An Open Letter via Twitter to Greta Thunberg: a thread on Twitter and here below:

An Open Letter via Twitter to Greta Thunberg:
https://twitter.com/do_you_cli_fi_/status/1178264823181635584

Kid, you rock! Keep rockin' and keep rocking the boat. With your voice, your words, your passion, your angst, you are waking your generation up. It's important. Greta, when I was 19, long ago, I lived in Stockholm aboard the ''Af Chapman'' sailing vessel docked in the city harbor and used as a youth hostel for young people travelling in Europe. Summer 1969... Memories.

Greta, I want to tell you today about a new genre for novels and movies that we in America call "cli-fi." It stands for climate change novels or movies. Not "sci-fi" but "cli-fi." It's something you might be interested in...cli-fi.net

I'm telling you about cli-fi --  #clifi -- today because I hope that as you get older and write more books, even TV scripts for Swedish drama series there, you might take an interest in cli-fi and perhaps write a YA cli-fi novel for children and teens...

so with this open letter, I'm hoping you will want to learn more about the cli-fi genre and discuss it with your friends and followers. And perhaps read some cli-fi novels by Scandinavian writers in Sweden Finland and Norway...

and most importantly, as you enter your 20s and 30s, I hope you might try your hand at writing a cli-fi novel for adults. I just want to wish you well, good luck, and tell you about my friend in Goteborg, Staffan Fennander, who I met in Rome while he was busking

Staffan is an old man now, like me, 70, but we remain "forever young" in our hearts and minds, and I hope you will remain forever young, too...

goodbye and good luck, Greta, I hope this tweet thread finds you in happy spirits during your sojourn in North America (and soon #Chile, too).

 here's looking at ya, Kid....

SO: do your best, Greta. Give it your best shot. I know you will. -- Ciao, from Dan Bloom, doing my best to promote cli-fi to the world as "a wake up call" literary genre.


######


[THREAD OVER] with over 5000  inpresssions by Twitter users, whatever "impressions' means. Clicks? Page views? Hits? Quick looks?

Cli-Fi publishers and movie producers Vow ''Action'' On Climate Change, But Literary Critics Say They Need To Do More

Cli-Fi publishers and Hollywood movie producers Vow ''Action'' On Climate Change NOvels, But Literary Critics Say They Need To Do More

Within a couple generations, after climate change has more visibly ravaged the Earth, the easiest way for humanity to interact with lush forests and icy glaciers might be via cli-fi novels and movies. It’s a bleak, potential future, but not an improbable one; according to SOME PUNDITS we have just 500 years to get a handle on  catastrophic climate change. SEE the cli REPORT AT link

 During the United Nations Climate Action Summit, 21 major publishers, including Sony and random house , announced an industry-wide initiative to combat climate change called ''Publishing for the Planet.' 

 In what might be a brilliantly-timed PR move or an earnest effort to change the tides of global climate catastrophe, these companies have made pledges ranging from reducing supply chain emissions by 30 percent by 2030 to, a little less impressively, “putting green nudges” into CLI-FI NOVELS plots.

PUBLSIBHING for the Planet says commitments they received from book companies will help reduce CO2 emissions by by 2030. 

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Evancie Millsilver, a retired senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has studied the environmental impact of publishing, applauded the alliance’s effort in a press release.

When asked whether ''PUBLISHING for the Planet''’s report or the commitments made to the initiative went far enough, Gary CRoCk, author of the Geenpeace Gruide to Greener novels and movies  told this blog, “Largely, no. It’s great you have a mix of companies saying, ‘Hey, we are concerned about climate change and want to be doing something,’ but the actions they’re taking here, for the most part, are not going to move the needle and are not reflective of the significant impact the BOOK industry has on the environment.” CRooCk thinks that, unless BOOK companies acknowledge that significant impact, “they’re just giving lip service to a problem without actually doing anything.”

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“A lot of their future customers are really concerned about climate change and are demanding that governments and corporations take action and treat it like the emergency it is,” said Cook of BOOK PUBLISHERS IN THE UK AND NYC.

The other day, when 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg uttered the words “How dare you!” to a room of international world leaders assembled for the United Nations climate summit, Gen Z’s damned future felt nearer than ever. Her speech rode on the tails of the enormous, worldwide Global Climate Strike, led by millions of youth. Gen Z is stepping up and pressuring pubLisherS AND MOVIE PRODUCERS  to do the right thing, at the same time as they’re known as the most tech-addicted generation yet.

