Kim Stanley Robinson pronounces on ''cli-fi'' -- approves of it -- and says it's here for the long haul, in his intro to the new ASU antho:

Kim Stanley Robinson pronounces on ''cli-fi'' -- approves of it -- and says it's here for the long haul, in his intro to the new ASU antho:


  ''As part of that fidelity to the real, a lot of near-future science fiction is also becoming what some people now call **climate fiction**. [Aka cli-fi.]  This is because climate change is already happening, and has become an unavoidable dominating element in the coming century. The new name thus reflects the basic realism of near-future science fiction, and is just the latest in the names people have given it; in the 1980s it was often called cyberpunk, because so many near-future stories incorporated the coming dominance of globalization and the emerging neoliberal dystopia. Now it’s climate change that is clearly coming, even more certainly than globalization. That these two biophysical dominants constitute a kind of cause and effect is perhaps another story that near-future science fiction can tell. In any case, climate fiction will be one name for this subgenre for a long time to come. This is a good thing, because fiction is how we organize our knowledge into plots that suggest how to behave in the real world. We decide what to do based on the stories we tell ourselves, so we very much need to be telling stories about our responses to climate change and the associated massive problems bearing down on us and our descendants. This book collects a number of new and exciting stories about things that will be happening soon, as people try to adapt to a changing climate and its impacts on our biosphere. It’s fair to ask whether that means that these stories are depressing and unpleasant to read; the answer is no, they aren’t, and in fact they are tremendously stimulating. This should not come as a surprise. Literature is about reality, indeed is part of the creation of reality, so it always deals with hard situations. This engagement is a crucial part of literature’s interest to us."