"The specter of cataclysmic environmental events has led to a growing need for novels and movies to help us conceptualize our changing planet. And the genre of dystopian climate-based fiction has helped both readers and educators put the effects of climate change into context," Andrew Hirschfeld recently wrote in a news article on the website ''Mic'' that was headlined "How climate fiction is helping people understand the planet's uncertain future."
There are now hundreds of cli-fi courses at community colleges and major universities in the USA, U.K., and Australia, largely in part to how Margaret Atwood has helped propel the genre since a popular tweet she sent out to her followers on Twitter in 2012, Hirschfeld noted.
Atwood has become a major figure across the cli-fi literary universe. She not only helped the term catch on when she tweeted about it in 2012, but her 2013 novel ''MaddAddam'' has been a popular teaching tool which largely summarizes the need for the genre in the first place, Hirschfeld added, sharing: "The book tells the story of a group of environmentalists, known as the gardeners, who rebuild the world after a global pandemic. The novel shows how fragile our global systems are.''
“People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void,” Atwood has written. Her book was part of the curriculum for a course on cli-fi at Brandeis University in 2015.
In a recent email, after reading Hirchfeld's essay, Atwood sent this reporter a short email that read: "Yes, cli-fi is now front and center."
Cli-fi courses have popped up at major universities across the United States. The vast majority of young voters see climate change as a major issue -- and young people ssuch as 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg have been at the forefront of major climate movements.
Climate change-themed literature is starting to catch on in K-12 education, too, according to Mic.
"Places like Connecticut and Portland, Oregon are passing laws that would require climate change to be taught as part of the curriculum in public schools -- which would include the use of cli-fi literature in English classes," Hirschfeld wrote.
With the effects of climate change looming, he added, it only makes sense that Americans will need more ways to help them grapple with how the world is changing. We might very well need literary tools that speak to us beyond science textbooks and government charts, which for some readers, just might require a deep dive into the world of fiction.
#MELT ''by Jeff Murray in New Zealand is a cli-fi novel that will appeal to climate activist Dan Bloom who has been hoping for the appearance of just such a book. But this is not a scare story about climate catastrophe, but rather one that takes its likely results seriously.''
BOOK REVIEW: Fictionalizing the plight of climate refugees
This strong debut cli-fi novel imagines the life of migrants fleeing the effects of climate change in a work that mixes adventure with sociological analysis
By Bradley Winterton / Contributing reporter
''Melt'' is a strong cli-fi novel, perceptive on how individuals in government think and work, vivid in its description of natural landscapes and the impersonality of climate change and everywhere probing and thoughtful. Putting a woman at the center of the action, and seeing most things through her eyes, was a brave move for a male author, and it pays off.
This is the kind of cli-fi novel that will appeal to climate-change activists everywhere, people like Taiwan’s Dan Bloom who ...has been hoping for the appearance of just such a book as ''Melt,'' and here it is. But this is not a scare story about climate catastrophe, but rather one that takes its likely economic and political results seriously. It’s an important addition to what is sure to become a growing genre: climate fiction, also known as cli-fi.
Also, I'm including my response to Heather Morris's publisher's statement in this article above.
See below.
From George Kovach in California, the stepson of Cilka (Cecilia Klein).
I thank the Daily Mail for publishing my objections to Heather Morris’s books, The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka’s Journey.
Let me now comment on Morris’s publisher’s response.
Morris asserts that her books are “based on the memories of survivors who knew Cilka at the time these events are described, in particular, Lali Sokolov.”
I challenge Morris to release the tapes where Lali Sokolov talks about my stepmother. If Morris just has her own recollections of what Sokolov said to her, then that is not even worth a grain of salt since she has been wrong about so much in telling her story.
Furthermore, Morris should identify any other witnesses by name and produce any documents she claims to have.
Morris and her publishers further state that they “chose to tell Cilka’s story because it highlights the sexual abuse that women suffered during World War II and its aftermath, abuse that has gone unacknowledged for too long.”
The abuse of women during World War II has been in the public domain for a long time.
This is a blatant attempt to jump on the #MeToo movement and thus deflect any criticism of her books.
Just because these terrible things happened doesn’t mean that my stepmother was forced to sleep with SS-Obersturmfuhrer Johann Schwarzhuber in Auschwitz.