An Ecofeminist Reading Of Margaret Atwood’s Work

An Ecofeminist Reading Of Margaret Atwood’s Work

by Deya Bhattacharya

September 20, 2019

 

For as long as I have read Atwood’s works, her identity as a feminist writer has remained ensconced within the paradigm of dystopia, oppression and women’s rights. As an ardent admirer of Atwood’s prose and poetry, I was taken aback when I realised that I had a very unidimensional view of her literary work. While she is best known for being a feminist writer, Atwood also considers herself an environmental activist, and a large portion of her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have had some elements of, or were spun keeping the environment, nature and climate change at the centre.
On a cursory reading, it may seem as if Atwood’s immensely acclaimed work does not explicitly mention environmental crises; however, a more careful reading shows that they highlight undeniable connections between women’s rights and environmental justice. In fact, Atwood’s works often reflect a deep connection between an erosion of the climate with the erosion of women’s rights.

The Female Body As Landscape And Nature

A plethora of Atwood’s work, especially her poetry, seems significantly tied to ecofeminism, which is a brand of feminism that draws on the concept of gender to investigate the relationships between human beings and the natural world. While the term was introduced by feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne in 1974, Mary Mellor, an ecofeminist and academic, defines the concept as “… a movement that sees a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world, and the subordination and oppression of women”.
At the outset, it is impossible to understand whether Atwood wrote her poetry with an ecofeminist agenda – there is no essay or documentation of this rationale. And yet, the reader cannot help but see environment, nature and climate action as motifs within her poetic works. Atwood’s childhood as the daughter of an entomologist, and living deep within the backwoods of northern Quebec may also explain the imagery of nature within her poetry.
In the poem, ‘She Considers Evading Him’, Atwood compares women’s identities to nature – their flexibility and malleability in a patriarchal world, where both women and nature have to alter themselves in order to be acceptable to men. It also speaks to women and nature alike occupying inflexible space in the world where they “could grow bark and become a shrub, or switch back in time.” This changing identity, she says, “would be inconvenient but final.”
In Surfacing, the famous lines “I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place” play out as the nameless protagonist’s search for her father, and also the search for her inner-self, and is indicated through her gradual submersion into nature. Atwood unearths the strange connection between the natural world and the feminine vision, as the protagonist is able to bridge the gap between the artificial construct of herself and her true self when she encounters nature. In doing so, the protagonist raises her consciousness of the victimisation of women. The language, characters as well as the trajectory of the novel reflect a world very true to our own – one that oppresses nature and femininity.
Atwood’s celebrated poem, This Is A Photograph Of Me explores the tension between an obscured, surreal reality and a factual one, that is guided by the imagery of the Canadian landscape. She writes – “It is difficult to say where/ precisely, or to say/ how large or small I am:/ the effect of water/ on light is a distortion” as she alludes to the woman in the photograph, whose identity is marred by nature, but also protected by it. In this way, Atwood’s work intertwines the environment and women – as victims but also as participants of their own emancipation – where each protects and is protected by the other.

The Politics Of Food, Bodies And The Environment

Atwood borrows heavily from Carol J Adams’ theory on the ‘absent referent’ where through a process of objectification, fragmentation and consumption through technology, language and cultural representation, a breeding ground is created for the oppression of animals (and by extension, of women). In this process, they are separated from their identities and the actualisation of their human rights. Using this theory, Atwood portrays how the objectification of women and animals often results in fragmentation – as Adams describes it “the object is severed not only from its body but its ontological meaning”.
Atwood’s The Edible Woman is the story of a woman who is so oppressed by patriarchy that she is unable to consume food. The protagonist, Marian, during a meal with her fiancé begins to see the animal in her dinner – “She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a real cow that once moved and ate and was killed.”
Atwood also uses her brilliance to indicate the “sexual-edible continuum” in her works. Towards the end, in The Edible Woman, Marian bakes a cake in the shape of a woman – “All that work had gone into the lady and now what would happen to her? ‘You look delicious,’ she told her. ‘Very appetizing. And that’s what will happen to you; that’s what you get for being food.” Atwood has interwoven the narratives of consumerism, consumption and the woman’s body so intricately in the novel, that her protagonist ignores her absent referent and embraces her role in the world as consumable for the patriarchy. In The Year Of The Flood, Atwood twists the concept of being “on the menu” suggesting that customers at SecretBurger can have a pick of the meat or the women.
In most of her works, Atwood splices together the narratives of women and other elements of nature, such as flora and fauna, through the concept of the absent referent. Her characters and language reflect on the violence and destruction that consumerism, unbridled abuse of technology and the avarice for profit bring about on women’s bodies, their autonomy and the environment.

