Thursday, August 31, 2017

An Interview with David Barker, author of new cli-fi novel BLUE GOLD in the UK


  1. DAN BLOOM: When did you first hear about the cli-fi term?

  1. DAVID BARKER: I first heard the term Cli-Fi used by a literary agent when we were discussing the manuscript that formed my debut novel. It would have been June 2015. At the time, the agent thought that Cli-Fi had been and gone after a burst of interest ten years earlier, such as the film The Day After Tomorrow and several similar-themed novels. I was intrigued by the snappy moniker, but surprised to hear that the genre might have had its day already! I personally thought that the time was right for even more focus on climate change, especially water shortages. So I viewed that agent’s rejection as only a minor set-back on my journey towards publication.

  2. DAVID BARKER: Everyone has their own idea of what people mean when they say Sci-Fi, but for me it is associated with space and technologies way in advance of our own. I love Sci-Fi novels and films. They will always be one of my favourite types of story. Star Wars: The Force Awakens,  and Guardians of the Galaxy are great escapism adventures. Wikipedia defines Sci-Fi as a sub-set of speculative fiction, and I think this broader notion captures the nature of Cli-Fi novels very well. I was really keen to set Blue Gold in the near future to make people realise that the tragic consequences of climate change may not be decades or centuries away. I speculate on a key question: who will keep the peace during a world war for water?

  3. DAVID BARKER: Movie options? No! But I am certainly keen to get it in front of the right people. Films producers will tend to gravitate towards books that are already very successful; it’s likely less of a financial risk for them. But a breakthrough can sometimes be a matter of luck – somebody of influence picks your book up at the airport, reads it on the beach and hey presto! An offer is on its way. Nearly all of the people who have read Blue Gold remark that its action scenes are very cinematic and that it would make a great movie. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed and putting out feelers...
  4. DAVID BARKER: Blue Gold’s theme is: what will humanity do when our most basic resource, fresh water, becomes a scarce commodity? It’s a spy adventure set in the near future during a world war for water. So the novel will appeal to fans of James Bond and Jason Bourne. But it has elements of political thriller in there. And, of course, a message about climate change although I’ve been careful to make sure that the book isn’t preachy, which can be a turn off for readers. In terms of local media, I already appear on a monthly book show with BBC Radio Berkshire, which is great exposure. The local newspapers in the UK have really tiny circulations, so I am aiming for some of the bigger newspapers but obviously competition for interviews/articles in those is much tougher.
  5. DAVID BARKER: For promotions and PR, my publisher does some of the marketing for me via a traditional distribution and sales company, via social media as well as at book fairs. My personal marketing campaign included a blog tour – whereby I got several book bloggers to agree to host me on consecutive days around the launch date for Blue Gold. I did book signings at local bookstores and on four occasions now have done talks about water shortages as well as my journey to becoming a published author. Most recently I engaged Smith Publicity to run a targeted three-week campaign in the US. It cost me US$1800. Their approach is very thorough and professional and they have helped raised my profile. It’s too early to say whether there’s been a noticeable lift in sales. I didn’t decide to continue with the campaign on an ongoing basis partly because of the cost, but partly because I felt they had achieved a reasonable success rate already. A fellow author who self-published a book last year had used Smith Publicity and had been pleased with the results, so I figured it was worth trying for my book too.

PR from SMTIH PUBLICITY!


How to turn an economic forecast into a Cli-Fi novel

By David Barker


Stories about climate change have been around for longer than you might realise. Jules Verne wrote a tale about a sudden change in temperate at the North Pole over one hundred years ago. JG Ballard penned a novel about rising sea levels more than fifty years ago. But recently such stories have managed to claim their own label: cli-fi. It rhymes with Sci-Fi in meaning as well as sound, but authors like myself who write about planet Earth in the near future feel uncomfortable giving their books a Sci-Fi label, since this often implies tales of the far future in galaxies far, far away.


In my previous role as chief economist at an international fund, it was my job to think about future trends and their effects on financial markets. While I was researching the prospects for commodity prices, it was clear that one vital resource had no tradeable market but the potential to become a new source of global conflict as shortages loomed: water. I became fascinated by the topic and dug deeper with my research.

At the time, I had no idea that I was destined to become an author or that Cli-Fi was even a genre. But an image stuck in my head: the opening scene of a story. It took me a couple of years to flesh out that initial idea into a rounded plot. The ending of the novel was quick to come, but joining the dots and thinking about what the world might look like fifteen years into the future was hard work. As nearly every author will tell you: especially when you are trying to hold down a full-time job. At least my daughter's bedtime routine at that time - when she would often ask me to make up a story - helped keep the creative juices flowing. Blue Gold, my debut novel, was on its way.



Why are water shortages becoming worse? To boil down a complex issue into two broad components: demographics and climate change. Over the next twenty years the global population is expected to rise by 20%, that's 11/2 billion people who will need food and water. Unfortunately, most of those extra people are likely to be born in regions of the world already stressed by water shortages: Africa, the Middle East and Asia. And while climate change does not alter the amount of water on the planet, extreme weather conditions such as drought and flooding are becoming more common and they make water supplies harder to manage.

When the price of oil shot up after 2004, people economized by driving fewer miles and buying smaller autos. What would happen if the price of water followed a similar trajectory? While most households in the western world can probably think of ways to use less water, families elsewhere - already down to a bare minimum of water - would struggle to economize and would struggle even more to pay higher prices.

It was probably no coincidence that the Arab Spring of 2010-12 occurred during a period of rapid increases in the price of flour and bread. People like to grumble when luxury items become more expensive. People riot when basic, essential items become unaffordable. Sadly, a much higher price for water may be needed to get industry to innovate and a crisis may be required to get governments to take the issue seriously. For now, we are simply tapping into vast underground reservoirs known as aquifers and hoping that the taps never run dry.

Back to my story. I knew that I wanted it set in the near future, to make people sit up and take notice. This is not a far-future dystopia that we have plenty of time to avoid. I had to find a way to make the story exciting. A World War for Water became the backdrop to my novel, in which two British agents get sent on a dangerous mission. I attended the London-based Faber Academy writing course to help avoid some of the pitfalls of writing, such as showing off all my research in the novel and preaching to the reader.

