Cli-fi and Sci-fi
Gender Literature and the Climate Crisis
by Irène Langlet , July 7, 2020 [TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY DAN BLOOM]
Cli-fi (climate fiction) novels and movies are multiplying and perhaps now form a genre in their own genre. They express our concerns, our anxieties, our expectations. The corpus is heterogeneous, but it is proof that there is now an imaginary climate crisis.
The climate crisis is not a hypothesis. It already has its events (heat waves, hurricanes, giant fires in Siberia, California and Australia); it has its scientific bodies (the IPCC), its political summits (the COPs), its literary genre visionary (Dan Bloom), its struggles (the climate marches). It also has its own lexical palette: should we talk about crisis? warming? change? disruption? climate change?
And it also has its own literary and media genre: climate fiction, ''climate fiction'' in English, abbreviated cli-fi by coiner Dan Bloom - pronounced "klaï-faï", as (in principle) in sci-fi.
For those who have been advocating this category for the last ten years or so (writers, journalists, academics, especially in the English-speaking world), cli-fi brings together all the stories that imply a consideration, direct or indirect, of the climate crisis. It can range from post-apocalyptic fiction to disaster fiction, from science thrillers to pure science fiction; but there are also thrillers, noir novels, romance novels, sentimental novels... This apparent dispersion of registers and sub-genres in no way discourages the conviction of the promoters of cli-fi: for them, on the contrary, it is a sign, throughout the 20th century, of a slow convergence of various literary and narrative regimes towards today's reality.
Once a simple setting, the climate crisis is now a narrative lever, if not the main theme of fiction.
Cli-fi term gives a genre name to this new cultural order.
This conviction is reinforced by the rise of another concept, the Anthropocene, which designates the new geological era in which we find ourselves as soon as human actions have reached sufficient power to modify the planet's geological and climatic cycles (the exact dating of its beginning is one of the debates that animate the community of scholars: most often, it is the industrial revolution that serves as the historical pivot, but some propose to go back to the Neolithic revolution and the establishment of a sedentary and agricultural humanity). If there are climate fictions, they are obviously linked to the disciplines debating the climate crisis, first and foremost (but by no means exhaustively) climatology, biology, ecology and environmental sciences.
As such, climate fiction is part of the vast body of ecological novels, nature writings and other "ecofictions", as Christian Chelebourg called them in 2012. But their development is also closely linked to the examination of man's influence on the environment, the history of science and technology, the philosophy of nature, and the political theories of the industrialized and globalized world. This is why it is not surprising to see them prominently in a book such as Adam Trexler's Anthropocene Fictions.
Thus, the question of whether cli-fi is a media fad, a marketing trick or a literary and film "real genre" is less important than the question of observing it as a cultural practice. Through its multiple sub-genres, its heterogeneous or unitary symbols, its gallery of authors and authors who are sometimes at odds with each other, the cli-fi presents itself as a stock of narrative matrices, a reserve of imaginary motifs that pose a fictional magnifying glass on the reality of our current human condition and the stakes of its major challenge. Always indirectly, like all fictions, climate fictions are also a symbolic discourse on the crisis; they provide information not only on the perception of the crisis, but also on the perception of the policies that confront it and the sciences that study it.
Finally, in a broader sense, as a cultural practice, cli-fi testifies to an imaginary of the climate crisis that is not only shared in the present but also inscribed in a cultural history, through a reflexive discourse of authors and critics on the genre itself. It is this reflexivity, which brings together very diverse practices, that we recognize in the name of the genre; and its reading is as rich in lessons as that of the fictions themselves.
A heterogeneous corpus
In fiction, climate catastrophes and climate manipulation have been present for much longer than the crisis.
In fiction, climate catastrophes and climate manipulation have been present for much longer than the current crisis. The motif of the flood is certainly the oldest, present in the oldest known literary text, The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th century BC); glaciations were in vogue in the 19th century. Climate anxiety runs through Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man (1805), a novel sometimes cited as evidence of an awareness of the problems of the Anthropocene even before the industrial revolution was in full swing. Among the motives that are found in twentieth-century literature are the greenhouse effect, the hole in the ozone layer, atmospheric pollution, changes in underwater currents, droughts, the thawing of the permafrost... When we look for precursors in the cli-fi style, there are many choices.
The "cli-fi" label itself applies to more recent fictions, where climate change is anthropogenic, i.e. caused by mankind, or more directly linked to human activities.
Science fiction provides an important body of work, either through catastrophic scenarios such as in John Barnes' The Mother of Storms, or through geo-engineering fictions involving climate control: Kim Stanley Robinson is the dominant writer, after a "Martian trilogy" that has become a classic of the genre (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars) and the lesser-known novel 2312, whose main character is a "planetary designer". SF has also taken an early interest in ecological issues, as illustrated for example by Norman Spinrad (Blue as an Orange), Robert Silverberg (Burning Midnight Sky), Jean-Pierre Andrevon (Back to Earth anthologies). The cycle of J. G. Ballard's "Apocalypses" is sometimes evoked: the author of Crash! began his career with Le Monde englouti ou Sécheresse (The Sunken World or Drought), whose story elaborates on worlds ravaged by rising waters or the tragic scarcity of fresh water. But Ballard's fantasy SF does not bother with any plausibility: there is little recognition of the scientific affinities of science fiction, which explains why the theme of climate was present there even before a climate crisis was publicized in the media.
In fact, cli-fi is mostly presented as a recent branch or extension of science fiction. Beyond the novels of Arthur Herzog (Heat, 1976) or George Turner (The Sea and the Summer, 1987), which are held to be the true starting point of the genre, the lists that flourish in the cultural press already have their classics, on a varied range of scenarios and registers. Among those available in translation, it will come as no surprise to find Michael Chrichton in the vein of the thriller (Etat d'urgence, a disaster novel against the eco-terrorist movement), Ian McEwan rather in that of the satirical novel (Solaire, where the climate crisis is perceived through the character of a detestable scientist). K. S. Robinson is illustrated in the trilogy Capital Code (The Forty Signs of Rain, 50° below zero, 60 days and after). Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy features a man who survived a terrible, artificially triggered pandemic, and the climate disruptions that paralleled this insane increase in bio-industrial activity. Paolo Bacigalupi paints dystopian pictures of an America ravaged by drought (in Water Knife) or, in The Automaton Girl, of a neo-Indonesia struggling against rising waters (among a hundred other perils, including bio-industrial ones). The post-apocalyptic desolation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road was a great success after John Hillcoat's film adaptation of it; a father and son travel through many landscapes of death, from which the fauna and flora have disappeared, but there is no real discussion of the causes of this devastation. Barbara Kingsolver's In the Light tells the story of how the life of a modest (and unhappily married) farmer is turned upside down by a colony of butterflies on her land, pushed there by global warming. Nathaniel Rich, in ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW, follows the squeaky destiny of a crisis specialist in a dramatically flooded New York City, to which Kim Stanley Robinson's novel New York 2140, in which a post-flood quasi-utopia develops, is a response. In French-language literature, we can count Jean-Marc Ligny's serious cli-fi novels (AquaTM, Exodes), and Joël Bacqué's satirical novel (La Fonte des glaces).
A bubbling up of genres
What should we think of this cli-fi label that is trying to establish itself in bookshops and the cultural press?
Look on the network, in blogs, in the literary pages of the press and in the lists of platforms of readers or sellers (Goodreads, Babelio, Sens critique, Amazon), the cli-fi may well be just another buzzword or label in a proliferation that makes you dizzy.
The roots derived from ecology are combined with those of futurism or utopias and dystopias, for example in ecotopia, the first use of which appeared in the title of a novel by Ernest Callenbach in 1975. In any case, we invite you dear reader to take hold of this "new genre" while being fully aware of the system of genres in which it takes on its meaning.
It is much more instructive to identify the cli-fi in this way, in a cartography of cultural practices, than to try to define it through formal properties (new or borrowed from this or that tradition), themes, styles and scenarios whose checklist would make it possible to distinguish between climate fictions and those that are not.
