on individuals occludes acts that harm the broader community.”

Admussen goes from despair to hope. While he maintains that ”the humblest grammatical formulation all the way up to the way we conceptualize our most cherished ideals, the English language is choked by metaphors of possession and exchange, and sorely lacks metaphors of membership and interrelation,” he also champions what he calls perhaps the greatest hope for fiction today, that young people are participating now in fiction.

“They write a fanfic or attend a book club or play Quiddich on the college campus green,” he writes. “They dream themselves into capacious and novel systems. This gives them the power and vision to build futures.”

Building on his variou themes and proposals, Admussen notes that in the last 20 years, advanced economies in the North have taken pride in their modest decreases in carbon dioxide emissions per capita, while at the same time completely ignoring the way in which this is possible because of the exportation of manufacturing to the global South.

“Vast disparities in income, as well as vast differences in the intensity of social and political systems from region to region, drive climate destruction in the present day and fundamentally restrict our ability to conceptualize the global ecosystem of tomorrow,” the Cornell professor writes. “These types of inequities are almost always accompanied by moralizing fictions. The industrialized North looks with nostalgia and admiration at the false image of the people whose labor and resources fund its comfort, imagining them to be somehow closer to nature.  Full partnership for everyone in a global ecosystem means redistributing the rewards that the developed world has already incurred by harming it.”

Like I said, this is all a tall order, and not everyone is keen to accept it.

“I’m circumspect about calls for systemic ‘reform’ of any art form,” a published novelist told me by email. “Calls for art or literature that portray or reflect an under appreciated truth are useful but I think that proposals like these are more likely to emerge as trends naturally, from the culture at and not likely to vault forward because
an academic or critic has articulated them.” Said another novelist, also via email: “Admussen’s essay is interesting, but ‘prescription’ for artists is not a good idea, and ‘reform’ in relation to the arts is always pretty sinister.”

The entire essay is published by The Critical Flame here.

Excerpt:

A scene in Guiuan, Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan, Nov. 21, 2013. Credit: Roberto De Vido/cc by 2.0

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

I live on a crowded, subtropical island ​nation ​in the Western Pacific, on the opposite side of the “Pacific Pond” from North America. And just south of Taiwan is the ​many-splendored island nation of the ​Philippines. We are neighbours. You can fly there in one hour, it’s that close.

So when Typhoon ​Yolanda hit Tacloban City in the Philippines in November 2013, we ​in south Taiwan ​could feel the rain and wind here in Taiwan, although the storm made its direct hit on Tacloban and ​sadly ​killed 7,000 people there."Movies like 'Taklub' present scenarios that make large events comprehensible and future possibilities concrete." -- Prof. Edward Rubin

​The Philippines has been a Catholic country for over 400 years now. People ​there ​know the Bible, people know Jesus, and people are devout and deeply religious.

So when the well-known Filipino film director Brillante ​Ma ​Mendoza decided to make a feature film about the aftermath of ​what the international community called ​Typhoon Haiyan — known as ”Typhoon Yolanda” in the Philippines — he used a quote from the ​Bible to bookend the story: “A time to tear ​one’s garments and mourn, and a time to ​mend and ​​build up.”

Mendoza’s ​powerful and emotional ​cli-fi movie “Trap” (called “Taklub” in Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines) was set up originally as an ”advocacy movie” financed by the government of the Philippines ​and produced by a senator from the national parliament ​to help raise awareness of typhoon readiness and the resilience of the Filipino people.

The carefully-crafted 90-minute feature has already been shown at the Cannes Film Festival and has a good chance of bagging an Oscar next year in Hollywood in the best foreign film category.

​It has also been recently been hailed by the Cli Fi Movie Awards (dubbed the ”Cliffies​”) — a film awards programme that recognises the best climate-themed movies worldwide — as the winner of the international 2015 cli fi awards for: best picture, best director, best actress, best actor, best child actor, best screenplay, best cinematography, best producer, best government sponsor and best trailer.

It’s that good, it’s that poignant, it’s that brilliant. Mendoza is a film director who is well-known in Asia, but while “Trap” is a powerful climate-themed movie with a great cast and helmed by a savvy director, whether the movie will catch on among arthouse fans in Europe and America ​it ​is hard to say.​

But for the Cli Fi Movie Awards, whose mission is to wake up the world via movie awards about climate change issues. of all the cli fi films nominated for 2015, “Taklub” took top honours in all categories this year! It is that important a movie.

“Trap” is a quiet, slow-moving, thoughtful piece of international cinema. It stars the famous Filipina actress Nora Aunor, and for her performance alone, the film is worth the price of admission.