Finally, my novel was ready to share with the world. Just one snag: who was going to publish it?! As other writers will testify, that's a pretty big hurdle. The Cli-Fi moniker is still not widely accepted as a mainstream genre. So, what was I trying to sell? Blue Gold is part spy story, part action adventure and part political thriller. All set in the future. Anecdote: this latter point closed at least one door to me. A very famous literary agent said he liked my writing but never got involved in stories set in the future.

But at last, I hooked up with Urbane Publications - an independent house based in England that is willing to take risks with new authors and with stories that do not always fall neatly into standard categories. It's been an amazing experience and a delight to see my book in stores and to hear readers' reactions. During my author events over the past 3-4 months, I have been raising awareness about water shortages. And raising funds for some of the excellent work that charities such as Water Aid do in this sector. If you want to know more about any of the subjects covered by this article, please feel free to reach out to me at the website listed below.

David Barker lives in Berkshire, UK with his wife and daughter. His debut novel, Blue Gold, was published in May 2017 by Urbane and the sequel, Rose Gold, is due out in May 2018. He attended the Faber Academy novel writing course in 2014 whilst working in the financial industry and recently gave up his economist's job to become a full-time writer. 

He is a panellist on Radio Berkshire's monthly book show Radio Reads. And he is passionate about our planet and love playing sports. 

You can find out more about him on his website: www.davidbarkerauthor.co.uk and follow him on twitter: @BlueGold201


Related Keywords:international,

Source:Digital Media Online. All Rights Reserved

Whether you call your novel cli-fi or ecolit or sci-fi or spec-fic or weird/horror or SFF or whatever else floats your boat, go with your own instincts. Follow your own path.






[Some aggregated ''notes and quotes'' from around the world]

*QUESTION:  I have noticed there are many names for the type of fiction that is written about the environment and climate. I have come across terms like cli-fi, sci-fi, ecolit, climate change fiction, solarpunk and several more. And I have been wondering if we writers are all writing about the same/similar topics -- but maybe from different angles? Should there be one "name" for fiction that is about taking care of our planet? Any views on this?



**POSSIBLE ANSWER:  No, there should not be any one name for these kinds of novels, short stories, poems or movies. There should be many names, and there are. Choose the one that best fits your approach to these themes and which genre best fits your ideas. No one genre fits all sizes. There are many paths to choose. Go with what works for you.

Many literary critics and book reviewers worldwide have had some good thoughts about climate-themed narratives and early branding for global warning literature, and some have voiced concerned with the apparent failure of the novels (and the publishing world) in dealing with climate change.

All in all, literary genres are now blurred anyway when it comes to the overwhelming climate/environmental crises that affect our everyday life. No one label covers it all.

Authors and publishers will all have their own ideas. We should not brand such literature without recognizing the diversity and different labels that will help describe it.

So whether you call your novel cli-fi or ecolit or sci-fi or spec-fic or weird/horror or SFF or whatever floats your boat, go with your own instincts.


Follow your own path.

Habt ihr schon mal ''Cli-Fi'' geschrieben? Cli-Fi in Germany? -- YES! A rising genre in Germany now, too!


Grönland taut ab, Extremwetterereignisse werden zur neuen Normalität, Millionen von Umweltflüchtlingen suchen eine neue Heimat, ganze Kulturen versinken im Ozean … Alles ausgedacht?








Leider nicht. Auch wenn es immer noch einige Zweifler gibt: Der Klimawandel ist real, und wir stecken mittendrin. Was machen wir mit dieser Erkenntnis – und was macht diese Erkenntnis mit uns?






Einen spannenden Zugang zu dem Thema findet die Cli-Fi ---- (''Climate Change Fiction''), für die namhafte Autoren wie Paolo Bacigalupi, Kim Stanley Robinson oder Margaret Atwood als Beispiele gelten.












Philip Boehm has translated the cli-fi novel from Germany titled ''The Lamentations of Zeno'' (by Ilija Trojanow)

Speaking of  ---- >
Philip Boehm translated cli-fi titled ''The Lamentations of Zeno''

The Lamentations of Zeno

A Cli-Fi Novel By Ilija Trojanow, [a German-Bulgarian novelist, writing in German]

Now Translated in English by Philip Boehm in USA
(for this cli-fi novel coming out in May 2016 from VERSO Books
)

It's also a kind of travelogue: Ilija Trojanow has written many travel books as well as fiction.






see also: THE Cli-Fi Report's COUNTRY REPORT for Germany:






''Cli-Fi'' COUNTRY REPORTS: ''Cli-Fi'' in GERMANY (third in a global series of Country Reports)
                          
[ cli.mate fi.ction ]

As the cli-fi genre gains momentum worldwide, with news reports in several languages already, and writers in over 15 countries already working in the cli-fi genre -- from Finland to Sweden to Norway to Austrlia and New Zealand and the USA and the UK (and Canada, too, of course) -- this blog has started a series of CLI-FI COUNTRY REPORTS, detailing news on the ground about cli fi in non-English speaking nations around the world. On topic today is GERMANY, with information gathered from our correspondents in Munich and Bremen and Bonn.

A friend of this blog tell us:
    "Concerning German cli fi literature.....I've never seen the term ''cli fi'' or anything equivalent (such as maybe "Klimawandelliteratur") used in German media, but that does of course not mean there's no discussion. You might want to contact Professor Axel Goodbody at Bath Spa University in the UK; he's a leading eco-critic specializing in German studies. I'm sure he knows much more about German cli fi and the current debate than most people.

Cli-Fi in GERMANY:

A professor friend who knows German literature from A to Z tells this blog in a midnight email:You want to know about cli fi novels in German?

''Well, Ilija Trojanow's novel 'EisTau' (Melting Ice) is probably the best known German novel on climate change. AND he adds:

''Since the 1990s, about 20 popular novels on global warming have also been written in German.

As with the English novels, these range from action narratives in which climate change only serves as a backdrop to thoughtful engagements with the social and psychological implications of global warming, from the alarmist to the satirical, and from passionate calls for action to sceptical refutation.


One of the earliest German cli fi novels would be Günter Grass’s Totes Holz (Dead Wood, 1990): extreme weather events are the most immediate tangible manifestations of climate change in Europe, and it is no accident that the first clifi novels are prompted by them.

Anton-Andreas Guha’s Der Planet schlägt zurück (The Planet Strikes Back, 1993) was an early example of German climate change sci fi.