Erosion Of The Biosphere Equals The Erosion Of Women’s Rights

In June 2018, Atwood told the The Guardian that what is happening to the earth is not unforeseen – she said that “this isn’t climate change – it’s everything change.” In 2015, she wrote for English In Matter – “Planet Earth – the Goldilocks planet we’ve taken for granted, neither too hot or too cold, neither too wet or too dry, with fertile soils that accumulated for millennia before we started to farm them – is altering.” While this is the first time that Atwood spoke publicly about the environmental crises, she has been hiding away bits and pieces of climate struggles, environmental chaos and degradation for years within her fiction.
The Handmaid’s Tale – a very formidable way to come face-to-face with dystopia – is the story about life under a futuristic, religious totalitarian state named Gilead that has taken over after the collapse of the United States, where the fertility crisis and religion’s preoccupation with women’s wombs dictates the hierarchy of the society. But what spurs this crisis is the complete breakdown of the environment – the colonies of Gilead are uninhabitable, toxic wastelands where unwanted people are sent to die. At some point in the book, we also read about the erratic weather patterns that disrupt and ruin natural crop-cycles threatening food security. In the sequel, The Testaments, we see a progressive effect of these environmental crises where unbabies (still-births and birth defects) are common and cancer in children is rising.
In Oryx And Crake, Atwood’s anxiety around environmental degradation is apparent as she reflects upon growing disparities between the rich and the poor, increasing starvation and the immense ecological damage caused by consumerism and capitalism. She also writes in her worries around the abuse of science and technology to brutally devastate the environment. In the book, we are witness to a post-apocalyptic world that we often fear – nature as we know has been destroyed and only genetically modified flora and fauna exist. The protagonist, Snowman, is the last human being left; but he has survivor’s guilt – his father contributed to the development of biotechnology that ultimately caused the extinction of the human race.
Atwood’s dystopian novels have borne witness to how environmental catastrophes give rise to undemocratic structures that impede the actualisation of women’s rights. In an article in The Guardian, she discusses her greatest fears that she attempts to fictionalise – “More extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, rising sea levels that will destroy arable land, and disruption of marine life will all result in less food. Less food will mean that women and children get less, as the remaining food supplies will be unevenly distributed, even more than they are. Climate change will also mean social unrest, which can lead to wars and civil wars and then brutal repressions and totalitarianisms. Women do badly in wars – worse than in peacetime.”

As Atwood’s literary works grapple with themes of climate change, science, gender, capitalism and politics, her characters and the realities they experience indicate to her readers that the dystopia we are so fearful of, is already a possibility. She explores the delicate chaos between the identities of women and the environment as a whole – any irreversible damage to the environment could mean a widespread change in how women live their lives. In many parts of the world, especially in the Global South, communities of women may lead struggles for conservation of nature and the sustainability of resources, but they are routinely excluded from decision-making. But it is these women who are most vulnerable to environmental degradation. Atwood’s works paint a grim picture of the future, but she also says that the future is dynamic, and our realities can change completely, if we use technology, language, privilege, and culture to protect the environment and the rights of women.

Do you think there is a connection between climate change and women’s rights? Have you read any of Atwood’s works that reflect with these themes? Share your thoughts below.

A UK aspie's love-hate relationship with fellow aspie Greta Thunberg

''I also have Asperger’s. I’m not sure she is doing her cause much good." WRITES 

Mat Vaillancourt

19 September 2019      

Greta Thunberg

Like many people, I am fascinated with Greta Thunberg’s meteoric rise. For me, her appeal is not to do with her environmental campaign: it’s because she is a well-known figure on the autistic spectrum. Like Greta, I have Asperger Syndrome. I was diagnosed when I was a young teenager in 2002, before Greta was born.

While I admit that I have mixed feelings about Greta Thunberg, I find the hatred she engenders disturbing. Some of Thunberg’s detractors on social media say she is ‘mentally unstable’, ‘used by others’ and ‘fragile’. This taps into the dangerous stereotype that people with her condition are incapable of being autonomous individuals who can make their own decisions. Everyone on the autistic spectrum is different and many people with autism live with mental-health challenges. Greta is not that extraordinary if you know people on the spectrum. Most people on the autistic spectrum have issues such as sensory overload or trouble communicating certain emotions. It’s perhaps a good thing that because of Greta people are less inclined to make ‘Rain man’ generalizations.

 

On the other hand, I find the cult surrounding Greta quite nauseating. She is treated like a mascot. And Greta herself is probably doing some damage to her cause. First of all, she is very dogmatic in her approach and her rather sour preaching is not a good way to win over those who aren’t converted. As the old saying goes, ‘you catch more bees with honey than vinegar.’ I think Greta is turning off people who are not 100 percent responsive to her message and who are not completely converted to her cause. Then of course there is the double-standards of her publicity stunts: yes she crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat to reduce carbon emissions, but of course the crew returned by a carbon-spewing commercial aircraft.

