''Cli-fi is still an embryonic genre that reminds in many cases the early, naive, science fiction of the 1930s. And yet, it is growing and turning into literature. ''

UGO BARDI in Italy writes:

"So, in this difficult moment of late 2016, we are seeing something moving, out there. A new form of literature that embodies our future, makes it real, tells us about it. And it is not a good future. It is a terrible future. It is a future that most of us refuse to contemplate, even though we know that it is there, even though we refuse to admit it. This new literary genre takes the name of "Cli-Fi" in reference to sci-fi, of which it is in some ways the continuation [as a subgenre of SF].




''It is still an embryonic genre that reminds in many cases the early, naive, science fiction of the 1930s. And yet, it is growing and turning into literature. Italian novelist Bruno Arpaia has written a harsh and unforgiving cli-fi book in Italian titled "Something out There", [also translated for a Spanish language edition now] the story of a group of dispossessed migrants who try to reach Northern Europe, leaving an Italy devastated by climate change and only a few will make it. Surely not an optimistic book, although it has elements of hope. But it is a book that does the work that a literary piece must do: showing to you the change ahead.

''It is not by chance that I cited Dante; a cli-fi novel like Bruno Arpaia's one is comparable to the comedy's first cantica, the one about Hell. It sounds like the very first lines of the Comedy, where Dante tells of having been lost in a "dark wood," with its typical cli-fi theme: people desperately looking to escape from the climate disaster. And it is our situation: we are completely lost; unable to find our way out. Someone still has to write the cli-fi equivalents of the other two canticas of the Comedy, the one about Purgatory and the one about Paradise, and that will make it possible for us to understand what is in store for us. Can narrative take us out of Hell? Hard to say, but it is certain that without a narrative of the future, we can have no future.''

-- UB

''Cli-fi is still an embryonic genre that reminds in many cases the early, naive, science fiction of the 1930s. And yet, it is growing and turning into literature. ''