Morris then doubles down on my poor stepmother in Cilka’s Journey and makes her the sex slave of SS-Rapportfuhrer Anton Taube as well!
As Memoria magazine (the online magazine dedicated to information about the Holocaust) stated about the relationship between Schwarzhuber and Cilka – “In practice, the possibility of maintaining such a long and, according to the book, semi-explicit relationship between a Jewish female prisoner and a high-ranking member of the SS hierarchy was non-existent. The disclosure of such a relationship would involve an accusation of race dishonor (Rassenschande) and severe punishment for the SS man.”
I challenge Heather Morris to a debate: Are Heather Morris’s novels The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka’s Journey mostly fake or fact?
Signed,
George Kovach
POST-SCRIPT: A few corrections to this blogger's earlier blog posts about Mr Kovach and Heather Morris:
posted by Dan Bloom on October 7, 2019
PLEASE NOTE:
Mr Kovach lives in Oakland, not San Francisco.
He never said that Heather Morris is a romance novel writer. He tells this blog: "I made this mistake because when I looked up Heather Morris on Amazon I was led to a site for a writer of the same name who happens to write romance novels. It was an honest mistake of mine. Heather did not write romance novels before these two novels."
RE: Dan Bloom's blog post stating that ... "although he says he tried to tell Morris the true story of his stepmother, he says she refused to listen to him and even threatened him with a lawsuit."
George Kovach told me: "That is false."
He added in an email to me: "I did not try to tell Morris the true story. I wanted to find out who she was first, and read both books before I participated.
She would not let me read the manuscript of Cilka's Journey.
The excerpts that she read to me, describing my father, were nothing like him.''
''I also then read Tattooist.
It was after that that I decided I could not participate in this project,'' he added.
''So, again, I did not try to tell Morris the true story of my stepmother (or father)," he emphasized in his email to me. This blogger Dan Bloom is happy to report these corrections based on mistakes I made in my reporting.
''She did not refuse to listen to me, because I never volunteered any information.
Indeed, she was eager to listen to anything I might have to say," Kovach told me.
''Heather never threatened me with a lawsuit," he added, noting:
''I had my lawyer send her publisher a letter expressing my objections to the book and the treatment of my stepmother.''
''In climate-vulnerable countries such as INDIA, there has hardly been any climate literature. ''
''In climate-vulnerable countries such as INDIA, there has hardly been any climate literature. '' Why Not? Rajat Chaudhuri issues an appeal to novelists and poets in his own country, India, including ''Gun Island" author Amitav Ghosh.
Contemporary fiction can no longer evade an ethical obligation to engage with the climate crisis
part 1 of three part essay on the meaning and promise of cli-fi in this current age of climate crises
by Indian intellectual and literary critic Rajat Chaudhuri
The first of a three-part exploration of the relationship between climate change and literature.
Books, I would like to believe, can do the same. New studies are discovering that novels about climate change can indeed influence dialogue and behavioural change among readers. So, what drives an author to write climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” as literary journalist and climate activist Dan Bloom has dubbed it? Simple: Climate change is a disaster staring us in the face and it is natural that writers and other creative producers will engage with it.
During the height of the Cold War, a raft of nuclear apocalypse and post-apocalyptic novels and books was written, among which we can count such well-remembered works as A Canticle for Lebowitz, the Gregory Peck starrer On the Beach in 1959, based on Nevil Shute’s novel in1957 , and Staley Kubrick’s Dr Strangeglove. It is expected that the spectre and reality of climate change will spawn an equally rich body of work.
TEXT:
What is your worst encounter with global warming? A super-cyclone, a hurricane, a deluge that drowned your city, unbearable summers, months of drought, or a little-known illness snatching away a near one? Storms make the biggest headlines and so your memory most probably would be linked to names – Bhola, Katrina, Aila, Sandy – or years – 1970…2005 … 2009...2012… which one is next?
The dates recur with increasing frequency, coalescing with each other just as every christening of a superstorm far out in our warming seas strikes terror in our hearts. What are your memories of these disasters? Are these painful, fearsome or worse?
For me, storms bring remembrances of a good friend whom the cyclone took from us. A young energetic guy, a loving family, a promising career. But the weather gods thought otherwise. One of those majestic krishnachura trees, which in season deck up in bright orange blooms, crushed the car he was driving. It was a night of a severe storm in Calcutta and many trees were uprooted, as they still are whenever a powerful storm strikes.
Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.
End of dialog window.
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Do any of you remember that scene from The Day After Tomorrow with the homeless man on the streets of New York when the enormous weather system had already formed, and there is a traffic jam, and he says “These people, and their cars, and their exhausts...and they’re polluting the atmosphere.” In some ways, in that film, that homeless man is a kind of conscience keeper for humanity.
He is one of those who, besides climatologist Jack Hall, seems to care. He seems to know what we are doing to the planet. Or take the scene when Frank, Jack’s colleague, crashes through the roof of a shopping mall to his death. These images tell us something. When we come away from the theatre, the homeless man’s words keep ringing in our minds and perhaps, just perhaps, make some of us think differently.
What we have read already
Books, I would like to believe, can do the same. New studies are discovering that novels about climate change can indeed influence dialogue and behavioural change among readers. So, what drives an author to write climate fiction or “cli-fi” as literary journalist and climate activist Dan Bloom has dubbed it since 2011 at The Cli-Fi Report? Simple: Climate change is a disaster staring us in the face and it is natural that writers and other creative producers will engage with it.
During the height of the Cold War, a raft of nuclear apocalypse and post-apocalyptic novels and books was written, among which we can count such well-remembered works as A Canticle for Lebowitz, the Gregory Peck starrer On the Beach based on Nevil Shute’s novel, and Staley Kubrick’s Dr Strangeglove. It is expected that the spectre and reality of climate change will spawn an equally rich body of work. Yet, this has not happened everywhere –especially in climate-vulnerable countries such as ours, there has hardly been any climate literature.
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The material that a literature of climate change has to handle is huge and amorphous. Is it up to the task? Perhaps there is something missing in all our efforts. A missing link to the hearts and minds of people, something that will make them give up wasteful practices and high-carbon lifestyles.
Amitav Ghosh has pointed out that popular protest movements could play an important role in mobilising people. He also stresses how fiction, because of its unique ability, which allows the “imagining of possibilities”, can play a unique role in engaging with climate change.
From the very beginning of The Road, Cormac McCarthy overpowers you with his diamond cut prose depicting a post-apocalyptic American wasteland. Relating my own experience of reading the book, I had earlier written, “McCarthy moves us with the revelatory beauty of his unadorned prose, which forages for the right words in a fictional landscape where words are dying out – returning with gems of description and style that glitter and shine. In this book, the infinite scope of the novel is established once again by one of the masters of the craft.”
Surely the language is hard to ignore, and if we consider this to be cli-fi, though it seems to allude to the aftermath of a comet strike, according to the author himself in an online interview, this is perhaps one of the most wonderfully wrought works in the “genre.”
Still, when we are talking about engaging with an imminent threat to all forms of life on the planet, mere beauty, some would say, is not enough.
But first, why is climate literature necessary and important?
Where does it stand with respect to other so-called genres?
What are the types and forms it has taken?
What impediments does it face in imagining the unpredictable aspects of climate change?
How can it assume a more engaged role by telling stories of transitions to a better world?
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Why we need climate fiction
Storytelling has brought people together from ancient times. By connecting with us at our deepest levels, stories can move us in ways that bare facts, scientific material or news reports cannot. Besides serving to connect people and communicate at a deeper level, stories often serve the purpose of moral commentary, influencing our behaviour, politics, and action. While the scientific method makes a purposeful dissection of reality to discover its hidden laws, the literary artist works with the human mind. The subconscious and the natural world is her material, imagination her resource, and language her tool.
When Kim Stanley Robinson, in Pacific Edge, imagines characters in the small township of El Modena coming together to correct the wasteful ways of the past while fighting impediments, he is using the power of imagination to present a possible world while also pointing out the politics and organisation required to move in that direction. This is how imagination coupled with a conscientious politics can be brought together in fiction to portray a better future.
Or when Barbara Kingsolver in Flight Behaviour portrays how the migration habits of monarch butterflies get affected by climate change, creating upheavals in the lives of a Mexican community, profoundly affecting the principal character Dellarobia, she is again using her imagination to paint a possible world – in this case a place disrupted by climate disaster.