I’m happy that an Asperger’s sufferer is getting so much attention. But I fear that, instead of saving the planet, in the end Greta will be dismissed as just another eccentric teenager who has weird passions, as I did at her age.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.

Does ''Cli-Fi'' Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change? Of Course It Does!

Does ''Cli-Fi'' Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change?  Of Course It Does! 

    BY STAFF WRITERS AND AGENCIES      

[ slightly edited from the original for clarification and amplification ]                         

FALL 2019 

This fall of 2019, in cities across the globe, millions of teens and adults have been taking part in the Global Climate Strike, an international movement to bring awareness to the immanent dangers posed by Earth’s changing climate — and to demand that governments around the world take action to address the ways they contribute to the problem.

Concern about the devastating impacts of a radically changing climate isn’t a new phenomenon—certainly it’s a topic that CLI-FI has addressed in books and stories stretching back decades. But now, with the wide-ranging effects of climate change evident in the daily news, the genre—its authors, and its fans—are increasingly  contributing to the conversation, utilizing climate  fiction as a tool for imagining—often with bracing immediacy—the future that lies before us.

CLI-FI as a genre is an inseparable part of the industrial revolution, a massive transformation that stretched from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. The movement introduced new machines, chemicals, and power systems into society, fundamentally changing the labor market and the world economy. It led to new productivity gains for factories, as well as a boom in the global population. It helped produce the romantic movement that led artists to idolize the natural world, or look back with reverence to a pre-industrial age.

               

Writers reacted the to the changing world around them. Mary Shelley, often credited with the first modern work of Western cli-fi, according to the BBC, produced Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus in an attempt to grapple with the ramifications of a rapidly-changing scientific world.

Over its recent history, the CLI-FI genre has used its tropes and conventions to examine the existential threats facing humanity.

               

The 1960s ushered in a change in awareness towards the importance of the protecting the environment and humanity’s role in its destruction. Works like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped galvanize awareness of the health of the environment, and particularly, the destructive nature of new chemicals and industrial processes that progress had brought with it.
But it was a particular CLI-FI moment that helped bring the most awareness: a snapshot of the Earth taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts, given the evocative name “Earthrise.”

The portrait has become a symbol of the environmental movement, showing off the fragile and tiny nature of our home planet.
 

Topics such as pollution, overcrowding, and a warming Earth began to appear more frequently within the cli-fi genre. Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! (later adapted—and firmly embedded in pop culture consciousness—as Soylent Green) examined the plight of an overcrowded Earth, though today the main drivers of climate change are far less attributable to rising populations in less developed areas of the world and far more to do with mass consumerism in the developed world.

J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World specifically imagines a post-apocalyptic 2145 in which global warming (caused by solar wind heating the atmosphere, rather than specifically fossil fuel emissions) lead to sea-level rise, ruining London. Even nearly 60 years ago—long before “climate change” had become a source of widespread anxiety, it was a stark vision; reviewer Peter Brigg noted, “Ballard created in this novel the most pervasive demonstration of the frailty of ‘technological’ man.”

Two years later, Ballard published The Burning World (republished as The Drought), which goes in the opposite direction: rather than sea level rise, a world-wide drought devastates the world, caused by industrial pollution.

A trickle of other works would follow over the years, such as Dakota James’ 1984 novel Greenhouse: It Will Happen in 1997 and 1987’s Milwaukee the Beautiful, George Turner’s 1987 novel The Sea and the Summer, and Susan Gaines’ 2000 novel Carbon Dreams, each of which address the root cause of climate change: people. 

But in recent decades—and with an unmistakeable sense of urgency—the state of the Earth’s climate has become an increasingly ripe subject for CLI-FI authors looking not to the far future of the human race, but looking at the world around them and wondering if we’ll even get there in our current state.

               

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol trilogy—Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007), since republished in streamlined form in the omnibus Green Earth (the title a winking reference to the author’s trilogy about the terraforming of Mars for human habitation)—specifically examines the unwillingness of government to move with speed to address the problem of global warming, even as its effects become too drastic to ignore.

Robinson has also used his fiction as a vehicle for expressing his believe that those who look to the stars as a source of our salvation from a ruined planet are misguided. His 2015 novel Aurora follows the events onboard an ailing generation ship on its way to Tau Ceti, on a mission to colonize a potentially Earth-like moon. Its citizens come to realize the incredible fragility of human life and the biome that supports it: there’s literally only one place in the universe where we are best-suited to live, and we’re already doing our damnedest to make that impossible.

