When Amitav Ghosh speaks rubbish and disses cli-fi, the literary world ignores him, as well it should [VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT]]

      Undated　 

Nat Rich and Amitav Ghosh, pictured above in a New York Times article on Sept. 9. 2019, chat on stage in NYC at the New York Public Lirbary about cli-fi novels in a world gone insance. 90 minute VIDEO FEED HERE: https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2019/09/10/amitav-ghosh?nref=121031 

[Almost verbatim TRANSCRIPT], slightly edited for clarity and amplification and gentle provocation and literary criticism.

At the 108 minute mark in the long convo, some shit goes down:

QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: ''You have said, and this is to you DR GHOSH, in your nonfiction essay from 2016 titled ''TERMS OF DERANGEMENT'' that there is very little good  ''climate change fiction'' being written, very little.... but what is your view of so‑called ''cli-fi'' novels by Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeff Vandermeer and hundreds of others?"

NAT RICH turns to Dr Ghosh and says: "Cli-fi was a new literary genre term  I first heard after I published my cli-fi novel ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW in 2013. Some guy in Taiwan, whose name I have forgotten, Dan Bloom, I think, coined the term as a literary activist in 2011."

AMITAV GHOSH: "I think many of the people that are classified as writers of cli-fi novels are very fine writers, absolutely.  But I think as soon as a novel or a movie is categorized in that way, as cli-fi with a hyphen, people,or least some people, like me, won't take it seriously. Others do take it seriously, I acknowledge that. But I  myself as an elitist and serious literary fiction novelist, I think of cli-fi as ''fantasy,'' science fiction fantasy. And I think of cli-fi as always being dystopian and never positive or utopian and set in the distant future (although many people tell me I am wrong about this and that cli-fi can take place in the present and be about the here and now as GUN ISLAND is, and does not have to be dystopian and can also be utopian as KSR's cli-fi novel ''NEW YORK 2140'' is. So maybe I am wrong about this and too judgmental. So I think what is really important is not how any particular climate-themed novel is classified, either as as the hyphenated sci-fi or the equally hyphenated cli-fi. Take a great literary writer like myself or the even better writer Richard Powers ...we were not writing about some fantastic universe or about some distant dystopian future or about dystopia or about the end of the world.  We are writing about today."