This essentialist way of defining literary genres, which arises spontaneously (and for good reason) in discussions on genres, has been relativized for at least thirty years by genre theorists. From Raymond Williams to Matthieu Letourneux, they have all consistently affirmed it: "genres" are not transcendental models, classificatory labels, but social practices, where the concern to classify does exist, but within a more diverse set of other practices, such as those that consist in hybridizing, feeling, sharing, discussing, or even imitating, among a hundred others. From this culturalist perspective, "genres" are seen rather as shared agreements, collective practices based on a set of norms, codes, and discourses: those of authors, of course, but also those of publishers, advertisers, critics, and academics, all of whom are dominant actors in literary life; but above all, beyond these major official actors (...), each reader, each consumer, participates at his or her own level in the definition of gender. (...) the daily collective discourse plays a major role in identifying and naming gender and its institution.
This approach to a genre through the gender system and the set of practices in which it takes its meaning is particularly enlightening for climate fiction.
A digital and media baptism
Dan Bloom, an American writer and literary activist living in Japan, is credited with the main efforts to popularize cli-fi as a genre beginning in 2011. To do so, he draws on the whole dynamic of globalized digital culture: social networks, word searches, reader groups and online communities, but also reading recommendations on commercial sites or evaluation platforms (Goodreads, for example). Digital logic can thus, based on the ratings and comments of a book in an online bookstore, propel certain titles into buying suggestions.
In addition to this huge field of action, Dan Bloom, 71, has developed a small online cluster designed to document, archive, capitalize and disseminate the genre name and its definitions, even if they are changing: a page entitled "Cli-Fi Report" (CFR) brings together links to a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, a Wikipedia article in constant expansion since its creation in 2013, a personal blog, an evolving manifesto on the Medium platform, composed of a hundred or so "cli-fi ruminations"; finally, it compiles, in the manner of a bookmark aggregator, all the academic and semi-academic publications (blogs and popularisation) that document the phenomenon.
This hub, half community, half documentary watch, has not, however, been the only support for the cli-fi and its development. The genre name seems to have really caught on in April 2013 with the publication of Nathaniel Rich's novel Odds Against Tomorrow (translated in French as ''Paris sur l'avenir''), which tells the story of the New York flood.
By chance, Nat Rich says he received the book proofs of the novel, with its cover illustration, precisely at the same time as the By chance, the writer received the proofs of the novel, with its cover illustration, precisely when Hurricane Sandy put the city in distress in the fall of 2012. As in a fantasy baptismal act of the new genre, the author reports that he felt as if he had corrected the proofs of his novel all night and saw the images adapted for television the next day, while the publisher confided: "it was like entering the 4th dimension. ''
When freelance radio producer Angela Evancie presented a 5 minute segment on the USA network called National Public Radio, this anecdote was the basis of a true media story of literary foundation; the name of the cli-fi has acquired a cultural and sonic depth.
That’s according to a fascinating report in 2013 by NPR, “Has Climate Change Created a New Literary Genre?”
https://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so-hot-right-now-has-climate-change-created-a-new-literary-genre
The term "cli-fi" first came into broad popular use on April 20, 2013 when the NPR radio network in the USA did a five-minute radio segment by Angela Evancie on the national network's ''Weekend Edition Saturday''[to describe novels and movies that deal with man-made climate change, and historically, there have been any number of literary works that dealt with climate change in earlier times as well. A climate activist of the literary kind, Dan Bloom, a 1971 Tufts literature major, has been an influential figure in the development of "cli-fi" as a distinct genre. He coined the term in 2011, he started tweeting about it daily in 2012 and he lobbied editors at major newspapers and websites to assign reporters to cover the new genre's rise, with some succes with editors at the New York Times, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, the BBC and the the wire services of the Associated Press and Reuters.
Andrew Milner, a leading climate fiction expert in Australia, believes that Dan Bloom turned a popular literary buzzword into a radio moment, into a genre name. Anyway, the story is perhaps even more instructive in this way, and provides insight into how a cultural category crystallizes within social discourses.
Is cli-fi like sci-fi? Not really
Because once it was said that the "cli-fi" derives from the "sci-fi", what was said? This genre name, in English, leaves a discreet ambiguity: are we talking about climate / science fiction or climate science / fiction? In other words, are we talking about a branch of science fiction that specifically tells climate stories, or a branch of fiction in which climate science plays a major role?
We will see later on that this is perhaps not just a theoretical refinement.
The abbreviated terms, in any case: [klaj faj], [saj faj], have obviously helped the media fate of the genre's name. What has "taken" (like mayonnaise) with the cli-fi may simply be, first of all, this evocative nickname. It should be remembered that sci-fi was formed in the 1950s by the equivalent of "hi-fi", the diminutive of high fidelity, used in the phonographic industry (which the French imported as it was by francizing its pronunciation). It was first a diminutive with a pejorative tendency for science fiction: it was abbreviated "SF" or "sci-fi", and it did not refer to the same literary quality.
The revaluation of the second abbreviation occurred at the very end of the 20th century, in the years when the channel "SyFy" was launched by Universal in 1992 (the French version dates from 2005). It was a time when science fiction critics diversified their approach, and no longer limited themselves to distinguishing between good "sci-fi" from creators or scientists, fed by speculation and plausibility, and bad industrial and serial "sci-fi" fed by pseudo-sciences and techno-scientific junk. Gender theory has gradually ceased to be a tool for value judgements and now seeks to grasp gender as a complex set of social discourses and cultural practices; within this framework, it is no longer a question of deciding between a "real" SF (i.e. a good SF) and one that would not be.
This evolution of the theoretical viewpoint also accompanies the generational evolution of the genre and its audiences: science fiction, at the end of the 20th century, asserts itself first and foremost as a "pop culture" and as a genre fiction (genre fiction), i.e. a type of story to be appreciated in its global, proliferating and exuberant cultural environment, with its codes and legacies. Pure hard SF rubs shoulders with superheroes, the marvellous rubs shoulders with science, and the conquest of space with dystopias.
There are therefore important issues to name and popularize a new genre "cli-fi", deriving it from "sci-fi", a name itself derived from science fiction where the wonderful scientist, rational speculation and anticipation have aggregated all kinds of stories, lost worlds and alien planets, evil AIs and benevolent robots, monstrous aliens and extraterrestrial sages. The cultural press, blogs and amateur forums speak with a remarkably unanimous voice: cli-fi is a way of talking about the climate in the wake of science fiction, but in a new way. It engages all the critical discourse indirectly carried by fiction.
A strangeness without strangeness
Alongside the little name of cli-fi, the complex relationship of climate fiction to SF also sheds light on a relationship to the world, and the crystallization of the category in the audience is testimony to this. A hurricane named Hurricane Sandy hits New York at the same time as a novel describes the flooded city: a striking image indeed. We know the antiphon: fiction meets reality! We enter the fourth dimension... Today is already tomorrow; science fiction is now...
A strangeness without strangeness
Alongside the little name of cli-fi, the complex relationship of climate fiction to SF also sheds light on a relationship to the world, and the crystallization of the category in the audience is testimony to this. A hurricane named Sandy hits New York at the same time as a novel describes the flooded city: a striking image indeed. We know the antiphon: fiction meets reality! We enter the fourth dimension... Today is already tomorrow; science fiction is now.