               

Paolo Bacigalupi’s cli-fi 2009 novel The Windup Girl is a striking and portentous example of the current wave of fiction exploring humanity’s post-climate change future (a subgenre of science fiction that has garnered worldwide the eye-catching nickname of “cli-fi”). Certainly its critical and commercial success seemed to open the floodgates for more stories focused on the horrifying fallout humanity will suffer as the inhabitants of a drastically warmed planet. 

Set in the 23rd century, Bacigalupi’s novel takes place in a world whose oil resources have been depleted and whose oceans have risen, displacing billions and upending the global economy. Protected to a degree by its natural geography, Thailand has been able to fend off some of the worst changes, locking down its borders and preventing genetically modified crops from taking over its food supply. The narrative has a lot more on its mind than just climate devastation, though it is the impetus for the action of the plot and every bit of its worldbuilding.

Tackling the issue head-on, Bacigalupi’s followup novels depict similar scenes of climate-induced upheaval: his YA works Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, and Tool of War follow young characters facing terrible living conditions in the environmental ruins, and his nearer-future cli-fi novel The Water Knife is set in a chaotic southwest United States in which squabbles over increasingly scant resources threaten to explode into civil war.

In these novels, Bacigalupi focuses not only on the changing climate itself, but on the ways a capitalistic mindset and social structure are one of its root causes, arguing that no meaningful change is possible without a drastic societal reorientation. 

Other authors have come to similar conclusions: Robinson’s 2017 cli-fi novel New York 2140 follows the citizens of a drowned New York City in the titular year, and examines the persistent impact of capitalism run rampant on the world’s climate, even after many of the world’s coastlines have drowned. Like Bacigalupi, Robinson here points out that a mindset that favors short-term gains have a steep cost, and that long-term change can’t occur without a shift in attitude.

                                           

Considering the erratic state of the world’s climate in 2019, it feels at times as though the events we’re living through have been orchestrated an unseen science fiction author. Massive storms have wrecked cities and islands. Wildfires devastate the American West, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, and Indonesia. Parts of the ocean have drastically warmed, or experienced deoxygenation. And yet, our industrialized society marches on, pumping pollutants into the atmosphere and spewing plastics into the oceans, with little indication from policymakers that meaningful changes are being seriously contemplated.

This is where climate fiction can, and must, play a role: by helping to shape the conception of what a changing climate will bring, in all of its facets. The cli-fi genre was born in the early part of the 21st century, and helped to promote the potential that technological progress would bring to the world, and warning about its excesses.

Because of that heritage, climate fiction has a responsibility on its shoulders: a way to address, interpret, and interrogate the ramifications of a changing world, and its impact on its inhabitants.

After all, cli-fi isn’t really about the near future: it’s about the concerns of the present. And the last decade has brought a number of books that address the breadth of the changes that a shifting climate will bring. There are, in fact, almost too many to list (a search for the words “climate fiction and cli-fi” producse over 500 results); today, many speculative cli-fi novels set in Earth’s future seem to take disruptive climate change as a matter of course, even when it doesn’t feature heavily into the plot.

Here is a brief  cli-fi listicle:

Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse, set in the malaise of a world that has fallen to pieces by degrees;

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, which delve into humanity’s contributions to its own deminse;

Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus; 

Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, in which the environment becomes an unknowable enemy;

Undoubtedly, the ranks of these books will continue to grow, as cli-fi writers continue to sound the alarm, and inspire the current—and future—generations to imagine and build a better tomorrow for the planet, which is still the only one we’ve got. Yup, there's no planet B.

What novels have changed the way you think about Earth’s future climate?

Tags: cli-fi, kim stanley robinson, new york 2140,

***"Curious, empathetic, compassionate: What we should be as human beings."***

THE ''Cli-Fi ''REPORT:
100 academic and  media links:
http://cli-fi.net

LITERARY OBITS: Graeme Gibson, the Canadian author of books including Five Legs and Perpetual Motion and longtime partner of author Margaret Atwood, has died. He was 85.

Graeme Gibson, the Canadian author of books including Five Legs and Perpetual Motion and longtime partner of author Margaret Atwood, has died. He was 85.
His publisher, Penguin Random House, announced his death in a press release Wednesday.
Atwood said in a statement that her longtime love “went out on a high.”

“We are devastated by the loss of Graeme, our beloved father, grandfather, and spouse, but we are happy that he achieved the kind of swift exit he wanted and avoided the decline into further dementia that he feared. He had a lovely last few weeks, and he went out on a high, surrounded by love, friendship and appreciation. We are grateful for his wise, ethical, and committed life.”

Climate Challenges in Game of Thrones


Cli-Fi: About how fiction films about climate disasters can make us imagine the unimaginable.
