Thrillers include Frank Schätzing’s phenomenally successful Der Schwarm (The Swarm, 2004: but climate change only plays a marginal role there) and Ulrich Hefner’s Die dritte Ebene (The Third Level, 2009).

Dirk Fleck’s Maeva! (Maeva!) was the final part of a trilogy of speculative accounts of the consequences of climate change. This had begun with the dystopian novel GO! Die Ökodiktatur (GO! The Eco-Dictatorship) in 1994: the second book, Das Tahiti-Projekt (2007), portrayed a utopian state in the Pacific and explicitly promoted the political philosophy of "Equilibrism".

Crime novels include Till Bastian’s and Nele Neuhaus’s Tödliches Klima (Lethal Climate, 2000) and Wer Wind sät (He Who Sows Wind, 2011): the latter resembles Michael Crichton’s State of Fear in in 2004 interpreting global warming as a conspiracy of scientists seeking funding for their project teams, consequently a matter for healthy scepticism and self-assertion against authority.

Literary treatment of climate change in the German language also includes works of young adult YA literature, seeking to enlighten readers at the same time as entertaining them, such as Claus-Peter Hutter and Eva Goris’s Die Erde schlägt zurück (The Earth Strikes Back), and Cornelia Franz’s Ins Nordlicht blicken (Looking into the Northern Lights, 2012).

Probably the best known German climate change novel is "Eistau", or "Melting Ice", which explores the physical, social and psychological consequences of climate change through the story of a German climate scientist whose life is thrown into crisis when the Alpine glacier which he has spent his life observing and measuring melts, leaving just a heap of muddy boulders.

Other European clifi novels include the French Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005) and Finnish Antti Tuominen’s dystopian thriller The Healer (2011) have been well received in English translation.

See also Sven Böttcher's Prophezeiung (Prophecy, 2011).

http://www.goethe.de/ges/umw/prj/kuk/the/kun/en11224083.htm

Frank Schätzing's novel ''The Swarm'' (2004) is without doubt the best-known German cli fi thriller devoted, amongst other things, to the subject of climate change. It is now being made into a movie. Schätzing’s novel is without doubt the best-known German cli fi thriller and describes how the yrr, a single-cell, maritime, intelligent life form, punishes humankind for its environmental crimes and in particular for its destruction of the oceans. Nature fights back with tsunamis, underwater landslides and aggressive attacks by various species of marine life.

MOVIE NEWS
http://www.scifimoviepage.com/blog/movies/the-swarm/

At first, it seems that the protagonists in The Swarm are powerless to prevent the yrr from wiping out all of humankind. Finally, however, they succeed in communicating with the yrr. When the protagonists promise to live in harmony with nature in future, they are able to avert the ultimate devastation. In this sense Schätzing’s book reflects to some extent the so-called Gaia theory formulated by the British scientist James Lovelock, which regards the earth as a self-organized dynamic system that can and will take action against humankind for the sake of its own preservation and balance. The cli fi thriller, however, ends with the hope that humankind can after all be persuaded to rethink.

REFERENCE

“Conspiracy” as leitmotif


Cover von Nele Neuhaus’ „Wer Wind sät“; © Ullstein Verlag“Conspiracy” is a motif that frequently appears in climate change literature. One prominent example in the English-speaking world is Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004), which portrays climate change as a deception invented by environmental activists, thus absolving humankind from blame. The conspiracy motif, however, also appears in German climate change books, such as Nele Neuhaus’s Wer Wind sät (2011) and Sven Böttcher’s thriller Prophezeiung (2011).
Neuhaus’s crime novel ignores the seriousness of climate change and limits itself to criticizing the renewable energies market for its hunger for profits.
Cover von Sven Böttchers „Prophezeiung“; © Kiepenheuer & Witsch VerlagBöttcher’s thriller also focuses on the financial aspects of climate change: in the novel, the director of a major climate institute, who has invested heavily in a wind farm, senses an opportunity to eliminate his biggest rival, a photovoltaic manufacturer in China. Using a precise computer forecasting system, he plans to prove that millions of people will die as a result of climate change, China being to blame as the worst carbon emissions culprit. In fact, however, the dramatic weather events that were forecast fail to materialize.
Böttcher’s climate thriller critically illuminates climate research in a somewhat more nuanced fashion than the book by Neuhaus, showing that humankind should not be subject to blanket condemnation even if it is responsible for climate change.

Elegy


Cover von von Ilija Trojanows „Eis Tau“; © Hanser VerlagIn Ilija Torjanow’s climate change novel Eis Tau (2011), humankind is explicitly held responsible for climate change. This time, however, the accuser is one of them: Zeno Hintermeier, the novel’s protagonist, is convinced that humankind will destroy everything “that places itself on nature’s side”. As a glaciologist and the leader of cruise ship exhibitions in the Antarctic, he becomes a key witness to the environmental destruction that goes hand in hand with technological progress exploited for tourism: the Antarctic, formerly a desolate continent of courageous explorers, can suddenly be “conquered” even by old-age pensioners thanks to modern ships.
In Eis Tau, Zeno’s elegiac grief at the melting of the poles serves not only to give greater emphasis to the “inconvenient truth”; it also serves as the basis for a more general criticism of human ignorance about climate change, the destructive power of which is embodied in particular by the tourists on board the cruise ship. Zeno condemns this through an act of self-administered justice: he throws himself overboard, thereby abandoning the tourists to their fate.

Call for action


Dirk C. Fleck’s science fiction novel Maeva! (2011) is part of a larger political project initiated by the Equilibrism movement, which is searching for ways out of the ecological and economic crisis within the framework of a holistic concept. Rather like Trojanow’s Eis Tau, Fleck’s novel presupposes that humankind is to blame for the natural disasters of the future. It describes how extreme weather, droughts and conflicts over resources will already dominate world events by the year 2028.
Cover von Dirk C. Flecks “Maeva!”; © GreifenverlagIn response to the ongoing “tortilla fights in Mexico” and the “pasta demonstrations in Italy”, many industrialized nations have stepped up their military presence. This is the backdrop against which Maeva, the Tahitian president, embarks on a journey around the world aimed at bringing about a paradigm shift. Maeva is battling for an ecological restructuring of all areas of life, for a shift towards a natural circular economy and for sustainable monetary and land regulations and cosmopolitanism.
Dirk C. Fleck is thus one of the few German authors to propose concrete changes aimed at averting the imminent climate crisis. He illustrates ways in which humankind can escape its “sentence”. For this to be possible, however, it must start acting right now, as the book demands.