In their punchline appearance, these media clichés touch on one of the pillars of science fiction theory. At the base of the science fiction edifice is what has been called a "novum" since the semiotician Darko Suvin (1977). Thus we call objects, beings, events that produce a surprising otherness, that have no referent in the reader's real world, but do have one in the world of fiction. The theory of SF thus calls these elements of the novums, their effect a cognitive estrangement, and the body of knowledge they gradually compose through reading, and which underlies the imaginary world, a "xeno-encyclopedia" complementing the encyclopedia of reference knowledge, this xeno-encyclopedia itself taking its place in a global culture of SF developing its own intertextuality. In classic science fiction novels, the adventures of the characters form the narrative framework of a world development triggered by cognitive strangeness; in other words, the adventures support a mental effort necessary to understand a world different from ours, which functions according to other laws. The continuation of the narrative implies, for the reader, to speculate on these laws, in a way that is at least tending to be rational, at the most rigorously scientific (for example, if it is about the accelerated development of a civilization of imaginary beings living on a neutron star, as in Robert Forward's typically hard SF novel The Dragon's Egg). Critics of SF, sometimes considered less style-conscious than general literature critics, are particularly attentive to the manipulation of these digetic novums and their integration into the narrative. If there is "style" in SF, it is there: in the ability to articulate a surprising otherness and its unsurprising explicitation; to conduct the narrative as if the other world were self-evident; and to make the reader cooperate in the in-process deciphering of these othernesses. The formal responses to this challenge make up, in a way, the literary history of the genre, which is also a cultural history of the relationship to knowledge (which also includes marvellous, magical, mystical relationships to knowledge). This is the whole structuring legacy of SF, its genre code, beyond all the aliens, AI, future cities and spaceships whose visual culture flooded movie screens after colonizing the cheap covers of pulps and paperbacks. In literature, these formal responses can range from the long Jules Verne-style engineer's speech to the Asimov-style excerpt from Encyclopedia Galactica.
But in cli-fi, novums are not so much part of an imaginary world based on extraterrestrial, or futuristic, or parallel history, as they are part of a set of fears and threats whose operation is already understood in reality, as probabilities. The story takes place in a defeated, or deviant, world, rather than another world. The butterfly colony in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, FLIGHT BEHAVIOR, is a good thematic and formal example: the real world is that of poor small farmers in the Midwest, the animals have not mutated at all, the scientific team is realistic, its equipment is not embellished by any futuristic gadgets (a pressure cooker is prominently featured).
The butterflies have "simply" changed their migratory route and settled in a forest where they are not supposed to be able to live; their wing beats give the impression that the landscape is on fire. It is no coincidence that this landscape first leads the novel to a mystical, almost fantastical tale: Della, the heroine, at first sincerely believes she had a divine vision - a vision that made her renounce the adultery she was preparing to commit. The novel then works, slowly, to psychologize this first mystical scenario, while laying the foundations for a scientific scenario. The novum does not bring us into another world; it brings us into our own, better understood - in particular, we better understand its alterations already in the past (the incessant rains, the landslides, the economic problems of the farmers). From sci-fi, the cli-fi thus retains a decisive alteration in the elaboration of a world, as well as a recourse to scientific culture to deploying it.
The novum does not bring us into another world; it brings us into our own, better understood - in particular, one understands better the alterations that have already taken place (the incessant rains, the landslides, the economic problems of the farmers). From the sci-fi, the cli-fi thus retains a decisive alteration in the elaboration of a world, as well as a recourse to scientific culture to unfold and understand its elements; but the world is ours, and what emerges from it is already listed as possible or probable, without the need for invented laws of operation. The narrative springs of the strangeness are put to good use, but for the development of a world that cannot be perceived as imaginary, as "another world".
A Report to Science
This relationship to the world is partly related to science and human activity. In the great family of anticipatory fiction and prophetic narratives, the cli-fi occupies an original place. If we go back, like Milner and Burgman, to antiquity, we find a great abundance of flood tales; if we go down the course of literary history, we reach the symmetrical fictions of global warming or the new ice age, numerous during the first 20th century in pulp magazines, under the influence of the publications of James Croll and Svante Arrhenius - that is, the theories of the ice cycles and the greenhouse effect. The warming fictions are later than the cooling fictions, which can also be understood with reference to the entropy theories that powerfully structure the imaginary end of the world before 1914. In all these cases, climate change, whether dramatic or more diffuse, is rather caused by divine interventions (it can therefore be described as theogenic), by a set of Earth system functions such as earthquakes, volcanic activity or orbital oscillations (geogenic), or sometimes by extraterrestrial intervention (xenogenic). The case of glacial fictions makes it possible to differentiate between, on the one hand, cooling linked to deep geological cycles, in which human action is more of a victim than an actor, and on the other hand, nuclear winter fictions, in which human activity is crucial. In the latter, where the human role is essential, the "climate change" novum remains a secondary novum compared to nuclear, and not the driving force behind the plot. On the other hand, warming fictions engage human action much more quickly than previous ones. Milner and Burgman thus draw up their genealogical panorama of the cli-fi by articulating two typologies: the role of climate change in the plot and the determining factor of change. The contemporary "cli-fi" strictly speaking, the one that Dan Bloom has been naming and promoting since the late 2000s, is the one that emerges when the determining factor becomes anthropogenic. Compared to the old fictions of flood or cooling, they write,
The novelty of this last stage in the long history of climate fiction lies precisely in its fidelity to the discoveries of the relevant sciences. In short, contemporary cli-fi, compared to the close literary types that preceded it, is above all a science fiction ["is above all a science fiction"].
In their language, Milner and Burgman play on the first term "science fiction": they thus designate both the genre name that everyone knows (science fiction, SF, sci-fi) and a strong characterization of the cli-fi, based on scientific culture. They thus answer the question we asked above: climate / science fiction or climate science / fiction? For them, it's very clear: we understand the cli-fi better in relation to science fiction than to other genres or no genre at all (like general literature). Climate fiction, which comes from science fiction, is therefore science fiction, even and especially when this parameter comes into confrontation with other generic dimensions, other genre codes, in an enlarged genre system that mixes all sorts of other genre literature.
Literary intermingling
Some of these brews are already familiar to the public. The science thriller, for example, has absorbed the codes of the spy novel or even the war novel, fuelled by the techno-scientific competition between the two political blocs in the second half of the 20th century. The great nuclear fear gave way, after the non-proliferation treaties of the 1980s and the end of bloc geopolitics, to dystopias and end-of-the-world fictions. These end-of-the-world fictions adopt militaristic, post-apocalyptic and survivalist scenarios at the turn of the twenty-first century, whereas they were rather melancholy and meditative at the turn of the twentieth century. Climate fictions flow into these sometimes composite, sometimes refined models. This is Ligny's disaster and apocalypse novel, whose Exodus of the title promises no salvation. For Nathaniel Rich, it is a mixture of catastrophe novel, love story and social study of the American upper class. Robinson, who has forged his writer's weapons with a typical hard science fiction theme, terraformation, returns to the earth and its climates with a consummate art of the polyphonic novel (Capital Code trilogy, New York 2140).
The hybridization of science fiction and the sentimental novel is less frequent, and all the more remarkable. Science fiction already had a few examples of novels composed as diaries
The hybridization of science fiction and romance novels is less frequent, and all the more remarkable. Science fiction already had a few examples of novels composed as teenage girls' diaries: Jack Womack's Diary of the Night, or Octavia Butler's "Parables" cycle, marked the 1990s by putting the diarist form at the service of a strongly dystopian narrative. Carbon Diaries 2015, by Saci Lloyd, once again adopts the formula to portray a cli-fi of the near future, in a United Kingdom subject to strict energy rationing. Kingsolver's novel mentioned above is more original. It follows a double tradition: the psychological romance novel on the one hand, and the rural redneck novel of poor Americans on the other. Within the genre system, these form its main base. The cli-fi that develops from there conveys the message of rational fulfillment: Della, at the end of the adventure, has clarified her feelings for her husband, her friends, her mother-in-law, and for the attractive academic who came to study butterflies near her home; but she has also acquired scientific knowledge and the courage to end her unhappy marriage. Even more than an awareness, it is an empowerment for this character. The nuance is not subtle, because it involves more broadly the capacity to act (agency) which is at the heart of the political urgency of the climate crisis. The scientific discourse, in this novel, is therefore not the driving force behind the plot and the vector of emotions; it is nevertheless very meticulously documented, and is part of the character's journey towards mastering feelings and their formulation. But it is striking to observe that it never offers a global vision.
At long last, the Conclusion
As it has been actively promoted over the last ten years, cli-fi has an original place in the gender system and in the social discourse that constructs it.
The fields of the catastrophe novel, the post-apocalyptic novel, the scientific thriller, the terraforming story, or dystopia intersect, compete or reinforce each other, while attracting seemingly distant literary traditions (sentimental literature, teen-novel or novels for teenagers and young adults).
