Saturday, April 21, 2018

Case Williams at the HuffPost website goes cli-fi today in very insightful article

 HuffPost apocalyptic ''cli-fi'' (aka ''climate fiction''). coveres Paolo, Tobias, KSR, Watkins, Lerner, Atwood, Ghosh and more. CC: cli-fi.net for backstory.RE: Paolo, Buckell, KSR, @clairevaye more.  #CliFi rising RSVP. [Cli-fi as a established subgenre of #scifi...]

Casey Williams wrote:

[AUTHOR BIO: Casey Williams is a writer and doctoral student based in Durham, North Carolina. His work covers environmental politics and culture, and has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and other national and local outlets.]

If you live somewhere other than under a large rock, the premise of The Tangled Lands will sound familiar: A declining empire owes its former splendor to a 
miraculous energy source. Now, emissions from that source threaten to destroy 
the empire. Everyone’s freaking out.
The story is (maybe too) obviously an allegory of climate change. Instead of hydrocarbons, the fictional world Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell 
create in their recently released novel draws power from magic, which also 
fertilizes the voracious, writhing, poisonous weeds now bearing down on 
one of the last great cities. 
Migrants pour in from the bramble-choked periphery. The rich and 
powerful seek to turn the crisis to their advantage while ordinary 
citizens resist. Al Gore is … 
not there, but you get the point.
Novels like The Tangled Lands are seismographic readings from a 
trembling society. They register a profound anxiety that the world we know 
is collapsing 
under our feet. Literary critics interested in climate change are currently debating whether these works can also give readers tools for 
addressing the ecological crisis. Perhaps fiction, the thinking goes, 
makes it easier to wrap our heads around complex 
environmental changes and dream up useful ways of dealing with them.
The stakes are high. “If there is any one thing global warming has 
made perfectly clear,” wrote Amitav Ghosh in The Great 
Derangement, “it is that to think about the 
world only as it is amounts to a form of collective suicide.”
Fiction that wrestles with the changing world takes a number of forms. Some 
aspire to a kind of gritty realism (David Simon’s television series “Treme,” 
for example). 
Other works pine for better days or “trade in the nostalgic 
dreams of empire’s many lost wonders,” as a character 
in The Tangled Lands puts it. 
In general, cli-fi and science fiction and fantasy are the preferred 
genres for staging the sometimes slow, sometimes 
holy-shit-I-should-write-a-will-fast transformation of the world.
While some of these works avoid apocalyptic cli-fi themes, 
such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York: 2140, much climate-fiction 
plunges readers into near- or post-apocalyptic futures. 
Think movies like “The Day After Tomorrow and “Snowpiercer” 
or novels like Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus and 
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Even “Game of Thrones” is a story about cataclysmic changes in the weather.
These cli-fi stories can be powerful aids for thought. 
Novels like The Tangled Lands let us sample catastrophe 
from a safe distance. 
Films like “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which tracks a bayou 
community through a violent storm, make 
familiar dangers strange so that we might escape 
ourselves and reflect on a bizarre, broken world.
The best of these works, like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower 
(published in 1993, well before the current craze), 
highlight the uneven violence of large-scale environmental change. ....
.....Such speculations aren’t confined to fiction, of course. 
New York Magagzine Journalist David Wallace-Wells’ controversial 
article “The Uninhabitable Earth” fused literary conventions 
with hard reporting to conjure apocalyptic visions of a warming world. 
Even Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, remembered as the nonfiction book 
that sparked the environmental movement back in the 1960s, 
begins with a cli-fi “fable.”
“There once was a town at the heart of America where all life 
seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings,” Carson wrote. 
We know how the story ends: Humans lugged in 
their cars and pesticides, and broke the balance.

Fictional or factual, these stories matter because they frame 
people’s moral and political responses to ecological change. 
....
....There are plenty of reasons to be afraid. 
Global average temperatures creep higher each year; 
superstorms ravage coastlines; droughts and floods 
wipe out homes and farms and city blocks. 
As usual, those denied wealth and power suffer most 
from the intensifying disaster.

Journalist Kathryn Schultz summed up the problem nicely. “We 
excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones,” 
she wrote in a New Yorker article about a mega-earthquake threatening the Pacific Northwest. “But such apocalyptic visions are a form of 
escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action.”
Some recent cli-fi is resisting the easy spectacle of apocalypse. 
Take Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04. The novel’s action is bookended by fictionalized versions of two actual superstorms ― Hurricanes Irene and Sandy ― 
that fail to live up to the apocalyptic hype that precedes them. 
When Irene hits, the narrator expects catastrophe, 
but none arrives. “I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water and 
glanced at the instant coffee on the counter and it was no longer an 
emissary from a world to come,” 
he says. “There was disappointment in my relief at the failure of the storm.”
The narrator’s disappointment contains a lesson: 
Reckoning with the complexity of climate change means 
acknowledging one’s desire to turn it into a spectacle, 
an art object, a moment of personal transformation, 
a dramatic tale to which one can append existential anxieties 
ike so many railcars on a train barreling over the edge. 
Lerner asks readers to confront an unsettling possibility: For the wealthy and well-connected, climate change will not feel catastrophic most of the time.
For Lerner, as for Butler and Bacigalupi and Buckell, 
confronting climate change isn’t about staving off some future disaster, 
but dealing with the everyday injustices that make the 
present unbearable for so many.

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