Antonia Mehnert
is a PhD student at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and researches American climate change novels.Gregers Andersen
is a PhD student in comparative studies at the University of Copenhagen and researches climate change in film and literature.The article is the result of cooperation at the Carson Center in Munich.Translation: Chris Cave
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Internet-Redaktion
November 2013Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
internet-redaktion@goethe.de

THE MOVIE:

TITLE: The Swarm
WHAT’S IT ABOUT: Nature takes revenge on polluting mankind in the form of rampaging Orcas, destructive tsunamis and mysterious diseases brought about by hither-to undiscovered sea creatures.
It is up to a team of scientists to figure out what is going on before the whole of humanity is wiped clean from the face of the earth.
Imagine a Roland Emmerich movie in which the director actually paid attention to his scientific advisors and you’ll have an idea more or less of what The Swarm is about. Now throw in some Arthur C. Clarke meets The Abyss touches for good measure too . . .
SOURCE:
Instead it is an adaptation of Der Schwarm (translated into English as The Swarm) by German author Frank Schaetzing, an 800-plus pages cli fi epic that dominated German best-selling lists for a year upon its publication in 2004 which has been translated into 18 languages since then.
WHO’S INVOLVED? Actress Uma Thurman and two German producers bought the movie rights back in 2006. Since then Martha De Laurentiis (widow of legendary producer Dino) has been involved as well as soundtrack composer / movie producer Klaus Badelt and Ted Tally (who wrote the screenplay for Silence of the Lambs) and William J. MacDonald (Rome).
.
LAST WE HEARD: In 2007 Martha De Laurentiis announced Ted Tally’s appointment as screenwriter: “We needed a certain screenwriter to preserve the book’s intelligence and message without stepping on the momentum of the book’s cinematically spectacular set-pieces, and we loved the last time we worked with Ted [on Silence of the Lambs].”
Since then the project was updated on 12 March 2012 on Internet Movie Database as being “in development” with an envisaged 2015 release date. One can assume that the project isn’t entirely dead even though the movie rights were acquired more than six years ago by now . . .
CHANCES OF GETTING MADE: Who knows? News on this project has been quiet for some time now. To pull it off properly the project needs a pretty big budget otherwise it’ll be just be a Syfy original movie . . . It might just get made.
WHY IT’D BE GREAT: Schaetzing’s novel may be on the long-winded side seeing as it is “crammed full of scientific fact and learning” as the author himself admits in his post-scriptum, but it is nonetheless a thrilling page-turner of a read.
Producer De Laurentiis has it right when she talks about the book’s intelligence as well as its cinematically spectacular set-pieces. One cool set-piece involves a pod of Orcas attacking a boat of whale watchers as well as another boat containing eco protestors. (Incidentally, the last movie to feature a rampaging killer whale was 1977’s Orca: The Killer Whale, ironically produced by Dino De Laurentiis himself.)
The book’s climax involves a gigantic U.S. navy ship slowly sinking as it is rocked by several explosions.
One practically salivates at the mouth thinking what a skilled action director might achieve with the material. If a director can resist the temptation to jettison the story’s more challenging science stuff (Schaetzing goes to great lengths to make it all as scientifically plausible as possible even working in real life scientists in the process), the end result would be a Roland Emmerich movie . . . but with brains!


 


THE CLI-FI REPORT:
Over 50 academic & media links:
http://cli-fi.net

1 comment:

DANIELBLOOM said...
A professor friend who knows German literature from A to Z tells this blog in a midnight email:

You want to know about cli fi novels in German?

''Well, Ilija Trojanow's novel 'EisTau' (Melting Ice) is probably the best known German novel on climate change. AND he adds:

''Since the 1990s, about 20 popular novels on global warming have also been written in German.

As with the English novels, these range from action narratives in which climate change only serves as a backdrop to thoughtful engagements with the social and psychological implications of global warming, from the alarmist to the satirical, and from passionate calls for action to sceptical refutation.


One of the earliest German cli fi novels would be Günter Grass’s Totes Holz (Dead Wood, 1990): extreme weather events are the most immediate tangible manifestations of climate change in Europe, and it is no accident that the first clifi novels are prompted by them.

Anton-Andreas Guha’s Der Planet schlägt zurück (The Planet Strikes Back, 1993) was an early example of German climate change sci fi.

Thrillers include Frank Schätzing’s phenomenally successful Der Schwarm (The Swarm, 2004: but climate change only plays a marginal role there) and Ulrich Hefner’s Die dritte Ebene (The Third Level, 2009).

Dirk Fleck’s Maeva! (Maeva!) was the final part of a trilogy of speculative accounts of the consequences of climate change. This had begun with the dystopian novel GO! Die Ökodiktatur (GO! The Eco-Dictatorship) in 1994: the second book, Das Tahiti-Projekt (2007), portrayed a utopian state in the Pacific and explicitly promoted the political philosophy of "Equilibrism".

Crime novels include Till Bastian’s and Nele Neuhaus’s Tödliches Klima (Lethal Climate, 2000) and Wer Wind sät (He Who Sows Wind, 2011): the latter resembles Michael Crichton’s State of Fear in in 2004 interpreting global warming as a conspiracy of scientists seeking funding for their project teams, consequently a matter for healthy scepticism and self-assertion against authority.

Literary treatment of climate change in the German language also includes works of young adult YA literature, seeking to enlighten readers at the same time as entertaining them, such as Claus-Peter Hutter and Eva Goris’s Die Erde schlägt zurück (The Earth Strikes Back), and Cornelia Franz’s Ins Nordlicht blicken (Looking into the Northern Lights, 2012).

Probably the best known German climate change novel is "Eistau", or "Melting Ice", which explores the physical, social and psychological consequences of climate change through the story of a German climate scientist whose life is thrown into crisis when the Alpine glacier which he has spent his life observing and measuring melts, leaving just a heap of muddy boulders.

Other European clifi novels include the French Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005) and Finnish Antti Tuominen’s dystopian thriller The Healer (2011) have been well received in English translation.