It is essential to read this genre as part of this literary and media bubbling; first of all, it allows us to understand its intermediatic power, because in our contemporary world the mental images of the literary narrative are always more or less doubled by their visual replicas in cinema, comics, video games and the digital culture of the social web; moreover, narrative languages echo journalistic or political languages. Secondly, it allows us to understand a global cultural language, complex relationships to the world, space and time, and not just the serial variants of a climatological vulgate.
Climate fiction takes on the meaning of a perspective that is both absolutely certain in its principle and unknowable in its moments: a kind of "suspense without surprise", which sometimes borders on melancholy already present in the face of this unknown that is yet to come but is inevitable. This is the human condition of our time.
by Irène Langlet in France, July 7
Gender Literature and the Climate Crisis
by Irène Langlet , July 7, 2020 [TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY DAN BLOOM]
Cli-fi (climate fiction) novels and movies are multiplying and perhaps now form a genre in their own genre. They express our concerns, our anxieties, our expectations. The corpus is heterogeneous, but it is proof that there is now an imaginary climate crisis.
The climate crisis is not a hypothesis. It already has its events (heat waves, hurricanes, giant fires in Siberia, California and Australia); it has its scientific bodies (the IPCC), its political summits (the COPs), its literary genre visionary (Dan Bloom), its struggles (the climate marches). It also has its own lexical palette: should we talk about crisis? warming? change? disruption? climate change?
And it also has its own literary and media genre: climate fiction, ''climate fiction'' in English, abbreviated cli-fi by coiner Dan Bloom - pronounced "klaï-faï", as (in principle) in sci-fi.
For those who have been advocating this category for the last ten years or so (writers, journalists, academics, especially in the English-speaking world), cli-fi brings together all the stories that imply a consideration, direct or indirect, of the climate crisis. It can range from post-apocalyptic fiction to disaster fiction, from science thrillers to pure science fiction; but there are also thrillers, noir novels, romance novels, sentimental novels... This apparent dispersion of registers and sub-genres in no way discourages the conviction of the promoters of cli-fi: for them, on the contrary, it is a sign, throughout the 20th century, of a slow convergence of various literary and narrative regimes towards today's reality.
Once a simple setting, the climate crisis is now a narrative lever, if not the main theme of fiction.
Cli-fi term gives a genre name to this new cultural order.
This conviction is reinforced by the rise of another concept, the Anthropocene, which designates the new geological era in which we find ourselves as soon as human actions have reached sufficient power to modify the planet's geological and climatic cycles (the exact dating of its beginning is one of the debates that animate the community of scholars: most often, it is the industrial revolution that serves as the historical pivot, but some propose to go back to the Neolithic revolution and the establishment of a sedentary and agricultural humanity). If there are climate fictions, they are obviously linked to the disciplines debating the climate crisis, first and foremost (but by no means exhaustively) climatology, biology, ecology and environmental sciences.
As such, climate fiction is part of the vast body of ecological novels, nature writings and other "ecofictions", as Christian Chelebourg called them in 2012. But their development is also closely linked to the examination of man's influence on the environment, the history of science and technology, the philosophy of nature, and the political theories of the industrialized and globalized world. This is why it is not surprising to see them prominently in a book such as Adam Trexler's Anthropocene Fictions.
Thus, the question of whether cli-fi is a media fad, a marketing trick or a literary and film "real genre" is less important than the question of observing it as a cultural practice. Through its multiple sub-genres, its heterogeneous or unitary symbols, its gallery of authors and authors who are sometimes at odds with each other, the cli-fi presents itself as a stock of narrative matrices, a reserve of imaginary motifs that pose a fictional magnifying glass on the reality of our current human condition and the stakes of its major challenge. Always indirectly, like all fictions, climate fictions are also a symbolic discourse on the crisis; they provide information not only on the perception of the crisis, but also on the perception of the policies that confront it and the sciences that study it.
Finally, in a broader sense, as a cultural practice, cli-fi testifies to an imaginary of the climate crisis that is not only shared in the present but also inscribed in a cultural history, through a reflexive discourse of authors and critics on the genre itself. It is this reflexivity, which brings together very diverse practices, that we recognize in the name of the genre; and its reading is as rich in lessons as that of the fictions themselves.
A heterogeneous corpus
In fiction, climate catastrophes and climate manipulation have been present for much longer than the crisis.
In fiction, climate catastrophes and climate manipulation have been present for much longer than the current crisis. The motif of the flood is certainly the oldest, present in the oldest known literary text, The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th century BC); glaciations were in vogue in the 19th century. Climate anxiety runs through Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man (1805), a novel sometimes cited as evidence of an awareness of the problems of the Anthropocene even before the industrial revolution was in full swing. Among the motives that are found in twentieth-century literature are the greenhouse effect, the hole in the ozone layer, atmospheric pollution, changes in underwater currents, droughts, the thawing of the permafrost... When we look for precursors in the cli-fi style, there are many choices.
The "cli-fi" label itself applies to more recent fictions, where climate change is anthropogenic, i.e. caused by mankind, or more directly linked to human activities.
Science fiction provides an important body of work, either through catastrophic scenarios such as in John Barnes' The Mother of Storms, or through geo-engineering fictions involving climate control: Kim Stanley Robinson is the dominant writer, after a "Martian trilogy" that has become a classic of the genre (Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars) and the lesser-known novel 2312, whose main character is a "planetary designer". SF has also taken an early interest in ecological issues, as illustrated for example by Norman Spinrad (Blue as an Orange), Robert Silverberg (Burning Midnight Sky), Jean-Pierre Andrevon (Back to Earth anthologies). The cycle of J. G. Ballard's "Apocalypses" is sometimes evoked: the author of Crash! began his career with Le Monde englouti ou Sécheresse (The Sunken World or Drought), whose story elaborates on worlds ravaged by rising waters or the tragic scarcity of fresh water. But Ballard's fantasy SF does not bother with any plausibility: there is little recognition of the scientific affinities of science fiction, which explains why the theme of climate was present there even before a climate crisis was publicized in the media.
In fact, cli-fi is mostly presented as a recent branch or extension of science fiction. Beyond the novels of Arthur Herzog (Heat, 1976) or George Turner (The Sea and the Summer, 1987), which are held to be the true starting point of the genre, the lists that flourish in the cultural press already have their classics, on a varied range of scenarios and registers. Among those available in translation, it will come as no surprise to find Michael Chrichton in the vein of the thriller (Etat d'urgence, a disaster novel against the eco-terrorist movement), Ian McEwan rather in that of the satirical novel (Solaire, where the climate crisis is perceived through the character of a detestable scientist). K. S. Robinson is illustrated in the trilogy Capital Code (The Forty Signs of Rain, 50° below zero, 60 days and after). Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy features a man who survived a terrible, artificially triggered pandemic, and the climate disruptions that paralleled this insane increase in bio-industrial activity. Paolo Bacigalupi paints dystopian pictures of an America ravaged by drought (in Water Knife) or, in The Automaton Girl, of a neo-Indonesia struggling against rising waters (among a hundred other perils, including bio-industrial ones). The post-apocalyptic desolation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road was a great success after John Hillcoat's film adaptation of it; a father and son travel through many landscapes of death, from which the fauna and flora have disappeared, but there is no real discussion of the causes of this devastation. Barbara Kingsolver's In the Light tells the story of how the life of a modest (and unhappily married) farmer is turned upside down by a colony of butterflies on her land, pushed there by global warming. Nathaniel Rich, in ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW, follows the squeaky destiny of a crisis specialist in a dramatically flooded New York City, to which Kim Stanley Robinson's novel New York 2140, in which a post-flood quasi-utopia develops, is a response. In French-language literature, we can count Jean-Marc Ligny's serious cli-fi novels (AquaTM, Exodes), and Joël Bacqué's satirical novel (La Fonte des glaces).
A bubbling up of genres
What should we think of this cli-fi label that is trying to establish itself in bookshops and the cultural press?
Look on the network, in blogs, in the literary pages of the press and in the lists of platforms of readers or sellers (Goodreads, Babelio, Sens critique, Amazon), the cli-fi may well be just another buzzword or label in a proliferation that makes you dizzy.