Between them, these two authors are using fiction both to communicate the inherent dangers and contradictions of the present ways of the world, with Robinson going further to point out a transition to a better future.
Climate fiction (including films) can in fact portray these changes and their impact on individual and collective behaviour, thereby creating different future imaginaries which, as Jeffrey Barber suggests, deepens awareness about the possible courses the future might take and can also guide policy and action.
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Sophia David in '' Bringing Climate Change into the Imagination” describes the potential critical functions of the climate novel as those of “communicating climate change, engaging readers with the issue, and making climate change meaningful and relevant to non-scientific people”.
These then are some of the basic reasons that cli-fi is important today.
But there is one more reason why a certain sub-genre of this kind of writing is of the greatest importance in our world. It can help to instill hope and fight despair in the face of climate disaster.We can refer to this as politically engaged fiction, the fiction of “critical utopias”.
Telling the right stories
Another set of justifications is proposed by Nick Admussen to demonstrate the importance of cli-fi in today’s world.
His “Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change” argues that our inability to visualise the unfolding disaster of climate change arises from a problem of our culture. In other words, we are not writing and telling the right stories.
Calling for doing away with progress-based narratives, Admussen suggests that progress logic “transforms the struggle to dismantle a destructive system into an episode of Scooby Doo or a volume of the Hardy Boys, in which the broken waste pipe is discovered dripping green goo and the story ends with its owner in handcuffs. These narratives end before the real conversation should start: the one that prevents such crimes in the first place.”
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He goes on to point out that narratives centred on individualism are destructive as they erase “radical dependence on each other and the environment”. Admussen argues that the self-regard and navel-gazing of culture distances it from the living systems that the environment consists of, which is why our conservation efforts fail and which is where an intervention needs to be made.
He further proposes that romanticising the poor while exporting the pollution of industrialised nations to their countries is ethically wrong, and that the voices of the underprivileged should be heard in the new fiction – it must narrate the ills that such a system promotes. This understanding echoes the approaches of environmental humanists like Sverker Sörlin, who avers, “Uncritically applying the indiscriminately universalising tool of monetised services risks doing more harm than good to the environment. In particular, it runs the risk of marginalising social groups – and, therefore, civic values –as they try to articulate value-based agendas for defending nature and urban space.” The new literature of climate change needs to take this into account.
In the final part of his proposals Admussen emphasises on connectedness and world-building in fiction, stressing on the need to focus on systems and not objects, bringing up Robinson Crusoe as an example of the latter. In the end he stresses on the necessary links between “knowing”, art and ethics, or moving people to action, finishing with these important lines, “Writing fiction must become more than an exercise in personal fulfillment, ambition, or hunger for fame. If there is no Silent Spring without The Jungle, if there is no American socialism without Star Trek, then artists have a calling and a responsibility that is much deeper, and more crucial, than the academy might have us believe.”
The idea of forgoing ambition in the face of climate disaster is echoed by commentators like Jim Bendell when he writes, “We no longer have time for the career games of aiming to publish in top-ranked journals to impress our line managers or improve our CV for if we enter the job market.”
Danish ''Cli-fi'' researcher Dr Gregers Andersen quotes French philosopher Paul Ricoeur who writes: “The first way human beings attempt to understand and to master the ‘manifold’ of the practical field is to give themselves a fictive representation of it.” This then is another reason why cli-fi is important to the world because, as Andersen explains, it helps human beings not only to imagine how the future will look like but also “to come to terms with what it will mean to live in a seriously altered climate”.
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Naomi Klein writes, “Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.” It is absurd that literature refuses to engage with the phenomenon and, even when it does, prefers to push them into ghettos of genre writing.
[To be continued in part 2 and part 3.]
Rajat Chaudhuri has advocated on climate change issues at the United Nations and has recently published The Butterfly Effect, his fourth novel. This article is an edited version of his keynote address on the “Literatures of Climate Change” delivered at a national conference in St Andrews College, Mumbai.
Climate Fiction aka Cli-Fi with the hashtag #CliFi comes in all sorts of forms, there’s your Mad Maxes, your Games of Thrones, your Parables of the Sowers, and your WALL-Es. But are all these Cli-Fi books, movies, and TV shows just capitalizing on a hot topic, or do they actually change people’s perceptions of climate change?