​The quote from Ecclesiastes ​fits this movie to a T.

For me, that’s what “Trap” is about: a powerful piece of cli-fi storytelling that is about an almost unspeakable tragedy, following the lives of a group of typhoon survivors trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, but at at the same time Mendoza says after the tear​ing of garments ​ and mourning, it’s time to mend the country and get things right again. And prepare for the next big storm as well.

​I asked a professor from Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, Edward Rubin, who is very concerned with climate change issues and the power of novels and movies to impact changes in public awareness, what he thought of Mendoza’s movie and its power to effect change.

“Written and audiovisual fiction (cli-fi novels and cli-fi movies like ‘Taklub’) can — and must — play a crucial role in educating people worldwide about climate change,” Rubin told me. “To begin with, people will watch the movie and be moved by it; they are not going to look at government charts and scientific research papers.”

Even more important, movies like ‘Taklub’ present scenarios that make large events comprehensible and future possibilities concrete,” he added, noting: “What is truly false, and belongs in the category of puerile fantasy, is to deny that climate change is occurring. The fact is that many of the grim possibilities portrayed in a cli-fi movie like ‘Taklub’ will become realities unless we take global concerted action.”​

“Trap” is not a documentary. It’s pure storytelling, pure cinema, pure magic. Can it help to raise awareness about global warming and climate change in the Philippines and worldwide?

Mendoza set out to make a touching local movie for audiences in the Philippines first, but he has succeeded in creating a piece of art that transcends borders now and has a global tale to tell.

It’s well worth seeing if it comes your way.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Paolo Bacigalupi. Credit: JT Thomas Photography

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, May 22 2015 (IPS)

Item: In a recent blog post at the New Yorker magazine, staff writer Dana Goodyear surveys the current drought impacting California and writes: “It’s hard to escape the feeling we are living a cli-fi novel’s Chapter One.”

Item: Edward L. Rubin, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville, surveys the ongoing California drought in an oped at Salon magazine, writing: “As the California drought enters its fourth year, it is threatening to strangle the splendid irrigation system that transformed the previously desolate Central Valley into some of the world’s most productive farmland and the scruffy Los Angeles Basin into one of the world’s great cities.”

Item: Indian film director Shekhar Kapur is currently in pre-production for a climate-themed movie about future ”water wars” in New Delhi and titled “Paani,” a Hindi word for ”water.”

Item: Adam Trexler in the introduction to “Anthropocene Fictions,” his newly-released academic study of 150 climate change novels, by authors in Germany, Finland and Canada over the past 50 years, writes: “Perhaps prompted by [the] coinage of “cli-fi,” [media] reported that the global warming has spurred the creation of a whole new genre of fiction.”

Welcome to the 21st century, where water issues combined with climate change and global warming threaten to turn the future into something that is difficult for most of us to imagine.

But that is where novelists and film directors come in, for they can toy with ideas and scenarios and try to make sense of where we stand now and where are headed.

Meet Paolo Bacigalupi, a fifth-generation Italian American and a prose writer with a sterling literary pedigree.

While he once wrote novels that were marketed as science fiction, his new novel, titled “The Water Knife,” is pure cli-fi. The story he tells seems almost ripped from daily newspaper headlines about heat waves, droughts, water shortages and, well, “water wars.”

A Colorado native married to a woman from India, Bacigalupi has in the past written environmentally-themed sci-fi novels. ”The Water Knife,” released this month, leaves science fiction behind and ventures deep into the mushrooming cli-fi genre.

Now in his forties, Bacigalupi writes like few people can today, prose that sings, ideas that flow, musings that ponder who we are and what we are doing on – and to – this planet Earth.

He is famous for saying that one of the classic questions that resonates with him as an author is: “If this goes on, what will the world look like?”

”The Water Knife” is set in America’s near future, and it’s about “water wars” between two major western cities: Las Vegas and Phoenix. The title comes from the starring role that so-called “water
knives” – a term the author coined for his story – play in the climate-themed story.

As master storyteller Bacigalupi frames it, “water knives” are eco-terrorists, hired thugs who become major players in a near future water war in the American Southwest that he imagines and delves into.

At a recent appearance at the annual American Library Association convention in Chicago, Bacigalupi introduced his new novel this way:

“You want a drought? I’ll give you a drought!”

And that’s what ”The Water Knife” is all about: a major drought that impacts the West.

Sound familiar? This book has legs, and it is likely to make a major impact of its own upon publication.
Translations are sure to appear in at least 12 editions outside the U.S., from Brazil to Spain.