See also Sven Böttcher's Prophezeiung (Prophecy, 2011).








http://pcillu101.blogspot.tw/2015/06/cli-fi-country-reports-cli-fi-in.html

Cli-Fi in GERMANY:

A professor friend who knows German literature from A to Z tells this blog in a midnight email:You want to know about cli fi novels in German?

''Well, Ilija Trojanow's novel 'EisTau' (Melting Ice) is probably the best known German novel on climate change.


A ''cli-fi'' about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic

CRITICS ARE SAYING:

“There is little that a novelist can tell us on the subject that we do not already know, but Trojanow gives the statistics and prognoses a human dimension … one of Europe’s most original contemporary writers.” – UK Times Literary Supplement

The Lamentations of Zeno is electric, irresistible, well written and movingly topical cli-fi. Ilija Trojanow, with several masterpieces to his name, never puts a foot wrong. He is as important a writer in this day and age as Günter Grass was for his—a joy to read.” – Nuruddin Farah, author of Hiding in Plain Sight

“Thrilling, nuanced, and chillingly meditative … Ilija Trojanow has written a modern cli-fi fable tinged with absurd humor, dramatizing the high stakes of our current climate gamble.” – Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin






see ALSO

Elegy
Cover von von Ilija Trojanows „Eis Tau“; © Hanser VerlagIn Ilija Torjanow’s climate change novel Eis Tau (2011), humankind is explicitly held responsible for climate change. This time, however, the accuser is one of them: Zeno Hintermeier, the novel’s protagonist, is convinced that humankind will destroy everything “that places itself on nature’s side”. As a glaciologist and the leader of cruise ship exhibitions in the Antarctic, he becomes a key witness to the environmental destruction that goes hand in hand with technological progress exploited for tourism: the Antarctic, formerly a desolate continent of courageous explorers, can suddenly be “conquered” even by old-age pensioners thanks to modern ships.
In Eis Tau, Zeno’s elegiac grief at the melting of the poles serves not only to give greater emphasis to the “inconvenient truth”; it also serves as the basis for a more general criticism of human ignorance about climate change, the destructive power of which is embodied in particular by the tourists on board the cruise ship. Zeno condemns this through an act of self-administered justice: he throws himself overboard, thereby abandoning the tourists to their fate.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

For #scifi writers worldwide World Climate Summit from Nov. 6-17 in Germany, holds #CliFi short story contest ! https://cli-fi-books.blogspot.tw/2017/08/tor-sf-and-sff-online-goes-cli-fi-here.html

For #scifi writers worldwide World Climate Summit from Nov. 6-17 in Germany, holds #CliFi short story contest ! https://cli-fi-books.blogspot.tw/2017/08/tor-sf-and-sff-online-goes-cli-fi-here.html

TOR SF AND SFF online goes cli-fi here in German language #Clifi #CliFiKurzgeschichtenwettbewerb

http://www.tor-online.de/fun/gewinnspiele/kurzgeschichtenwettbewerb/

TOR science fiction books online goes cli-fi here in German language Cli-fi re Cli Fi Kurzgeschichtenwettbewerb



ENGLISH HERE -- cli-fi short story Competition in

the snow of tomorrow - invitation to tender for the first Tor-Online-cli-fi Short Story Competition






Gate Team

30.08.2017

•BOOK
•FISCHER GATE
•FANTASY
•SCIENCE FICTION


Michael Schäfer @MichaelSchfer71 8月30日
Habt ihr schon mal Cli-Fi geschrieben? Climate-Fiction is Germany? YES!

Grönland taut ab, Extremwetterereignisse werden zur neuen Normalität, Millionen von Umweltflüchtlingen suchen eine neue Heimat, ganze Kulturen versinken im Ozean … Alles ausgedacht? Leider nicht. Auch wenn es immer noch einige Zweifler gibt: Der Klimawandel ist real, und wir stecken mittendrin. Was machen wir mit dieser Erkenntnis – und was macht diese Erkenntnis mit uns? Einen spannenden Zugang zu dem Thema findet die Cli-Fi, für die namhafte Autoren wie Paolo Bacigalupi, Kim Stanley Robinson oder Margaret Atwood als Beispiele gelten. HASHTAG for Twitter #CliFi


Greenland taut, extreme weather events are the new normality, millions of environmental refugees are looking for a new home, all cultures is sinking in the ocean ... everything is designed? Unfortunately not. Even if there are still some doubters are: climate change is real and we are stuck in the middle of it all. What do we do with this knowledge - and what makes this knowledge with us? An exciting access to the subject is the climate fiction, for the renowned authors such as Paolo Bacigalupi, Kim Stanley Robinson or Margaret Atwood as examples.

On the occasion of this year's World Climate Summit from 6 to 17. November in Bonn, we call for the Cli-Fi-short story competition!





Tips The spring moves the keyboard around and pour your ideas on climate change in a fantastic story. The best submission is with a publication on tor-online.de and a prize money of €250 crowned.

Send your previously unpublished short story on the subject of climate change up to 31.10.2017 via e-mail and in an open format (.doc, .rtf, .odt) to Kontakt@tor-online.de. The text should be at least 5,000 and 50,000 characters (including spaces) long and must be the same as the genre of Fantasy and Science Fiction to assign. The winners of history is on 17. November 2017 on Tor published online.

Here are the terms and conditions again in brief:

•Subject: Climate Change
•unpublished text
•per participant only 1 text
•Deadline: 31.10. to Kontakt@tor-online.de
•Genre: science fiction or fantasy
•as an open document (doc, rtf, odt)
•Size: 5.00 0-50,000 characters (including spaces)
•Author info: Name, Kurzbio
•Price: 250 €, publication on gate-online.de



for detailed terms and conditions can be found here. Much success!

Is Cli-fi a new, hot genre? Yes!

Is Cli-fi the new, hot genre?


