As the climate crisis continues to reshape our world, climate fiction has become one of the fastest-growing genres in literature. But what happens when the catastrophes that dominate headlines become indistinguishable from plots of fiction?
During an era of rolling disasters, we might expect readers to seek comfort in escapist stories, and yet the literary marketplace continues to reward those engaging head-on with environmentalist themes. It might be a signal that climate fiction has become so convincingly nuanced that readers are turning to these stories to help them interpret our new reality.
Now often known as “cli-fi,” this once-nameless sci-fi sub-genre has evolved into a major, prizewinning literary movement. Cli-fi doesn’t have to be dystopian. But as our fictional dystopias begin to resemble our reality, and as reality feels increasingly dystopian, the climate crisis has taken root among the usual settings and categories of literature: city life, college towns, coming-of-age, infidelity, love, tragedy.