Bacigalupi has a good track record as a novelist and short story writer, and he has fans worldwide now.

An earlier novel, ”The Windup Girl,” was a major genre hit, and ”The Water Knife” appears poised to go mainstream with an even bigger impact.

“Mad Max,” “The Hunger Games,” “Waterworld,” “The Walking Dead” and innumerable other books, movies and television series portray futures where the world has been devastated by disasters.

Do we really want to assign blame to global warming?

In the famous words of the American cartoonist Walt Kelly who created the Pogo character, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Bacigalupi knows this better than most people.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Devastating floods in the northeastern Indian state of Assam in 2014 prompted the government to erect bamboo bridges. This man and child travel from one village to another on a boat, and travel by foot over the bridges. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, Apr 8 2015 (IPS)

University lecture halls in North America are no strangers to the ”cli-fi” genre of climate-themed novels and movies, but now India is getting into the act as well, thanks to the pioneering work of Professor T. Ravichandran of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) in Uttar Pradesh.

Dr. Ravichandran’s course, titled “Cli-fi and Cli-flicks,” is set to begin in late July and consists of 15 modules covering such topics as eco-fiction, eco-fabulism, and representations of climate change issues in feature films and documentaries."How long will I continue to teach Shakespeare and Shelley and make them aesthetically love the beauty of daffodils or skylarks when in reality they would soon become endangered if climate change goes unchecked?" -- Professor T. Ravichandran

Aimed at undergraduate students at IITK, the course will be the first of its kind in all of India, Dr. Ravichandran told me in a recent email.

“In India, climate change awareness is not as acutely felt as in the U.S. or the U.K,” he said. ”My recent research on ‘Literature, Technology and Environment: Global and Pedagogical Perspectives,’ sponsored by the Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic fellowship from USIEF, India, and hosted at Duke University in North Carolina, was a turning point in my career.”

Dr. Ravichandran said he experienced a paradigm shift in his thinking about the way in which he connects to the natural environment during his fellowship in North Carolina.

When I asked him what he meant, he replied: “It made me to think seriously of my role as a teacher of literature to engineering students. How long will I continue to teach Shakespeare and Shelley and make them aesthetically love the beauty of daffodils or skylarks when in reality they would soon become endangered if climate change goes unchecked?”

To answer his own question, Professor Ravichandran added: “In order to make myself relevant to my existence on this Earth, I thought at least I should cause awareness on climate change in the minds of my students. So that’s how I started working on the course. In India, I hope to make this course a successful and effective one.”

Since the predominating global concern today is climate change, which obliterates geopolitical boundaries and connects humans in search of common solutions, Dr. Ravichandran is appropriating an inter-disciplinary approach for his course, he told me.

“Climate fiction (‘cli-fi’) and climate films (‘cli-flicks’) offer an inter-disciplinary study of a looming phenomenon that the humans in the Anthropocene age witness helplessly as if trapped on a sinking ship,” he said.

“The real question to be addressed is not, as posed by climate change sceptics, whether this catastrophe is so alarming that humans need to act on it immediately, but how long can humankind afford to remain impervious to something that is so glaring?” he added.

Dr. Ravichandran said that he hopes that having his students focus on novels and films in the ‘cli-fi’ genre will foster a change in mind-set that can open them up to thinking about the sustainable use of scarce resources and ensuring the symbiotic sustenance of the human and the nonhuman on Earth.

Students in the pioneering IITK course will be reading such novels as “Year of the Flood,” “A Friend of the Earth,” and “Flight Behavior.”

In additon, movies such as “Interstellar,” “Snowpiercer” and “The Day after Tomorrow” will be screened and discussed, Dr. Ravichandran said.

As a reporter from North America who has been closely following the rise of the cli-fi genre in the West, I am glad to see IITK in India offering a course like this to its engineering students. Call it a meme, a motif, a cultural prism, a buzzword, a PR tool, or a marketing term, ”cli-fi” is here to stay and India has just joined the club.

In fact, with this course, the first of its kind in India, the professor and his students will be making history, and I hope the media in Uttar Pradesh and beyond will pick up this story as a news story in English and Hindi.

Professor Ravichandran’s novel course could very well become a role model for other academics in India to follow.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

2015 is shaping up to be ''The Year of Cli-Fi'' in academia, and not just in North America, but in Britain and Australia as well. Credit: Tulane Public Relations/cc by 2.0

By Dan Bloom
TAIPEI, Mar 10 2015 (IPS)

From Columbia University in New York to the University of Cambridge in Britain, college classrooms are picking up on the “cli-fi” genre of fiction, and cinema and academia is right behind them.

