Cli Fi

[Tom_Mazanec]

Has there been any good cli-fi since Nov 2015?

[Archimid]

I wouldn't call it a good movie, but Io in Netflix has very good cli-fi. Worst case scenario stuff. 

[Poldergeist]

Hello fellow ASIF posters,

I am looking for new reads which help me imagine the consequences of the oncoming crises. Especially fiction. I have found some books which I thought were good:

The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Wall - John Lanchester
Water Knife - Paolo Bacigalupi

I know there's even a wiki entry for the genre, but I did not find the list of examples very interesting.

As far as non-fiction goes, I guess I have read quite a few of the most popular books. I did find 'six degrees' by Mark Lynas very helpful in imagining different futures.

Anyway, suggestions for further reading much appreciated.

Poldergeist
---
living at the bottom of a former sea

[Neven]

Poldergeist, I've added your comment to this thread on Cli-fi that already existed. If you read back, I'm sure you'll find some suggestions.

[Poldergeist]

Thanks!

[Sebastian Jones]

Hello fellow ASIF posters,

I am looking for new reads which help me imagine the consequences of the oncoming crises. Especially fiction. I have found some books which I thought were good:

The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Wall - John Lanchester
Water Knife - Paolo Bacigalupi

I know there's even a wiki entry for the genre, but I did not find the list of examples very interesting.

As far as non-fiction goes, I guess I have read quite a few of the most popular books. I did find 'six degrees' by Mark Lynas very helpful in imagining different futures.

Anyway, suggestions for further reading much appreciated.

Poldergeist
---
living at the bottom of a former sea

You have already listed this author, Paulo Bacigalupi, I recently read his "Windup Girl" and liked it more than I expected to. I find that as one learns more about potential climate futures, as is inevitable for regulars on this Forum, fewer and fewer CliFi writers stand up. Bacigalupi does. IMHOP.

[Tom_Mazanec]

Environmental crisis is the backdrop of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian storyline. "The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules," Offred tells the reader. She's describing The Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian state that arose out of environmental chaos, including nuclear war, waste producing uncontrollable radiation, toxic pollution, and ecosystem breakdown. "Meanwhile [these toxins] creep into your body, camp out in your fatty cells," Offred says. "Who knows, your very flesh may be polluted, dirty as an oily beach, sure death to shore birds and unborn babies." Just as the pollution infects beaches and animals, it affects bodies too, severely damaging the ability of people with uteruses to reproduce. With the very future of humankind thrown into question, those who can reproduce — primarily cis women — are forced to bear children for the wealthy ruling class of men.
https://www.bustle.com/p/the-handmaids-tale-is-trying-to-warn-you-about-climate-change-18667636

[Tom_Mazanec]

How climate fiction is helping people understand the planet's uncertain future
https://www.mic.com/p/how-climate-fiction-is-helping-people-understand-the-planets-uncertain-future-18804402

With the effects of climate change looming, it only makes sense that we'll need more ways to help us understand how our world is changing. We need tools that speak to us beyond the science textbook, which for some, just might require a deep dive into the world of fiction.

Some promising titles are mentioned in the article.

[sqwazw]

Kim Stanley Robinson has been mentioned a few time upthread already.

I'd really recommend his New York 2140 as a good portrayal about how sea level rise may realise, (his idea of three 'pulse' events is a hypnotic concept.).

[Sebastian Jones]

John Wyndham's "The Chrysalids" is a post nuclear apocalypse tale, where the island of Newfoundland is as warm as present day Maryland. It is one of the first books that I read that really made me want to read more by an author.

[Ktb]

Just finished Naomi Oreskes’ The Collapse of Western Civilization. More of a short story. Interesting nonetheless.

[Tom_Mazanec]

For Some Horror Writers, Nothing Is Scarier Than a Changing Planet
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/books/review/eco-horror-annihilation-jeff-vandermeer-chernobyl.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/climate&action=click&contentCollection=climate&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront

“Why does climate change cast a much smaller shadow on literature than it does on the world?” asked the novelist Amitav Ghosh, writing in The Guardian in 2016. “Is it perhaps too wild a stream to be navigated in the accustomed barques of narration?” Ghosh cited just a handful of prominent climate-change novels by authors like Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood and T. Coraghessan Boyle, lamenting what he perceived as a general failure of literary imagination. We could add to his list more recent work by John Lanchester (“The Wall”) and Richard Powers (“The Overstory”), but Ghosh’s larger point remains: A world in climate free-fall, marked by the outlandish and the improbable — freakish hurricanes, droughts, fires, heat waves and flash floods — is “not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction.”

But horror is turning to this topic.

[Tom_Mazanec]

That paragon of techno- optimism, Analog Science Fiction, has a couple good AGW stories in its Nov-Dec 2019 issue.

[Tom_Mazanec]

Here's a quickie:
https://365tomorrows.com/2019/11/16/bright-forest/

[sidd]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613349/a-full-life/

sidd

[Tom_Mazanec]

Analog September/October 2020 Vol. CXXXX No. 9 & 10
has a short story THE WRITHING TENTACLES OF HISTORY, Jay Werkheiser set 67 million years in the future in a world where octopi have evolved a scientific civilization in the wake of the Sixth Mass Extinction caused by AGW. They debate whether humans were intelligent.

[Tom_Mazanec]

Asimov's Mar-Apr 2021.
Gr andma +5° C

About the only thing that united the fragmented country was hatred of the greedy generation responsible for all their problems. Rangers still tracked boomers trying to evade incarceration in the protective detention camps...

"Don't you be judging, honey. It was a different time, different values. Everybody was dumb and happy. None of us knew it was going to be this bad. Hey, I was better than most. I recycled, drove electric. Who do you think put the windmills on the hill? And I never voted for those assholes. But just because I was born in 1955 and made some nice money and took care of myself, bullies like this want to chase me down and drag me off to some camp...I got out once, and no way I'm going back to sleep on concrete floors and wait in line for outhouses.