The roots derived from ecology are combined with those of futurism or utopias and dystopias, for example in ecotopia, the first use of which appeared in the title of a novel by Ernest Callenbach in 1975. In any case, we invite you dear reader to take hold of this "new genre" while being fully aware of the system of genres in which it takes on its meaning.
It is much more instructive to identify the cli-fi in this way, in a cartography of cultural practices, than to try to define it through formal properties (new or borrowed from this or that tradition), themes, styles and scenarios whose checklist would make it possible to distinguish between climate fictions and those that are not.
This essentialist way of defining literary genres, which arises spontaneously (and for good reason) in discussions on genres, has been relativized for at least thirty years by genre theorists. From Raymond Williams to Matthieu Letourneux, they have all consistently affirmed it: "genres" are not transcendental models, classificatory labels, but social practices, where the concern to classify does exist, but within a more diverse set of other practices, such as those that consist in hybridizing, feeling, sharing, discussing, or even imitating, among a hundred others. From this culturalist perspective, "genres" are seen rather as shared agreements, collective practices based on a set of norms, codes, and discourses: those of authors, of course, but also those of publishers, advertisers, critics, and academics, all of whom are dominant actors in literary life; but above all, beyond these major official actors (...), each reader, each consumer, participates at his or her own level in the definition of gender. (...) the daily collective discourse plays a major role in identifying and naming gender and its institution.
This approach to a genre through the gender system and the set of practices in which it takes its meaning is particularly enlightening for climate fiction.
A digital and media baptism
Dan Bloom, an American writer and literary activist living in Japan, is credited with the main efforts to popularize cli-fi as a genre beginning in 2011. To do so, he draws on the whole dynamic of globalized digital culture: social networks, word searches, reader groups and online communities, but also reading recommendations on commercial sites or evaluation platforms (Goodreads, for example). Digital logic can thus, based on the ratings and comments of a book in an online bookstore, propel certain titles into buying suggestions.
In addition to this huge field of action, Dan Bloom, 71, has developed a small online cluster designed to document, archive, capitalize and disseminate the genre name and its definitions, even if they are changing: a page entitled "Cli-Fi Report" (CFR) brings together links to a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, a Wikipedia article in constant expansion since its creation in 2013, a personal blog, an evolving manifesto on the Medium platform, composed of a hundred or so "cli-fi ruminations"; finally, it compiles, in the manner of a bookmark aggregator, all the academic and semi-academic publications (blogs and popularisation) that document the phenomenon.
This hub, half community, half documentary watch, has not, however, been the only support for the cli-fi and its development. The genre name seems to have really caught on in April 2013 with the publication of Nathaniel Rich's novel Odds Against Tomorrow (translated in French as ''Paris sur l'avenir''), which tells the story of the New York flood.
By chance, Nat Rich says he received the book proofs of the novel, with its cover illustration, precisely at the same time as the By chance, the writer received the proofs of the novel, with its cover illustration, precisely when Hurricane Sandy put the city in distress in the fall of 2012. As in a fantasy baptismal act of the new genre, the author reports that he felt as if he had corrected the proofs of his novel all night and saw the images adapted for television the next day, while the publisher confided: "it was like entering the 4th dimension. ''
When freelance radio producer Angela Evancie presented a 5 minute segment on the USA network called National Public Radio, this anecdote was the basis of a true media story of literary foundation; the name of the cli-fi has acquired a cultural and sonic depth.
That’s according to a fascinating report in 2013 by NPR, “Has Climate Change Created a New Literary Genre?”
https://www.npr.org/2013/04/20/176713022/so-hot-right-now-has-climate-change-created-a-new-literary-genre
The term "cli-fi" first came into broad popular use on April 20, 2013 when the NPR radio network in the USA did a five-minute radio segment by Angela Evancie on the national network's ''Weekend Edition Saturday''[to describe novels and movies that deal with man-made climate change, and historically, there have been any number of literary works that dealt with climate change in earlier times as well. A climate activist of the literary kind, Dan Bloom, a 1971 Tufts literature major, has been an influential figure in the development of "cli-fi" as a distinct genre. He coined the term in 2011, he started tweeting about it daily in 2012 and he lobbied editors at major newspapers and websites to assign reporters to cover the new genre's rise, with some succes with editors at the New York Times, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, the BBC and the the wire services of the Associated Press and Reuters.
Andrew Milner, a leading climate fiction expert in Australia, believes that Dan Bloom turned a popular literary buzzword into a radio moment, into a genre name. Anyway, the story is perhaps even more instructive in this way, and provides insight into how a cultural category crystallizes within social discourses.
Is cli-fi like sci-fi? Not really
Because once it was said that the "cli-fi" derives from the "sci-fi", what was said? This genre name, in English, leaves a discreet ambiguity: are we talking about climate / science fiction or climate science / fiction? In other words, are we talking about a branch of science fiction that specifically tells climate stories, or a branch of fiction in which climate science plays a major role?
We will see later on that this is perhaps not just a theoretical refinement.
The abbreviated terms, in any case: [klaj faj], [saj faj], have obviously helped the media fate of the genre's name. What has "taken" (like mayonnaise) with the cli-fi may simply be, first of all, this evocative nickname. It should be remembered that sci-fi was formed in the 1950s by the equivalent of "hi-fi", the diminutive of high fidelity, used in the phonographic industry (which the French imported as it was by francizing its pronunciation). It was first a diminutive with a pejorative tendency for science fiction: it was abbreviated "SF" or "sci-fi", and it did not refer to the same literary quality.
The revaluation of the second abbreviation occurred at the very end of the 20th century, in the years when the channel "SyFy" was launched by Universal in 1992 (the French version dates from 2005). It was a time when science fiction critics diversified their approach, and no longer limited themselves to distinguishing between good "sci-fi" from creators or scientists, fed by speculation and plausibility, and bad industrial and serial "sci-fi" fed by pseudo-sciences and techno-scientific junk. Gender theory has gradually ceased to be a tool for value judgements and now seeks to grasp gender as a complex set of social discourses and cultural practices; within this framework, it is no longer a question of deciding between a "real" SF (i.e. a good SF) and one that would not be.
This evolution of the theoretical viewpoint also accompanies the generational evolution of the genre and its audiences: science fiction, at the end of the 20th century, asserts itself first and foremost as a "pop culture" and as a genre fiction (genre fiction), i.e. a type of story to be appreciated in its global, proliferating and exuberant cultural environment, with its codes and legacies. Pure hard SF rubs shoulders with superheroes, the marvellous rubs shoulders with science, and the conquest of space with dystopias.
There are therefore important issues to name and popularize a new genre "cli-fi", deriving it from "sci-fi", a name itself derived from science fiction where the wonderful scientist, rational speculation and anticipation have aggregated all kinds of stories, lost worlds and alien planets, evil AIs and benevolent robots, monstrous aliens and extraterrestrial sages. The cultural press, blogs and amateur forums speak with a remarkably unanimous voice: cli-fi is a way of talking about the climate in the wake of science fiction, but in a new way. It engages all the critical discourse indirectly carried by fiction.
A strangeness without strangeness
Alongside the little name of cli-fi, the complex relationship of climate fiction to SF also sheds light on a relationship to the world, and the crystallization of the category in the audience is testimony to this. A hurricane named Hurricane Sandy hits New York at the same time as a novel describes the flooded city: a striking image indeed. We know the antiphon: fiction meets reality! We enter the fourth dimension... Today is already tomorrow; science fiction is now...
A strangeness without strangeness
Alongside the little name of cli-fi, the complex relationship of climate fiction to SF also sheds light on a relationship to the world, and the crystallization of the category in the audience is testimony to this. A hurricane named Sandy hits New York at the same time as a novel describes the flooded city: a striking image indeed. We know the antiphon: fiction meets reality! We enter the fourth dimension... Today is already tomorrow; science fiction is now.