While authors are penning cli-fi novels — with movie scriptwriters creating cli-fi screenplays to try to sell to Hollywood — classrooms worldwide are now focusing attention of the rising genre of literature and cinema."Literary fiction has dreamed up many versions of the end of the world, but how is contemporary fiction dealing with the threat of climate change?" -- Prof. Jenny Bavidge

Jenny Bavidge at the University of Cambridge taught a class on cli-fi last summer at the Institute of Continuing Education there, and Darragh Martin is teaching a cli-fi class at Columbia University in Manhattan this summer, too.

Cli-fi is a catchy abbreviation for the genre of “climate fiction,” much in the same way that “sci-fi” is a nickname for “science fiction.” With news articles about the rise of cli-fi appearing in the New York Times and Time magazine last year, literature professors saw an opportune time to introduce cli-fi classes into the curriculum.

“Literary fiction has dreamed up many versions of the end of the world, but how is contemporary fiction dealing with the threat of climate change?” Bavidge asked students in her introduction to the class last summer. “This course will focus on works by contemporary authors, including Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, and ask whether ‘cli-fi’ imagines solutions as well as ends.

“As people living through this particular historical moment, we may want to ask how far [cli-fi] novels contribute to efforts to better understand our relationship with the planet and its ecosystems,” she wrote

One of my mentors in the world of sci-fi literature is the novelist David Brin.

I once asked him about how climate change themes have been influencing sci-fi novels and movies, and he told me by email: “Global warming and flooding were important in my 1989 novel ‘Earth,’ but they were earlier featured in the film ‘Soylent Green’ based on Harry Harrison’s novel ‘Make Room, Make Room!’”

Six U.S. colleges have set up cli-fi classes this year, with both undergrad and graduate level courses involved. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This year, 2015, is shaping up to be ”The Year of Cli-Fi” in academia, and not just in North America, but in Britain and Australia as well.

Several non-English speaking countries are also looking at cli-fi and how it impacts their own literary circles, including Brazil, Spain, Germany and France.

While six universities and colleges in the United States have taken up the call and are part of the new trend in higher education in 2015, the genre is reaching out worldwide to writers (and readers) across the globe. Cli-fi is not an American or British genre; it has become a global genre.

The Chronicle of Higher Education newspaper in Washington, D.C., which covers academic issues in a variety of subject areas, has assigned a staff reporter to look into the rise of cli fi in the academy as well, according to sources.

In addition to Martin’s summer class at Columbia, which starts on May 27, professors at Temple University in Philadelphia, the University of Oregon, Holyoke Community College, the State University of New York in Geneseo (SUNY Geneseo) and The University of Delaware are currently teaching cli-fi classes this semester, with a total of about 200 students nationwide enrolled.

It’s a beginning. And there’s more to come.

Academics writing in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, among other world languages are putting out papers about cli-fi and planning classes in the genre at the universities where they teach.

There is, of course, a long and storied history of teaching sci-fi at colleges in North America and Britain, with several universities even setting up literature departments that specialise in sci-fi research. Now cli-fi is joining the global academic world and finding a room of its own there as well.

Elizabeth Trobaugh and Steve Winters at Holyoke Community College are team-teaching a climate-themed literature class this semester titled “Cli Fi: Stories and Science from the Coming Climate Apocalypse.”

When I told Trobaugh that I planned to write an oped about her course, she replied: “Thank you for your interest in what we are doing this semester. Professor Winters and I thought we were onto something, and your email confirms our conviction that cli-fi is indeed on the rise, and this is the moment (as Macklemore says in the song) to catch the wave.”

Stephen Siperstein, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, is also teaching a cli-fi literature class this semester, with his undergrad students posting weekly class blogs about what they are reading and how they are reacting to the new genre of fiction.

At Temple University, Ted Howell is teaching an undergraduate class titled “Cli-fi: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and Apocalypse” with about 30 students enrolled. They are also keeping weekly blogs about the course, using them to interact online outside of class with their professor and fellow students.

At SUNY Geneseo in upstate New York, Professor Ken Cooper is teaching a class this semester titled “Reader and Text: Cli-Fi.”

”Representative works will include Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘The Windup Girl,’ Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behavior,’ and other novels,” Cooper told his students by way of introduction, adding mischievously: “There will be at least one zombie apocalypse, too.”

Siohban Carroll at the University of Delaware is a specialist in 19th century British literature, and told me in a recent Tweet: “I’m teaching a 19th Century ‘cli-fi’ class right now at the graduate level. One segment is on Mary Shelley and the Anthropocene.”

