''Burning Worlds'' is Amy Brady’s monthly literary column dedicated to examining trends in climate fiction, or “cli-fi”

Burning Worlds is Dr. Amy Brady’s monthly literary column dedicated to examining trends in climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” 

''When I began this column a little over a year ago, my goal was to trace how contemporary writers are thinking about climate change....'' 

ABOUT AMY BRADY

Amy Brady is on Twitter at @ingredient_x

NOTES: 

A new genre of fiction is joining the ranks of sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery. Coined by climate activist and PR consultant Dan Bloom, it’s been dubbed cli-fi, or “climate change fiction.”

Brady is a remote opnline  editor at a literary website in Chicago and in  February 2017, upon encouragement from Bloom earlier that year she started writing a new monthly literary column devoted to cli-fi novels.

Brady says such novels and movies come in lots of different styles. For example,  writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 depicts a city that has been drastically altered by sea-level rise.

Another author, Barbara Kingsolver, tells a more subtle story in Flight Behavior. It’s about a woman who discovers a colony of monarch butterflies near her home in Tennessee, their migratory paths changed by rising temperatures.

Brady: “The one thing that they all have in common is that climate change plays some role in the lives of the people that they depict.”

Brady says that a novel about climate change does something for readers that a news article cannot.