The Cli-Fi term was coined by literary journalist and climate activist Dan Bloom in 2011 for a cli-fi novel he was promoting as a PR consultant to author Jim Laughter who wrote the ''cli-fi thriller'' ''POLAR CITY RED'' on Bloom's commissioning request in 2011, book published in 2012. see AMAZON.com or Jim's website.
Miriam Nielsen, host, and Lindsay Ellis, of It’s Lit, help us find out.
Host: Miriam Nielsen
Guest: Lindsay Ellis
Editor-in-chief: Joe Hanson
Creative Director: David Schulte
Executive Producer: Amanda Fox
Producer: Stephanie Noone
Editor/Animator: Sara Roma
Camera: Miriam Nielsen
Produced by PBS Digital Studios
Theme Music: Eric Friend/Optical Audio
Music: APM
I want to thank you and all those who have stood with me on behalf of my stepmother Cecilia Klein/Kovachova, also known as Cilka.
Thanks to you, the exploitation of my stepmother’s tragic life – 3 years as a teenage Jewish girl in Auschwitz and
later 9 years in the Soviet Gulag – has been brought to public notice.
My only concern is that, as P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity!”
I would hate to think that through my efforts I would further tarnish my beloved stepmother’s character and increase sales of this novel in any way.
The article in the Guardian by Alison Flood in London was well-written and thoughtful, but with a headline written by a Guardian copy editor using words from the article like
‘lurid and titillating’
the publishers at St. Martin’s Press are probably high-fiving each other.
However, I know Cilka would want me to get the truth out despite any unintended consequences.
I would only ask prospective readers who might order or purchase a copy of ''Cilka’s Journey'' to understand that each purchase encourages publishers to continue with what one Jewish pundit has called ''Holocaust fakery!''
The responsibility for this travesty of a book does not lie solely on the shoulders of Heather
Morris. Her publishers and editors in Melbourne and New York have a great deal to answer for. In their desperate pursuit of a ''sequel'' to the much-criticized (by Holocaust scholars and literary journalists) and very controversial ''The Tattooist of Auschwitz,'' also a ''Holocaust fakery'' fabrication cobbled together by a team of savvy Australian editors in 2017, they and Heather cobbled together, in just a year, a second ''novel'' -- dubbed a so-called sequel for marketing and PR purposes, and based in large part on information gleaned from undocumented or unverified personal memories, hearsay, books such as Anne Applebaum’s ''Gulag: A History'' and Sarah Helm’s ''Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women.''
Heather and her publishers declared
this fabrication on the cover of the new book to be (falsely) “based on a true story” and sat back waiting for the money to roll in.
And roll in it did.
If what Heather told me in a conversation at my home earlier this year in Oakland when she visited me and my wife is true, St. Martin’s Press paid a $2,000,000
''advance'' for just the North American rights for ''Cilka’s Journey'' – without even reading the book, sight unseen!
They were banking on the novel riding the wave of the lucrative financial success of ''The Tattooist of Auschwitz.''
The problem is that in doing so they continued with this new book to exploit and defame the character and memory
of my stepmother. They forced her to do things (in the narrative that Heather and her editors concocted) that she never would have done or even thought of
doing, such as being a sex slave to SS commanders or stealing drugs, etc.
I understand the need for an author of a novel to keep the story moving, to heighten drama, to create
mystery, to enhance characters.
But if you claim that your character is based on a real person, then you must always consider very
carefully what you make that person do.
You, the author, are the guardian of that real person’s reputation and memory.
Especially if that person was not a public figure.
Especially if there are people still alive who knew that person.
Especially if that person was a victim of the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag.
I will continue my fight to absolve my stepmother from the bogus character Heather and her
editors and publishers have forced on her in both ''Tattooist'' and ''Cilka’s Journey.'' I intend to set up a blog and
examine in detail how ''Cilka’s Journey ''and ''The Tattooist of Auschwitz'' have very little foundation
in truth and exploit not only Cecilia Klein but the tragic victims of both the Holocaust and the
Gulag.
In the blog, I will tell the story of my personal experiences meeting with Heather Morris and communicating with her by email -- and her publishers -- and
present my criticisms based on logic and facts.
Stay tuned.
-- George Kovach, 74, San Francisco
[* Email available upon request from reporters and Holocaust historians around the world. Just ask this blogger's email contact at danbloom@gmail.com]