So there you have it. Cli-fi has reached into academia and found partners on college campuses. It’s a worldwide trend because global warming impacts us all, and literature and cinema always respond to the things that matter.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Literature has a role to play in our discussions about global warming impacts worldwide. Credit: Karoly Czifra/cc by 2.0

By Dan Bloom
TAIWAN, Apr 4 2014 (IPS)

When we read novels or short fiction in any language, we read to understand the story. We read to learn something new, and hopefully to get some kind of emotional uplift through the words on the page and the skills of the storyteller.

So how to tell the “story” of climate change and global warming?The more we embrace the science behind climate change at a cultural level, the more effectively we can join together to avert the worst.

A new literary genre dubbed “cli-fi” has been evolving over the past few years, and while its name is a takeoff on sci-fi, this new genre is focused on stories that relate to climate change and how it impacts human life now and in the future.

Some insist that cli-fi is a just subgenre of sci-fi, and that makes sense on one level. But in other ways, cli-fi is a genre of its own, and it’s gaining momentum around the world not merely as escapism or entertainment – although it often has those elements – but also as a serious way of addressing the myriad complex, universal issues surrounding climate change.

I know a little about cli-fi because I have been working for the past few years to popularise it, not only in the English-speaking world but also among the billions of people who read in Spanish, Chinese, German or French, to name but a few. Cli-fi, as I see it, is a genre that should be tackled by writers in any nation in any language. It’s an international genre with an international readership.

A growing number of cli-fi novels are targeting a youthful audience – what’s called the YA (young adult) category – such as Mindy McGinnis’ “Not a Drop to Drink,” “The Carbon Diaries 2015” by Saci Lloyd, and “Floodland” by Marcus Sedgewick. For indeed, it is children and teenagers who will suffer the consequences of previous generations’ lifestyle choices.

In a world facing potentially catastrophic impacts from climate change, this new literary genre is now becoming part of our communal storytelling culture, imparting new ideas and insights about the future humanity might face, not only in 10 years, but in 100 or 500 years as well.

This is where cli-fi comes in. It can play an important role in bringing the emotions and feelings of characters in a well-written story or novel to the awareness of readers worldwide. Imagine a cli-fi novel that not only reached thousands of readers, but also touched them, and perhaps motivated them to become a louder voice in the raging international policy debate over carbon emissions.

That’s the potential of cli-fi.

One U.S. university is now offering a literature course on cli-fi novels and movies for graduate students working on degrees in environmental studies and literature. For Stephanie LeMenager, who is leading the class at the University of Oregon this year, the course gives her and her students a chance to explore the power of literature and film as writers and directors grapple with some of the difficult issues facing humankind as the 21st century unfolds.

LeMenager’s class is called “The Cultures of Climate Change.” It’s the first in North America, even the world, to focus on the arts and climate change this way. And I am sure that other universities around the world will follow this pioneering effort by adding new courses on climate fiction for their students as well.

Nathaniel Rich is a 34-year-old author who wrote the widely acclaimed novel “Odds Against Tomorrow,” a story set in near-future Manhattan which delves into the “mathematics of catastrophe”. A resident of New Orleans, he believes that more books like his will be published – not just in English, and not just from the perspective of Western writers in wealthy nations.

Writers from around the world also need to be encouraged to dip their toes into the cli-fi genre and use the literature of their own cultures to try to wake people up about the future that might await us all on a slowly-warming planet with no end in sight.

The plots can be scary, but cli-fi novels offer a chance to explore these issues with emotion and prose. Books matter. Literature has a role to play in our discussions about global warming impacts worldwide.

You might say that the climate-change canon dates back as far as a novel titled ”The Drowned World’. written in 1962 by British writer JG Ballard. Another early book about climate change was written in 1987 by Australian George Turner, titled “The Sea and Summer.”

Barbara Kingsolver, a U.S. novelist, published a very powerful cli-fi novel a few years ago titled “Flight Behavior.” It made a big impression on me when I read it last summer, and I recommend to readers here, too.

Canadian Mary Woodbury has created the webzine Cli-Fi Books that lists cli-fi novels past and present.

How do I see the future? I envision a world where humans cling to hope and optimism. I am an optimist. And I believe that the more we embrace the science behind climate change at a cultural level, the more effectively we can join together to avert the worst.

Dan Bloom is a freelance writer from Boston based in Taiwan. A 1971 graduate of Tufts University where he majored in French literature, he has been working as a climate activist and a literary activist since 2006. He can be found on Twitter @polarcityman