''[Cli--fi novels] refashion myths for our age, appropriating time-honored narratives to accord with our knowledge and our fears.''
A literary term dubbed cli-fi has been coined to describe a new genre of fiction that deals with climate change. A reporter for the Christian Science Monitor (via an NPR story in 2013) went further to say that “Cli-fi describes a dystopian present, as opposed to a dystopian future, and it isn’t non-fiction or even science fiction: cli-fi is about literary fiction.”
Given that many books discussed as being cli-fi are set in the future, one could go one step further to say that the genre is a subgenre of sci-fi and speculative in general fiction and of course related to climate change, whether it is set in the past, the future or the present. At the same time, others consider cli-fi to be a stand-alone independent genre not connected to sci-fi at all. Time will tell.
In 2013, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow wrote an essay for Dissent Magazine, headlined "The Birth of a Genre: Cli-Fi" which discussed climate change in literature. Something she said about the cli-fi books included in the essay still resonates:
''[Cli--fi novels] refashion myths for our age, appropriating time-honored narratives to accord with our knowledge and our fears.''
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