 









 
Risk and potential disasters are something people must imagine. But risk is often unimaginable. Until the disaster is a fact and it is too late to prevent it.


Scientific fact production on the climate, including through the UN Climate Panel, has documented the need for political action. But that has obviously not been enough. The UN is therefore holding a summit on the climate crisis on September 23.

At the same time, a recent survey on global climate awareness from YouGov shows that respondents in Western countries are not very concerned about climate. And Norway is among the worst in the West.

But young people around the world imagine a globe destroyed by political paralysis. They therefore went on a global climate strike on 20-27. September, fronted by Greta Thunberg.

Can Cli-Fi, popular cultural climate fiction, contribute to effective political communication about "the unimaginable"?

A movie or series that reaches and mobilizes a large audience uses both fact and fiction, or "faction".

Manufacturers dictate to tell a captivating story while conveying knowledge of a phenomenon. Thus, they create "edutainment"; learning through entertainment. It is a difficult balancing act.

Movies, documentaries and comics series usually do not reach a large audience.

If we use "profitability" (US BoxOffice gross earnings) as a criterion, it turns out that the climate crisis is central to only two of the 250 most popular films.

Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" from 2014 and Roland Emmerich's "The Day After Tomorrow" from 2004 are ranked 231 and 235 respectively.



The climate message is almost clear in Emmerich's action-packed film. Here we are witnessing a sudden global climate disaster as it happens. It may sound like a "junk" disaster movie. Fiction with climate as a convenient theme for creating entertainment.

Not unexpectedly, Emmerich was criticized for just that. But he managed to engage and make the audience easier to imagine the unimaginable. The film had a documented effect on viewers' perceptions of the dangers of climate change and their motivation to do something about it.

Another example is the HBO series "Game of Thrones" (GoT) that captivates people around the world. It takes place in a fantasy universe and Westeros has not even had an industrial revolution that could initiate man-made climate change.

Equally, many have interpreted the series as incorporating the climate challenges of our time as an important part of the story.

The GoT shows the denial of external existential threats and the difficulty of working together to stop them. An army of zombie-like White Walkers is outside the wall. But they eventually need to go through and threaten to wipe out all of Westeros.

Already at the beginning of the series, the capital receives reports of them, but denies that they exist at all. Towards the end, irrefutable documentation is presented, when it is almost too late to prevent the disaster.

We also hear right from the start about the slow climate change from multi-annual summer to multi-annual winter. But only the Starks clan seems to care. Next to The Wildlings, climate refugees who want inside the wall.

Boxer’s author George R.R. Martin also noted that GoT is "a perfect metaphor for understanding climate change"
He almost sounds like an echo of Greta Thunberg when he notes that other issues are important, but not if we all end up dead and our cities swallowed by the sea.





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Today's young people choose: - Everything fades in relation to climate and the environment







 






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Risk and potential disasters are something people must imagine. But risk is often unimaginable. Until the disaster is a fact and it is too late to prevent it.


Scientific fact production on the climate, including through the UN Climate Panel, has documented the need for political action. But that has obviously not been enough. The UN is therefore holding a summit on the climate crisis on September 23.

At the same time, a recent survey on global climate awareness from YouGov shows that respondents in Western countries are not very concerned about climate. And Norway is among the worst in the West.

But young people around the world imagine a globe destroyed by political paralysis. They therefore went on a global climate strike on 20-27. September, fronted by Greta Thunberg.

Can Cli-Fi, popular cultural climate fiction, contribute to effective political communication about "the unimaginable"?

A movie or series that reaches and mobilizes a large audience uses both fact and fiction, or "faction".

Manufacturers dictate to tell a captivating story while conveying knowledge of a phenomenon. Thus, they create "edutainment"; learning through entertainment. It is a difficult balancing act.

Movies, documentaries and comics series usually do not reach a large audience.

If we use "profitability" (US BoxOffice gross earnings) as a criterion, it turns out that the climate crisis is central to only two of the 250 most popular films.

Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" from 2014 and Roland Emmerich's "The Day After Tomorrow" from 2004 are ranked 231 and 235 respectively.



The climate message is almost clear in Emmerich's action-packed film. Here we are witnessing a sudden global climate disaster as it happens. It may sound like a "junk" disaster movie. Fiction with climate as a convenient theme for creating entertainment.

Not unexpectedly, Emmerich was criticized for just that. But he managed to engage and make the audience easier to imagine the unimaginable. The film had a documented effect on viewers' perceptions of the dangers of climate change and their motivation to do something about it.

