HEADLINE -- ''Dan Bloom: How a concern for future generations changed my life..."

''Dan Bloom: How a concern for future generations changed my life..."

I didn't get involved with ''Cli-Fi'' because I had a novel I wanted to write. I'm not a writer. But something pulled me in, something I had never felt in my younger years, a feeling that only came upon me when I turned 60: a deep concern for future generations 500 years from now and how they might cope with global warming impact events then. If there is to be a "then."

That's what pulled me in to ''cli-fi.'' [Cli-Fi is a short nickname for ''Cli''-mate ''Fi''-ction]. I was thinking of children and their parents thirty generations from now. Climate change has not really started yet, but we can see the warnings all around us, not just in government charts or in scientific measurements of the build-up of  co2 in the Earth's atmosphere.


You can see in the people around you, their fears, their worries, their anxieties. We know AGW is for real and it's not going to go away. That's what gnawed at me, drew me in.

Now I'm cli-fi 24/7. Now I'm spending part of my days scouting the year 2500, looking into a future that may very well become real sooner than we think. But I'm willing to give humankind 30 more generations before the shit really hits the fan. I want to be generous. I don't want to scare anyone. I don't want to be an alarmist.

But I see dead people, billions of dead people 30 generations from now. I know you don't want to hear this or even see these words in print, but it's what the IPCC reports and other scientific  handwriting on the wall has led me to see. I'm not scared, and you shouldn't be scared either.

There's still plenty of time to get our lives in order, 30 more generations of children and grandchildren.

That's how I came to cli-fi, or rather how cli fi came to me. I want to read those novels, both dystopian and utopian. I want to see those movies, both hopeful and unspeakably messy.

Remember the Hollywood movie ''On the Beach'' filmed in Australia in 1959 with Gregory Peck and the stellar cast? I envision a climate themed movie based on a climate themed novel that becomes the ''On the Beach'' of the Anthrocene. A global warning, an alarm bell, a warning flare. Cli-fi.


Someone will write it. In the next 100 years? Or sooner?


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