In their punchline appearance, these media clichés touch on one of the pillars of science fiction theory. At the base of the science fiction edifice is what has been called a "novum" since the semiotician Darko Suvin (1977). Thus we call objects, beings, events that produce a surprising otherness, that have no referent in the reader's real world, but do have one in the world of fiction. The theory of SF thus calls these elements of the novums, their effect a cognitive estrangement, and the body of knowledge they gradually compose through reading, and which underlies the imaginary world, a "xeno-encyclopedia" complementing the encyclopedia of reference knowledge, this xeno-encyclopedia itself taking its place in a global culture of SF developing its own intertextuality. In classic science fiction novels, the adventures of the characters form the narrative framework of a world development triggered by cognitive strangeness; in other words, the adventures support a mental effort necessary to understand a world different from ours, which functions according to other laws. The continuation of the narrative implies, for the reader, to speculate on these laws, in a way that is at least tending to be rational, at the most rigorously scientific (for example, if it is about the accelerated development of a civilization of imaginary beings living on a neutron star, as in Robert Forward's typically hard SF novel The Dragon's Egg). Critics of SF, sometimes considered less style-conscious than general literature critics, are particularly attentive to the manipulation of these digetic novums and their integration into the narrative. If there is "style" in SF, it is there: in the ability to articulate a surprising otherness and its unsurprising explicitation; to conduct the narrative as if the other world were self-evident; and to make the reader cooperate in the in-process deciphering of these othernesses. The formal responses to this challenge make up, in a way, the literary history of the genre, which is also a cultural history of the relationship to knowledge (which also includes marvellous, magical, mystical relationships to knowledge). This is the whole structuring legacy of SF, its genre code, beyond all the aliens, AI, future cities and spaceships whose visual culture flooded movie screens after colonizing the cheap covers of pulps and paperbacks. In literature, these formal responses can range from the long Jules Verne-style engineer's speech to the Asimov-style excerpt from Encyclopedia Galactica.
But in cli-fi, novums are not so much part of an imaginary world based on extraterrestrial, or futuristic, or parallel history, as they are part of a set of fears and threats whose operation is already understood in reality, as probabilities. The story takes place in a defeated, or deviant, world, rather than another world. The butterfly colony in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, FLIGHT BEHAVIOR, is a good thematic and formal example: the real world is that of poor small farmers in the Midwest, the animals have not mutated at all, the scientific team is realistic, its equipment is not embellished by any futuristic gadgets (a pressure cooker is prominently featured).
The butterflies have "simply" changed their migratory route and settled in a forest where they are not supposed to be able to live; their wing beats give the impression that the landscape is on fire. It is no coincidence that this landscape first leads the novel to a mystical, almost fantastical tale: Della, the heroine, at first sincerely believes she had a divine vision - a vision that made her renounce the adultery she was preparing to commit. The novel then works, slowly, to psychologize this first mystical scenario, while laying the foundations for a scientific scenario. The novum does not bring us into another world; it brings us into our own, better understood - in particular, we better understand its alterations already in the past (the incessant rains, the landslides, the economic problems of the farmers). From sci-fi, the cli-fi thus retains a decisive alteration in the elaboration of a world, as well as a recourse to scientific culture to deploying it.
The novum does not bring us into another world; it brings us into our own, better understood - in particular, one understands better the alterations that have already taken place (the incessant rains, the landslides, the economic problems of the farmers). From the sci-fi, the cli-fi thus retains a decisive alteration in the elaboration of a world, as well as a recourse to scientific culture to unfold and understand its elements; but the world is ours, and what emerges from it is already listed as possible or probable, without the need for invented laws of operation. The narrative springs of the strangeness are put to good use, but for the development of a world that cannot be perceived as imaginary, as "another world".
A Report to Science
This relationship to the world is partly related to science and human activity. In the great family of anticipatory fiction and prophetic narratives, the cli-fi occupies an original place. If we go back, like Milner and Burgman, to antiquity, we find a great abundance of flood tales; if we go down the course of literary history, we reach the symmetrical fictions of global warming or the new ice age, numerous during the first 20th century in pulp magazines, under the influence of the publications of James Croll and Svante Arrhenius - that is, the theories of the ice cycles and the greenhouse effect. The warming fictions are later than the cooling fictions, which can also be understood with reference to the entropy theories that powerfully structure the imaginary end of the world before 1914. In all these cases, climate change, whether dramatic or more diffuse, is rather caused by divine interventions (it can therefore be described as theogenic), by a set of Earth system functions such as earthquakes, volcanic activity or orbital oscillations (geogenic), or sometimes by extraterrestrial intervention (xenogenic). The case of glacial fictions makes it possible to differentiate between, on the one hand, cooling linked to deep geological cycles, in which human action is more of a victim than an actor, and on the other hand, nuclear winter fictions, in which human activity is crucial. In the latter, where the human role is essential, the "climate change" novum remains a secondary novum compared to nuclear, and not the driving force behind the plot. On the other hand, warming fictions engage human action much more quickly than previous ones. Milner and Burgman thus draw up their genealogical panorama of the cli-fi by articulating two typologies: the role of climate change in the plot and the determining factor of change. The contemporary "cli-fi" strictly speaking, the one that Dan Bloom has been naming and promoting since the late 2000s, is the one that emerges when the determining factor becomes anthropogenic. Compared to the old fictions of flood or cooling, they write,
The novelty of this last stage in the long history of climate fiction lies precisely in its fidelity to the discoveries of the relevant sciences. In short, contemporary cli-fi, compared to the close literary types that preceded it, is above all a science fiction ["is above all a science fiction"].
In their language, Milner and Burgman play on the first term "science fiction": they thus designate both the genre name that everyone knows (science fiction, SF, sci-fi) and a strong characterization of the cli-fi, based on scientific culture. They thus answer the question we asked above: climate / science fiction or climate science / fiction? For them, it's very clear: we understand the cli-fi better in relation to science fiction than to other genres or no genre at all (like general literature). Climate fiction, which comes from science fiction, is therefore science fiction, even and especially when this parameter comes into confrontation with other generic dimensions, other genre codes, in an enlarged genre system that mixes all sorts of other genre literature.
Literary intermingling
Some of these brews are already familiar to the public. The science thriller, for example, has absorbed the codes of the spy novel or even the war novel, fuelled by the techno-scientific competition between the two political blocs in the second half of the 20th century. The great nuclear fear gave way, after the non-proliferation treaties of the 1980s and the end of bloc geopolitics, to dystopias and end-of-the-world fictions. These end-of-the-world fictions adopt militaristic, post-apocalyptic and survivalist scenarios at the turn of the twenty-first century, whereas they were rather melancholy and meditative at the turn of the twentieth century. Climate fictions flow into these sometimes composite, sometimes refined models. This is Ligny's disaster and apocalypse novel, whose Exodus of the title promises no salvation. For Nathaniel Rich, it is a mixture of catastrophe novel, love story and social study of the American upper class. Robinson, who has forged his writer's weapons with a typical hard science fiction theme, terraformation, returns to the earth and its climates with a consummate art of the polyphonic novel (Capital Code trilogy, New York 2140).
The hybridization of science fiction and the sentimental novel is less frequent, and all the more remarkable. Science fiction already had a few examples of novels composed as diaries
The hybridization of science fiction and romance novels is less frequent, and all the more remarkable. Science fiction already had a few examples of novels composed as teenage girls' diaries: Jack Womack's Diary of the Night, or Octavia Butler's "Parables" cycle, marked the 1990s by putting the diarist form at the service of a strongly dystopian narrative. Carbon Diaries 2015, by Saci Lloyd, once again adopts the formula to portray a cli-fi of the near future, in a United Kingdom subject to strict energy rationing. Kingsolver's novel mentioned above is more original. It follows a double tradition: the psychological romance novel on the one hand, and the rural redneck novel of poor Americans on the other. Within the genre system, these form its main base. The cli-fi that develops from there conveys the message of rational fulfillment: Della, at the end of the adventure, has clarified her feelings for her husband, her friends, her mother-in-law, and for the attractive academic who came to study butterflies near her home; but she has also acquired scientific knowledge and the courage to end her unhappy marriage. Even more than an awareness, it is an empowerment for this character. The nuance is not subtle, because it involves more broadly the capacity to act (agency) which is at the heart of the political urgency of the climate crisis. The scientific discourse, in this novel, is therefore not the driving force behind the plot and the vector of emotions; it is nevertheless very meticulously documented, and is part of the character's journey towards mastering feelings and their formulation. But it is striking to observe that it never offers a global vision.