Hey everyone, there’s a new, exciting genre in town – Cli-fi.  Or – Climate change novels.
It seems I’ve been putting my Song of Forgetfulness Sci-fi/Dystopian series in the wrong category.
According to an article in The Guardian, the genre has been around for some time, possibly as early as 2003 with Margaret Atwood’s  The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake. 
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Also, Ian McEwan’s novel Solar, is cli-fiso clearly not that new. You can read the full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/31/global-warning-rise-cli-fi
Having looked up some Cli-fi, I think the genre is a little vague and saturated by all sorts of dystopian, sc-fi, YA, romance…in short, a lot of authors seem to be using the term quite loosely. Which is a good thing, especially with a sub genre that isn’t too well known. Perhaps now is the time to promote this category to raise awareness of global warming and the fragility of our beautiful planet.
cli-fi
Until I read about Cli-fi in a post by Lisa Rowan, I’d never heard of it. Stupid me!  I mean all of my books in The Song Forgetfulness series deal with climate change and the effects it has on future generations as they struggle to survive in a hostile world. As well as a host of other things too numerous to mention here. Kind of exactly the definition of this ‘new’ genre.  Well, now I know.
Right, I ‘m off to Amazon to change my subheading and a category or two.
 If you want to have a look at my work and decide if it is indeed – Cli-fi – check out my new release – The Chronicles of Mayer, prologue to the series mentioned above.
MayerFront10.08plain_type_sml
Let’s start reading more Cli-fi folks!
Wishing you all a safe day, especially those people having to deal with Hurricane Harvey.

Will a cli-fi novel become the breakthrough novel of the Fall 2017 publishing season? Our scout reports from NYC



Will a cli-fi novel become the breakthrough novel of the Fall 2017 publishing season?

Our scout reports from NYC

As the USA book world’s most literary season approaches, the Fall season, the book industry still awaits the year’s big literary publication. Will it be a cli-fi novel? Stay tuned.


While critics have celebrated Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West,” George Saunders’ ”Lincoln in the Bardo” and other works, no 2017 releases have approached the sales or the impact of such older titles as Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and George Orwell’s “1984.” Publishers wonder if it’s a familiar syndrome, the so-called Trump effect, with the public too caught up in the headlines to focus on new and challenging fiction.


“People are indeed *distracted*, and there’s no sign of it letting up,” says Paul Bogaards, an executive vice president and executive director of publicity at the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. “Many are weary from their social feeds — mentally exhausted — and some, perhaps, are simply choosing to binge watch their favorite television series and eat copious amounts of ice cream rather than read a contemporary, literary novel.”


“We’ve been disappointed in sales, and other publishers have been disappointed,” said Scribner publisher and senior vice president Nan Graham, who hopes to break the spell this fall with new fiction from prize-winners Jennifer Egan and Jesmyn Ward. “I think it’s harder for new books to break through because people are reading the books that other people are reading. They’re looking to talk to other people about something they have in common. And that drive seems more intense right now. Is that the so-called Trump effect? Sure.”


But cli-fi novels are out there and one or two might break through. Here comes the Fall season of 2017.

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

NOT INTERESTED

NOT INTERESTED
 
a quiet informal oped by Dan Bloom
 
The 21st century marked the time when American cli-fi novelists first started penning novels and short stories about climate change, set in the present or near future.  And yet, given the slow pace of publishing, this is only logical: cli-fi novels being written now, as we speak, in the middle of the Hurricane Harvey disaster that struck Texas, cli-fi novels about Katrina and Harvey and the Mumbia floods will likely not appear until the mid-2020s, perhaps in 2025 or 2030 even.

So are we having a crisis of the imagination as Indian-American novelist Amitavji Ghosh says over and over again in his book and opeds splashed all over the media in the UK, the USA and Canada and in India as well? No, Dr Ghosh is wrong. There is no crisis of the imagination. There is a crisis in publishing. Among acquiring editors, and literary agents and CEO publishers. They mostly care about the bottom line and feeding their shareholders with money-making novels. That means distraction, escapism, science fiction adventures in outer space and other universes, along with celebrity cookbooks and such crap. But there is no crisis of the imagination among cli-fi novelists. They are working hard. They are writing daily. The crisis with with publishers who won't publish their works and with literary agents who won't even read their manuscripts. The publishing industry is a mess. When this blogger asked a top editor at a major trade magazine in New York City that covers the book industry if he was interested in covering the rise of the new genre of cli-fi, he replied in a two word note: "Not interested."

That sums up where we stand. Not interested, say the gatekeepers.

So even in Holland, Groene editor Jaap Tielbeke writes an essay titled "Crisis van de verbeelding," Crisis in Imagination, which basically gives up the old Amitav Ghosh anti-genre mantra.        
''Waarom zijn we toch maar niet in staat om grip te krijgen op de overweldigende klimaatcrisis? Volgens de Indiase schrijver Amitav Ghosh is dat het grote vraagstuk van onze tijd.''
Seems as if literary gatekeepers around the world cannot wrap their arms around the concept of cli-fi. After all, they are in the business of making money off novels that distract us from the what really matters now, and that is climate change. Will anything change? Not for another century at least. Cli-fi will not truly surface until the mid-21st century and even by the year 2100, the beginning of the 22nd Century, cli-fi will be nowhere. We are living in this kind of reality. The ''NOT INTERESTED'' reality of our literary gatekeepers.
They've even crafted a slur against cli-fi, calling it "climate porn." Post Katrina, post-Harvey, post the Mumbai floods of 20017, we are still in the lala land of climate porn. And nothing will change for another 100 to 200 years and then, after 500 years of this NOT INTERESTED nonsense, it will be too late. As Margaret Atwood told Jeff Vandermeer in an interview a few years ago, by the time mother of all climate change/global warming distasters hits us, it will be too late. And no genre of literature -- not cli-fi, not sci-fi, not spec fic, not ecofic -- will make any difference. By the time the mother of all climate change impact events hits us, it will be too late. We were warned but we did not listen to McKibben or Klein or Monbiot or Caldeira or Revkin or Colbert or Lynas. We just keep being distracted by the latest MTV awards show, the last fashion trend, the latest cat videos, the latest gossip about Celebrity A-Listers.
We were all NOT INTERESTED.

Monday, August 28, 2017

'Harvey' matters - an OpEd by Vanderbilt law professor and novelist Edward Rubin






BLOG POST INTRO: When ‘Hurricane Harvey’ crashed into the Texas coast recently, the national media in the USA went into overdrive in trying to explain it all.


Was climate change to blame? No. Did climate change make the hurricane and its flooding aftermath worse? Most likely.


So I asked  a friend of mine, Edward Rubin, a law professor at Vanderbilt University and the author of a novel about climate change impacts in some distant future, for his take on ”Harvey.” He didn’t mince his words.