Another example is the HBO series "Game of Thrones" (GoT) that captivates people around the world. It takes place in a fantasy universe and Westeros has not even had an industrial revolution that could initiate man-made climate change.

Equally, many have interpreted the series as incorporating the climate challenges of our time as an important part of the story.

The GoT shows the denial of external existential threats and the difficulty of working together to stop them. An army of zombie-like White Walkers is outside the wall. But they eventually need to go through and threaten to wipe out all of Westeros.

Already at the beginning of the series, the capital receives reports of them, but denies that they exist at all. Towards the end, irrefutable documentation is presented, when it is almost too late to prevent the disaster.

We also hear right from the start about the slow climate change from multi-annual summer to multi-annual winter. But only the Starks clan seems to care. Next to The Wildlings, climate refugees who want inside the wall.

Boxer’s author George R.R. Martin also noted that GoT is "a perfect metaphor for understanding climate change"

He almost sounds like an echo of Greta Thunberg when he notes that other issues are important, but not if we all end up dead and our cities swallowed by the sea.





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With his new cli-fi novel, ''Gun Island,'' Ghosh offers what reads like a response to the questions The Great Derangement posed: a beautifully layered story about climate change and its thorny relationship to immigration, the legacy of white western colonialism, and the very nature of storytelling.

PHOTO ARCHIVES: an undated photo of future cli-fi novelist Amitav Ghosh as a young man in India, circa 1977

undated photo of Amitav Ghosh as a young man in India, circa 1977

In 2016, Amitav Ghosh, published a very controversdial NONFICTION ESSAY polemic about why ......in his elitist opinion..... which was later shown to be wrongheaded and incorrect......, some contemporary novelists had yet to embrace the scale of climate change, even Dr Ghosh hinself!

But with his new cli-fi novel, Gun Island, Ghosh offers what reads like a response to the questions The Great Derangement posed: a beautifully layered story about climate change and its thorny relationship to immigration, the legacy of colonialism, and the very nature of storytelling.

The novel stars a Kolkata-born rare books dealer who lives in Brooklyn and who embarks on an adventure of a lifetime after visiting a shrine in the Sundarbans. The shrine is dedicated to the ancient Gun Merchant, who circled the globe in an attempt to escape the wrath of Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes.

In this interview, they discuss what inspired Gun Island, the strangeness brought on by climate change, and the importance of giving a voice to the voiceless.

 

In The Great Derangement, your 2016 nonfiction treatise about how difficult it is for contemporary novelists to write about climate change, you describe a tornado. You’ve said that writing about this tornado in fiction has proved difficult because it’s such an improbable event. In Gun Island there’s a tornado.

Amitav Ghosh

Yes, I finally found a way to write about that tornado in fiction. When the real-life tornado occurred [in the 1970s], it felt like an event of extreme probability. But today, it actually isn’t. The weirdest thing has happened, Amy. Every day now I get messages from people telling me that things I’ve written about in my books have actually happened. There was another tornado like the one I describe in Gun Island in Venice quite recently. I also write in Gun Island about a massive hail storm and rare, poisonous spiders appearing in places they aren’t supposed to be. Well, a hail storm occurred in Venice just a few weeks ago. And very recently I received a message from a friend of mine who lives there—he had to take his son to the hospital for a spider bite.

 

This has happened to you before. I remember in your 2004 novel The Hungry Tide you describe an enormous storm surge in the Sunderbans, and not long after, a catastrophic tsunami happened there in real life.

Amitav Ghosh

Oh yes, and you may remember in Gun Island that there’s a scene in Los Angeles with a fire headed toward a museum. This also happened just last year. The Getty Museum was in the path of the wildfires. But I wrote that scene six months before it actually happened. It’s all so uncanny.

 

Are you a prophet?

Amitav Ghosh

[Laughs] No, we’re just living in an age where the improbable is becoming the probable.

 

What is it like to be a novelist in an age where the weirdness of reality is outpacing the weirdness of fiction?

Amitav Ghosh

For one, I have to keep insisting that this is indeed the case! My books aren’t fantasy; I’m just writing about the reality of the world we’re in. For so long these [improbable events] have been relegated to genre fiction, but they need to be recognized for what they are, which is part of the reality we inhabit every day.

 

At one point in Gun Island your character Cinta says that “you mustn’t underestimate the power of stories. There is something in them that is elemental and inexplicable.” What is your view on the power of stories? 

Amitav Ghosh

I have mixed feelings on this because my friends will say time to time that life is all about storytelling, and that we need to change the story we’re telling, and as a writer of stories, I think a lot about what stories can achieve in the world. But honestly, I don’t know how much they can achieve. On the other hand, I do know that The Hungry Tide inaugurated something significant. People’s attitudes toward the Sundarbans changed completely after that book. People began to think about the place in a different way. People need a way to enter a reality, and narrative can provide that. Stories can give you a way to think about the world around you.