At long last, the Conclusion
As it has been actively promoted over the last ten years, cli-fi has an original place in the gender system and in the social discourse that constructs it.
The fields of the catastrophe novel, the post-apocalyptic novel, the scientific thriller, the terraforming story, or dystopia intersect, compete or reinforce each other, while attracting seemingly distant literary traditions (sentimental literature, teen-novel or novels for teenagers and young adults).
It is essential to read this genre as part of this literary and media bubbling; first of all, it allows us to understand its intermediatic power, because in our contemporary world the mental images of the literary narrative are always more or less doubled by their visual replicas in cinema, comics, video games and the digital culture of the social web; moreover, narrative languages echo journalistic or political languages. Secondly, it allows us to understand a global cultural language, complex relationships to the world, space and time, and not just the serial variants of a climatological vulgate.
Climate fiction takes on the meaning of a perspective that is both absolutely certain in its principle and unknowable in its moments: a kind of "suspense without surprise", which sometimes borders on melancholy already present in the face of this unknown that is yet to come but is inevitable. This is the human condition of our time.
by Irène Langlet in France, July 7
Cli-fi & Sci-fi
Littératures de genre et crise climatique
Les cli-fi (fictions climatiques) se multiplient et forment peut-être désormais un genre à part entière. Elles disent nos préoccupations, nos angoisses, nos attentes. Le corpus est hétéroclite, mais il est bien la preuve qu’il existe aujourd’hui un imaginaire de la crise climatique.
La crise du climat n’est pas une hypothèse. Elle a déjà ses événements (les canicules, les ouragans, les incendies géants de Sibérie, de Californie, d’Australie) ; elle a ses organes scientifiques (le GIEC, ou IPCC), ses sommets politiques (les COP), son héroïne (Greta Thunberg), ses luttes (les grèves scolaires ou « Fridays for Future », les marches pour le climat). Elle a aussi sa palette lexicale : faut-il parler de crise ? de réchauffement ? de changement ? de dérèglement ? de bouleversement climatique ? Et elle a peut-être même déjà son genre littéraire et médiatique : la fiction climatique, climate fiction en anglais, abrégée cli-fi – prononcez « klaï-faï », comme (en principe) dans sci-fi. Pour ceux qui défendent cette catégorie depuis une dizaine d’années (écrivains, journalistes, universitaires, surtout dans le monde anglophone), la cli-fi rassemble toutes les histoires qui impliquent une prise en compte, directe ou indirecte, de la crise climatique. Cela peut aller de la fiction post-apocalyptique au roman-catastrophe, du thriller scientifique à la science-fiction pure et dure ; mais on y trouve aussi des polars, des romans noirs, des romans sentimentaux... Cette apparente dispersion des registres et des sous-genres ne décourage nullement la conviction des promoteurs de la cli-fi : pour eux, c’est le signe, au contraire, tout au long du XXe siècle, d’une lente convergence de divers régimes littéraires et narratifs vers la réalité actuelle. Naguère simple décor, la crise climatique est désormais un levier narratif, voire le thème principal des fictions. La cli-fi donne un nom de genre à cette nouvelle donne culturelle.
Cette conviction est renforcée par la montée en puissance d’un autre concept, l’Anthropocène, par lequel on désigne l’ère géologique nouvelle dans laquelle on se situe dès lors que les actions des êtres humains ont atteint une puissance suffisante pour modifier les cycles géologiques et climatiques de la planète (la datation exacte de son début est l’un de ces débats qui animent la communauté des savants : le plus souvent, c’est la révolution industrielle qui sert de pivot historique, mais certains proposent de remonter à la révolution néolithique et à l’instauration d’une humanité sédentaire et agricole). Si fictions climatiques il y a, elles ont évidemment partie liée avec les disciplines qui débattent de la crise climatique, au premier rang desquelles (mais sans nullement les épuiser) la climatologie, la biologie, l’écologie, les sciences de l’environnement. À ce titre, les fictions climatiques s’inscrivent dans le vaste ensemble romans écologiques, écritures de la nature et autres « écofictions », comme les a nommées Christian Chelebourg en 2012. Mais leur développement est aussi étroitement lié à l’examen de l’influence de l’homme sur l’environnement, à l’histoire des sciences et techniques, à la philosophie de la nature, aux théories politiques du monde industrialisé et globalisé. C’est pourquoi il n’est pas étonnant de les voir en bonne place dans un ouvrage comme celui d’Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions.
Dès lors, la question de savoir si la cli-fi est une mode médiatique, une astuce de marketing ou un « véritable genre » littéraire et filmique se pose moins que celle de l’observer en tant que pratique culturelle. À travers ses multiples sous-genres, ses symboles hétéroclites ou unitaires, sa galerie d’auteurs et d’autrices que parfois tout oppose, la cli-fi se présente comme un stock de matrices narratives, une réserve de motifs imaginaires qui posent une loupe fictionnelle sur la réalité de notre condition humaine actuelle et des enjeux de son défi majeur. De façon toujours indirecte, comme toutes les fictions, les fictions climatiques sont aussi un discours symbolique sur la crise ; elles renseignent non seulement sur la perception de cette dernière, mais aussi sur la perception des politiques qui l’affrontent, des sciences qui l’étudient. Enfin, dans un sens plus large, en tant que pratique culturelle, la cli-fi témoigne d’un imaginaire de la crise climatique qui est non seulement partagé au présent mais aussi inscrit dans une histoire culturelle, à travers un discours réflexif des auteurs et des critiques sur le genre lui-même. C’est cette réflexivité, qui rassemble des pratiques très diverses, qu’on reconnaît dans le nom de genre ; et sa lecture est aussi riche d’enseignements que celle des fictions elles-mêmes.
Un corpus hétéroclite
Dans les fictions, les catastrophes climatiques et les manipulations du climat sont présentes depuis bien plus longtemps que la crise actuelle. Le motif du déluge est assurément le plus ancien, présent dans le plus vieux texte littéraire connu, L’Épopée de Gilgamesh (env. XVIIIe s. avant J.-C.) ; les glaciations ont connu une vogue au XIXe siècle. L’inquiétude climatique traverse Le dernier homme de Cousin de Grainville (1805), un roman parfois cité comme témoignage d’une conscience des problèmes de l’Anthropocène avant même que la révolution industrielle ne batte son plein. Parmi les motifs qui scandent les littératures du XXe siècle, on pourrait relever pêle-mêle l’effet de serre, le trou dans la couche d’ozone, la pollution atmosphérique, la modification des courants sous-marins, les sécheresses, le dégel du permafrost... Quand on cherche des précurseurs à la cli-fi, on n’a que l’embarras du choix.
Le label « cli-fi » proprement dit s’applique à des fictions plus récentes, où le dérèglement du climat est anthropogénique, c’est-à-dire causé par l’humanité, ou plus directement lié aux activités humaines. La science-fiction en fournit un corpus important, soit à travers des scénarios catastrophes comme dans La Mère des tempêtes de John Barnes, soit à travers des fictions de géo-ingéniérie impliquant la maîtrise du climat : Kim Stanley Robinson y fait figure d’écrivain dominant, après une « trilogie martienne » devenue un classique du genre (Mars la Rouge, Mars la Bleue, Mars la Verte) et le roman moins connu 2312 dont le personnage principal a pour profession le « design planétaire ». La SF a également porté un intérêt précoce aux problèmes écologiques, comme l’illustrent par exemple Norman Spinrad (Bleue comme une orange), Robert Silverberg (Ciel brûlant de minuit), Jean-Pierre Andrevon (anthologies Retour à la Terre). On évoque parfois le cycle des « Apocalypses » de J. G. Ballard : l’auteur de Crash ! a en effet commencé sa carrière avec Le Monde englouti ou Sécheresse, dont l’histoire élabore des mondes ravagés par la montée des eaux ou la raréfaction tragique de l’eau douce. Mais la SF fantasmatique de Ballard ne s’embarrasse d’aucune plausibilité : on n’y reconnaît guère les affinités scientifiques de la science-fiction, qui expliquent pourquoi le thème du climat y a été présent avant même qu’une crise climatique ait été médiatisée.