OpEd from Professor EDWARD RUBIN


”Houston is under water at present.  The rainfall was ‘measured in feet’, not inches, and the damage is estimated in the billions.  Observers described the storm, which fell upon the epicenter of climate change denial, as ‘beyond anything experienced.’


 ”People who demand action to address the scientific fact of anthropogenic global warming have been instructing the deniers for many years that weather is different from climate.  When Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma brought a snowball into the Senate chamber to prove that the world wasn’t getting warmer, it was recognized as actually proving that he is a moron, as well as a tool of the energy industry.  But after Katrina, Sandy, the South Carolina flood of 2015, and now Harvey, it is time to stop making this point and start making a different one.


”Yes, weather events like the present one are different from climate, and devastating hurricanes struck the American coastline long before the industrial era. But the frequency of these events is an indication that the climate is changing, and that same frequency will be one of the most serious consequences of this change. It seems possible that sea levels will rise three feet by the end of this century if we fail to bring global warming under control.  That may be sufficient to flood many of America’s coastal cities. But long before that occurs, lesser increases in sea levels, combined with the increased energy in the Earth’s atmosphere, will mean that storms ‘beyond anything experienced’ will be experienced on a regular basis.


”Houston, courtesy of American taxpayers whose lives the Texas climate change deniers are content to devastate, will recover from this storm, as New York did from Sandy, South Carolina did from its flood and New Orleans did – sort of — from Katrina.  The streets will be drained and reopened soon, the ruined buildings re-built within a decade.  But how often can we do this?  What happens when the next ]storm of the century] strikes ten years later, and the next one five years after that?  Long before it actually floods, Houston, together with Boston, New York, Washington, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle and other coastal cities will be subject to repeated devastation, ultimately coming before the damage from the previous disaster has been repaired.


”I suspect that one of the reasons why so many Americans are willing to ignore the overwhelming evidence of climate change is not that they truly disbelieve it, but because they think that its disastrous effects will occur in other nations.  We’re located in the temperate zone, not the tropics, after all, most of our buildings are air-conditioned, we produce more food than we need, and so what if Florida, Texas and Arizona stop growing so fast and population shifts back to the Northeast and the Midwest.  In fact, abandoning our coastal cities would be a disaster.  We can afford to literally bail out Houston, but moving five of our ten largest metropolitan areas and many other large cities will cost trillions.  At the very least, that alone will quadruple everyone’s tax bill, aside from the heat waves, droughts and tornadoes that will afflict the interior of the country.


 But cost will not be the only problem.  Even if we are willing to turn back the tens of millions of climate refugees who will flock to our shores (presumably by killing them) where will our own tens of millions of internal refugees go?  In my cli-fi novel, The Heatstroke Line, I predict that population disruptions of this magnitude will destroy the unity of the nation and end our democratic system of government. We don’t have to wait until rising sea levels actually drown our coastal cities.  The repeated storms of the next few decades – weather, admittedly, but weather  whose frequency is caused by climate change – may be enough.”

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Michael Mann at PennState TWEETS: [MSM non-coverage of HARVEY flooding is] ''Reminiscent of the Hunger Games. Dystopian CliFi has something important to offer to our public discourse.''



Important TWITTER feed: Michael Mann at UPenn in Twitter convo with Eric Heggie -- August 28



 Eric Heggie‏ @EricHeggie ·

...
''4th largest city in America is going underwater and the news is still running Sunday shows, and the networks aren't breaking into coverage..''
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Dr Mann said in Replying to @EricHeggie @7im
''Reminiscent of the Hunger Games. Dystopian CliFi has something important to offer to our public discourse.''

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Welcome to open 'cli-fi' FB page: academics, novelists withstrong interest in cli-fi novels/movies.







EVERYONE! Welcome  to open 'cli-fi' FB page: academics, novelists withstrong interest in cli-fi novels/movies. https://www.facebook.com/groups/clifigroup/

Friday, August 25, 2017

READING GROUP GUIDE for new cli-fi novel ''THE HISTORY OF BEES'' by Norwegian writer Maja Lunde

The History of Bees

Reading Group Guide

    This reading group guide for The History of Bees includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Maja Lunde. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

    Introduction

    In the spirit of Station Eleven and Never Let Me Go, this dazzling and ambitious literary debut follows three generations of beekeepers from the past, present, and future, weaving a spellbinding story of their relationship to the bees—and to their children and one another—against the backdrop of an urgent global crisis.

    England, 1852. William is a biologist and seed merchant who sets out to build a new type of beehive—one that will give both him and his children honor and fame.

    United States, 2007. George is a beekeeper fighting an uphill battle against modern farming, but hopes that his son can be their salvation.

    China, 2098. Tao hand paints pollen onto the fruit trees now that the bees have long since disappeared. When Tao’s young son is taken away by the authorities after a tragic accident, she sets out on a grueling journey to find out what happened to him.

    Haunting, illuminating, and deftly written, The History of Bees joins these three very different narratives into one gripping and thought-provoking story that is just as much about the powerful bond between children and parents as it is about our very relationship to nature and humanity.

    Topics and Questions for Discussion

    1. The History Of Bees alternates between three perspectives: those of Tao, George, and William. With which of these three main characters did you most relate? To whom did you find it hardest to connect? With whom do you most identify?

    2. On page 30, William’s mentor, Rahm, opines “One reproduces, has offspring, one instinctively puts their needs first, they are mouths to feed, one becomes a provider, the intellect steps aside to make way for nature.” Do you agree or disagree with Rahm’s statement? What do you think William felt when his mentor put it thusly?

    3. On page 36, George thinks longingly of the bees’ buzzing as the “real reunion celebration.” How does George’s expectation of how his reunion with Thomas will go impact how the two men relate to each other?

    4. Throughout the book, there’s great emphasis on experience vs. intellect. Think of George’s experience vs. Thomas’s books, Tao’s attempts to discover what happened to Wei-Wen, William’s relationship with Rahm. Which brand of “knowledge” do you think is more valuable?

    5. George is preoccupied with leaving a “legacy” behind, resisting Emma’s attempts to move them to Florida. From where does his legacy ultimately come? Is it what you expected?

