Literary Hub website poked ''cli-fi'' novelists and Cli-Fi short story anthology editors
for some quotes on the role of ''cli-fi'' in this age
of runaway [AGW] [TheAnthrocene].
Excerpts: Here's what some of them said:
“Climate change is a social and spiritual emergency as well as a political, scientific one. Clearly all the arts need to address themselves to it, and never fear, soon enough they’ll have to. All too fast that confrontation will be unavoidable. The fact that we can’t put out the fires and lower the seas with words or pictures or music doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for trying.”
–Lydia Millet, author of Fight No More
“Roger Ebert called the movies ‘a machine that generates empathy.’ The same is true of climate-change fiction. Climate change is both monolithic and multifarious. Its effects show up differently in different places, but it’s also one big thing that we have to live through together. Stories give us the power to see climate chaos anew, through the eyes of people whose lives and experiences are utterly unfamiliar to us. They’re indispensable for building the shared global consciousness that we’ll need to respond collectively, and in time to preserve as much as we can.”
–Joey Eschrich, editor of ASU cli-fi short story anthologies 1 and 2
“Humans are no good at the large-scale or the future tense. We tend to recoil from enormity in awe and stupefaction—a reaction that is terribly dangerous now, in the Anthropocene, when it is not nature but humanity that is the uncontrollable danger, the ungraspable vastness. Fiction is uniquely equipped to counter that paralysis by bringing readers a direct and human-sized experience of climate change: one family’s battle against rising water, one man’s flight from a forest fire. I have to believe that if we learn to see, up close, what we have done, we might begin to change.”
–C. Morgan Babst, author of The Floating World
“Our deepening climate crisis is going to require much more creativity and willpower from all of us, and we’re not going to get through this without the power of imagination. Which means that fiction and creative writing have a unique and super vital role to play in helping us to visualize what’s coming and how we’re going to cope with it. Seldom have fiction writers had such a rich opportunity.”
–Charlie Jane Anders, author of The City in the Middle of the Night
“As climate change impacts become more widespread, our world grows less legible. I believe this transition, which is already upon us, will create a hunger for literature that helps make sense of it. And if fiction is, at its core, an exercise in empathy—the act standing in the shoes of another and inhabiting her life for a few hundred pages—then literature that documents life in this changing world might help un-impacted individuals understand what’s at stake. In a world in which climate change impacts will not be equitable, I see this as a crucial step toward collective action.”
–Ashley Shelby, author of South Pole Station
“Great fiction allows us to see ourselves more clearly—to understand how the most urgent crises of our time touch our inner lives. ‘The private life,’ as James Baldwin wrote, ‘is the writer’s subject.’ I don’t think a novel can cause the United States and China to agree on stricter emissions limits or make West Virginians hate coal. But fiction can help us to understand how our climate crisis is changing us.”
–Nathaniel Rich, author of Odds Against Tomorrow and the forthcoming Losing Earth
“For a long time, much of literary fiction has been committed to the idea that meaning is primarily subjective and synthetic, mediated by commodity and defined by the morally ambiguous private self. Until our stories return to the stance that meaning is out there, that it resides in the enormously difficult task of reconciling human society to the influences and affordances of the planet, we will fail at the task of living here, inside the cycles that the living world requires. Climate change is one symptom of that failure. The challenge lies not so much in taking climate change as our subject; it lies in taking the Earth as our object and our setting and our enduring source of meaning.”
–Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize winning cli-fi author of The Overstory
Hopefully next year's 2020 Lit Hub list of climate-theme writers will grow to include more women and men and people of colour and non-English speaking people and such climate gurus as David Wallace Wells and James Bradley and Roy Scranton and Paolo Bacigalupi and Annaleen Newitz and Megan Hunter. And many many more, film directors like Paul Schrader and Marshall Herskovitz, too. The next 80 years are going to see a massive increase in the number of writers jumping into the cli-fi literary arena. -- Dan Bloom, editor, The Cli-Fi Report
“Fiddling while Rome burns, whistling from the coal mine, serenading the doomed while the ship sinks—I’d like to think that storytellers and poets have a more urgent role right now than this. As many other writers and critics have said, if you’re writing realistic fiction that’s set in the modern world right now, you’re already writing about climate change in some way. There’s nothing the least bit speculative about cli-fi anymore. We already know, because we can see it happening today. The economic and practical effects of climate change will be felt first and worst by the very populations that are the most at-risk and vulnerable. We have to tell those stories. Not just because it’s a moral imperative but because pretty soon, those stories are going to be representative of more of the audience for fiction. Writing fiction and poetry in the era of climate change is an opportunity and a privilege. The purpose of art is to generate radical empathy, to enlarge our understanding of ourselves and our world, through people and stories that dramatize what a climate report or news story can’t. And our world has never needed that generative power more than now. Who if not us?”
–Siobhan Adcock, author of The Completionist
“...With climate change in particular, Paolo Bacigalupi has been modeling what the world looks like after the fact; anyone who thinks climate change is not a big deal should be assigned his novels.”
-- John Scalzi
[Hopefully next year's 2020 Lit Hub list of climate-theme writers will grow to include more women and men and people of colour and non-English speaking people and such climate gurus as David Wallace Wells and James Bradley and Roy Scranton and Paolo Bacigalupi and Annaleen Newitz and Megan Hunter. And many many more, film directors like Paul Schrader and Marshall Herskovitz, too. The next 80 years are going to see a massive increase in the number of writers jumping into the cli-fi literary arena. -- Dan Bloom, editor, The Cli-Fi Report ]
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