 

One reason why I appreciate novels about climate change—and why I started this ''cli-fi trends'' column—is because novels allow me to spend time in the minds of other people for an extended period of time. It seems to me that’s an important way to experience and think about the world, especially one ravaged by climate change.

Amitav Ghosh

What you describe is the peculiar power of fiction! It allows you to enter other people’s consciousness and see the world through their eyes. That’s one of the most important things that fiction does. And it’s the most important thing that the humanities can do: they take you out of your own private little island and show you other ways of experiencing the universe.

 

While reading Gun Island, I felt like I could experience the universe in two different ways, depending on how credulous I was willing to be. On the one hand, the strange “happenings” in your novel—the mass beaching of dolphins, the various encounters with rare snakes and spiders—could be explained by science, especially in an age of global warming. But your novel also leaves open the possibility that these are manifestations of a vengeful goddess. There’s a lot of ambiguity here.

Amitav Ghosh

Yes, absolutely. Different readers will and should read the novel in different ways. I think, in literary terms, the most difficult challenge a writer has in an age of climate change is determining how to give a voice to the non-human. And not just in terms of natural disaster—in general. It’s such a challenge. One writer who has done this very well is Richard Powers. I thought his book, The Overstory, was a huge event because it expanded the boundaries of what writers can do. Now I am asking similar questions: How do we restore nonhuman voices? How do we trace the influence of the human among the nonhuman? What’s interesting is that giving voice to the nonhuman is something that fiction used to do, up through the nineteenth century. Melville’s Moby-Dick is about a whale that has agency and the power of comprehension. If Melville had written that book in the late twentieth century, he would have been treated as a fantasy writer. We have to ask ourselves why it’s not possible to still write that kind of story. We have to get back to the thing that only fiction can do, which is to give a voice to the things that have no voice.

 

It’s hard to know what an animal is thinking, isn’t it? Let’s take the beached dolphins in Gun Island for example. You leave open the possibility that the beaching is self-inflicted. But how could we know for sure?

Amitav Ghosh

Well, you know, animal suicide is quite common.

 

It is?????????

Amitav Ghosh

Oh, yes. There’s a very good book about it called Animal Madness by Laurel Braitman. It’s very well written. Many kinds of animals commit suicide: dogs, parrots, elephants.

 

I had no idea.

Amitav Ghosh

The fact that we don’t generally allow animals this possibility is a kind of prejudice. We tend to think of animals as living entirely in a world of instinct, but that is not the case.

 

Thank you for introducing me to that possibility, even though it’s horribly depressing.
Let’s discuss the Sundarbans, where a good part of Gun Island is set. At one point, a character describes the region as “the frontier where commerce and the wilderness look each other directly in the eye; that’s exactly where the war between profit and Nature is fought.” I understand that the Sundarbans have their own ecosystem and their own specific natural and human histories, but this characterization reads almost like an allegory for the entire world. Everywhere we look, we see a kind of war taking place between profit and nature.

Amitav Ghosh

That is true, isn’t it? After I wrote The Great Derangement I felt very strongly that if we are going to find our way back to thinking differently about large issues, we have to start looking at how other people have thought about these things. One example is the Bengali legends that I draw on throughout Gun Island and which are set in the Sundarbans. All of this is exactly what these legends are about: How to restrain human desire, how to create balance between different living beings in the world. These are ancient stories. It just goes to show that our ancestors understood the world perhaps better than we do.
At this moment in time we find ourselves in the middle of terrible extinction events. And every day we hear another story about human language dying out. Language is an aspect of human flourishing, so how is its diminishment not being taken into account when we think about these larger events?

 

You address all of this in Gun Island, and yet, it still reads as a hopeful novel.  Are you hopeful for the future?

Amitav Ghosh

You know, for someone like me… [long pause]. I’m a parent of two adult bi-racial children raiswed with my Caucasian wife Deborah Baker, also a writer. I was born and raised in India, a part of the world where many, many people tend to die or lose their livelihoods. I feel I have a duty to be hopeful. I feel we all have certain duties as human beings, and to be hopeful is one of mine. I can’t allow myself to feel fatalistic or give in to a certain kind of doom-ism, if you like.

When I look at fiction novels about climate change, it’s often but not always somewhat apocalyptic, dystopian. I think that is a white Caucasian privileged point of view. It’s almost a certain kind of American or Western— and even male —perspective, and that’s just not my world or my imaginative space at all. I don't write climate fiction, and I don't write cli-fi. I'm glad you asked.