    6. William, on page 116, says of his desired creation “Only humans could construct proper buildings, a building it was possible to monitor, which gave humans, not nature, control.” From where does the impulse to control nature come? Do you think that a desire to control the natural world is something humans can overcome without catastrophic reason?

    7. How do the workings of the hive impart a lesson for humans? Is there any wisdom to be gleaned from the way their “society” works?

    8. When George goes on the camping trip with young Tom, he tells him a tale about a snake (p. 186). What could the snake be symbolic of?

    9. Colony Collapse is partially about abandonment of the queen. How does the theme of abandonment or fear of abandonment play out throughout the novel, specifically in Tao’s timeline?

    10. Both William and Tao find refuge in going to bed, while George finds himself unable to rest. How do the characters hide from their loved ones? Where do they each find solace?

    11. Which character do you think is most important in the book? Whose life story holds the three narrative threads together?

    12. On page 316, Tao notices that Li Xiara and the teenage boy are using the same words to describe two very different feelings—“Each and every one of us is not important” could be about either community or loneliness. Do you find meaning in community? How? How could a sense of community be taken too far?

    Enhance Your Book Club

    1. Pick up New Observations on the Natural History of Bees by François Huber or Robbing the Bees by Holley Bishop from your local library. Discuss how what you learn from those texts enhances the fictional world Maja Lunde has created in The History of Bees.

    2. Find a local nursery, garden center, or farm that keeps bees and visit to see them in action!

    3. Do some research on Colony Collapse Disorder. What was surprising to you? Did you know about its existence before reading The History of Bees?

    4. Have a honey tasting! Try some local honey and some that’s more mass-produced. Discuss the differences between the different varieties you try.

    A Conversation with Maja Lunde

    All three of the main characters are parents, and they’re deeply affected by their hopes and disappointments in their respective children. In comparing their relationships to their children, what were you trying to say about the nature of parenthood?

    The three main characters are very different, live in different times and places, but have in common that they are parents filled with fear and hope, a fighting spirit, and resignation. And they all want what’s best for their kids, but don’t always know what that is. This is a theme I, as a mother of three, really relate to. Children are constantly evolving, and thus the role of a parent is ever-changing. It is so easy to forget that your child is a completely different person than you, and what’s right for you is often not right for him or her. Tao, George, and William are certain they know what’s best for their children, but are quite often mistaken.

    Each of the three narrators uses such distinct diction and has such different backgrounds and priorities. Which was the easiest for you to write, and which was the hardest? How did you ensure that you kept their diction distinct?

    I think George was the one who came easiest. I just loved him, with all his weaknesses, and felt I knew him from day one. Tao was the most difficult one, mostly because her story is from the future. But when I forgot that and instead focused on her as a mother, it started to flow. Her son is three; my youngest was three when I did the writing. It was him, really, I imagined when writing about Tao. That actually made their story very emotional for me.

    What first sparked your curiosity in writing about the importance of bees to humans? Why choose to make your statement through fiction instead of a research-based nonfiction work?

    I came up with the idea for this novel after seeing a documentary about Colony Collapse Disorder. It scared and fascinated me at the same time and I immediately knew that I wanted to write this novel.

    When starting to work with the book, I had three questions: why do the bees die, how does it feel to lose them, how can the world be without pollinating insects?

    To answer the questions I did a lot of research, and through the research, I found the three main characters of the novel. As a fiction writer, it was the characters who inspired me and made me go on writing.

    What books did you read, or what websites, to understand England in the nineteenth century? What resources did you draw upon to imagine China in the year 2098?

    I read a lot of Dickens, among other authors. I found Great Expectations especially inspiring. I also read different history books, and talked to a historian. The biology part was quite a challenge. I did quite a bit of research to find out how much they knew about bees back then, and of course tried to find out as much as I could both about Lorenzo Langstroth and Huber. Langstroth’s story also inspired the story of William: the depressed father rising through a new invention.

    When it came to China I had to find out how the world could look without bees and pollinating insects. It was not easy—I had to imagine everything, really—but I checked with several experts to try to make it as realistic as possible. I also read books about China today and took note of the pollination system they have in place, the names they’re already using (the Committee, for example), and details like the red scarf, which is used in school.

    Have you ever thought about keeping honeybees yourself?

    Every day, at least in summer. But my garden is very small and next to a playground. I’m not sure if the other neighbors would be thrilled.

    The History of Bees ends on a hopeful note. Why choose to add an element of hope to the dystopian future? How do you theorize the bees made a return?

    Deep down I’m an optimist; therefore it would be wrong for me to end my novel without hope. As long as we have hope, we are also willing to take the steps we need to make our planet better and safer for children of the future.

    I want the readers to have their own opinion about why the bees have come back . . . or . . . maybe they’ve been there the whole time?

    What is something that readers can do to help combat Colony Collapse Disorder? What do you recommend people do if they’d like to help?

    Keep bees. Plant bee-friendly flowers. And try to live as sustainable and green as you can. When Planet Earth is in trouble, the bees are in trouble. Everything is connected to everything—it’s as simple and difficult as that, really.

    For which character in the novel—main or secondary—did you feel the most affinity? Affection? Annoyance?

    I love the children in the book. Charlotte, Tom, and Wei-Wen. They’re the heroes of my story. And in them you find the hope.

    I got annoyed with all my three main characters when writing, especially William. He could be quite irritating. But I also felt for them, understood them and loved them, and can’t decide which one is my favorite. It’s a bit like asking me which of my three kids I love the most. . . .

    Are you working on another novel now? If so, can you tell us a little about it?

    I am. And again I’m writing about parents and kids, past, present, future. And nature. Write where it burns, we say in Norway. This is where it burns for me.

    You’ve written children’s books, YA books, and scripts. How did writing The History of Bees differ from those other undertakings?

    Writing scripts for film and TV is different when it comes to language. The language is only a tool. But building characters and story is sort of the same. I also hear my novels are very easy to visualize for the reader. I guess it’s all my years working as a screenwriter that are coming through!

    Writing for kids is like writing for the child inside me. Sometimes it’s more difficult than writing for adults, because I have to find her, the ten-year-old Maja. It’s not about being simpler or more childish, it’s about being more imaginative, more daring, perhaps. There’s little that gives more meaning to me than opening the door to the great adventures of books for young readers, and I’m constantly working on new books for children.