De fait, la cli-fi est la plupart du temps présentée comme une branche récente, ou une extension de la science-fiction. Au-delà des romans d’Arthur Herzog (Heat, 1976) ou de George Turner (The Sea and the Summer, 1987), qui sont tenus pour le véritable point de départ du genre, les listes qui fleurissent dans la presse culturelle ont déjà leurs classiques, sur une gamme variée de scénarios et de registres. Parmi ceux qui sont accessibles en traduction, on ne sera pas surpris de retrouver Michael Chrichton dans la veine du thriller (État d’urgence, roman-catastrophe à charge contre la mouvance éco-terroriste), Ian McEwan plutôt dans celle du roman satirique (Solaire, où la crise climatique est perçue à travers le personnage d’un savant détestable). K. S. Robinson s’illustre dans la trilogie Capital Code (Les quarante signes de la pluie, 50° au-dessous de zéro, 60 jours et après). La trilogie Maddaddam de Margaret Atwood met en scène un homme qui a survécu à une terrible pandémie artificiellement déclenchée, et aux dérèglements du climat parallèles à cet accroissement dément des activités bio-industrielles. Paolo Bacigalupi brosse les tableaux dystopiques d’une Amérique ravagée par la sécheresse (dans Water Knife) ou, dans La Fille automate, d’une néo-Indonésie luttant contre la montée des eaux (parmi cent autres périls, notamment bio-industriels). La désolation post-apocalyptique de La Route, de Cormac McCarthy, a connu un grand succès après l’adaptation cinématographique qu’en a tirée John Hillcoat ; un père et son fils traversent de nombreux paysages de mort, d’où la faune et la flore ont disparu, mais il n’est pas vraiment question des causes de ce ravage. Dans la lumière, de Barbara Kingsolver, raconte comment la vie d’une fermière modeste (et malheureuse en ménage) est bouleversée par une colonie de papillons sur son terrain, poussés là par le réchauffement climatique. Nathaniel Rich, dans Paris sur l’avenir, suit le destin grinçant d’un spécialiste des crises dans une New York dramatiquement inondée, à quoi réplique le roman New York 2140, de K. S. Robinson, où se développe une quasi-utopie post-déluge. Dans la littérature en français, on peut compter les romans sérieux de Jean-Marc Ligny (AquaTM, Exodes), le roman satirique de Joël Bacqué (La Fonte des glaces).
Un bouillonnement de genres
Que penser de ce label cli-fi qui cherche à s’imposer en librairie et dans la presse culturelle ? Pour qui furète ne serait-ce que quelques minutes sur le réseau, dans les blogs, dans les pages littéraires de la presse et dans les listes des plates-formes de lecteurs ou de vendeurs (Goodreads, Babelio, Sens critique, Amazon), la cli-fi pourrait bien n’être qu’une énième étiquette dans un foisonnement qui donne le vertige : thriller écologique, écofiction, écotopie, Anthropocene fiction, environmental fiction, ecofuturism, solarpunk, biopunk, green fiction... Les racines dérivées de l’écologie s’y assemblent avec celles du futurisme ou des utopies et dystopies, par exemple dans écotopie, dont le premier usage apparut en titre d’un roman de Ernest Callenbach en 1975. Le terme solarpunk est forgé plutôt en référence au cyberpunk, branche de la science-fiction férue d’informatique et de mondes urbains, née au début des années 1980, avec une racine solar qui évoque les énergies durables. En vérité, ce foisonnement mérite qu’on s’y intéresse : ce qui se présente à première vue comme une dispersion ou un éclatement de catégories tous azimuts pourrait bien, au contraire, témoigner d’une convergence d’intérêts, d’imaginaires ; d’un bourgeonnement fécond, plutôt que d’un éparpillement. Il invite en tout cas à se saisir de ce « nouveau genre » en étant pleinement conscient du système de genres dans lequel il prend sa signification.
Il est beaucoup plus instructif de repérer la cli-fi ainsi, dans une cartographie des pratiques culturelles, que de chercher à la définir à travers des propriétés formelles (neuves ou empruntées à telle ou telle tradition), des thèmes, des styles et des scénarios dont la check-list permettrait de départager les fictions climatiques de celles qui ne le seraient pas. Cette manière essentialiste de définir les genres littéraires, qui se présente spontanément (et pour de bonnes raisons) dans les discussions sur les genres, est relativisée depuis au moins trente ans par les théoriciens des genres. De Raymond Williams à Matthieu Letourneux, ils l’affirment tous avec constance : les « genres » ne sont pas des modèles transcendants, des étiquettes classificatoires, mais des pratiques sociales, où le souci de classer existe bel et bien, mais au sein d’un ensemble plus diversifié d’autres pratiques, comme celles qui consistent à hybrider, ressentir, partager, discuter, ou bien encore imiter, entre cent autres. Dans cette optique culturaliste, les « genres » sont vus plutôt comme des conventions partagées, des pratiques collectives reposant sur un ensemble de normes, de codes, et de discours : ceux des auteurs, bien sûr, mais aussi ceux des éditeurs, publicitaires, critiques et universitaires, autant d’acteurs dominants de la vie littéraire ; mais surtout,
par-delà ces acteurs majeurs officiels (...), chaque lecteur, chaque consommateur, participe à son niveau à la définition du genre. (...) le discours collectif quotidien joue un rôle majeur dans l’identification et la nomination des genres et de leur institution.
Cette approche d’un genre par le système des genres et l’ensemble de pratiques où il prend son sens est particulièrement éclairante pour la climate fiction.
Un baptême numérique et médiatique
C’est à Dan Bloom, écrivain et activiste vivant à Taïwan, que l’on doit l’effort principal de popularisation de la cli-fi en tant que genre. Il s’appuie pour cela sur toute la dynamique de la culture numérique mondialisée : les réseaux sociaux, mots-dièse, groupes de lecteurs et les communautés en ligne, mais aussi les recommandations de lecture sur les sites marchands ou les plates-formes d’évaluation (Goodreads par exemple). La logique numérique peut ainsi, à partir des notations et commentaires d’un livre dans une librairie en ligne, propulser certains titres en suggestions d’achat. Outre cet immense terrain d’action, Bloom a élaboré un véritable petit cluster en ligne destiné à documenter, archiver, capitaliser et diffuser le nom de genre et ses définitions, même mouvantes : une page intitulée « Cli-Fi Report » (CFR) rassemble les liens vers une page Facebook, un fil Twitter, un article Wikipédia en constante expansion depuis sa création en 2013, un blog personnel, un manifeste évolutif sur la plate-forme Medium, composé d’une centaine de « ruminations sur la cli-fi » ; elle compile enfin, à la manière d’un agrégateur de signets, toutes les publications académiques et semi-académiques (blogs et vulgarisation) qui documentent le phénomène.
Cette plaque tournante, mi-communauté mi-veille documentaire, n’a toutefois pas été le seul appui de la cli-fi et de son essor. Le nom de genre semble s’être réellement diffusé à l’occasion de la publication du roman Odds Against Tomorrow de Daniel Rich (traduit par Paris sur l’avenir), qui raconte une histoire d’inondation de New York. Par l’effet du hasard, l’écrivain reçut les épreuves du roman, avec son illustration de couverture, précisément alors que l’ouragan Sandy mettait la ville en détresse à l’automne 2012. Comme dans un acte de baptême fantastique du nouveau genre, l’auteur rapporte qu’il eut l’impression d’avoir corrigé les épreuves de son roman toute la nuit, et d’en voir les images adaptées à la télévision tout le lendemain ; l’éditeur confie, quant à lui : « on aurait dit qu’on entrait dans la 4e dimension ». Au micro d’Angela Evancie, sur la National Public Radio, cette anecdote a scénarisé un véritable récit médiatique de fondation littéraire ; le nom de la cli-fi y a acquis toute une épaisseur culturelle, et sonore, aussi. Andrew Milner, l’un des principaux spécialistes des fictions climatiques, estime que Dan Bloom n’a pas vraiment bénéficié, pour son propre roman, de l’activisme qu’il a déployé pour transformer en nom de genre ce qui aurait fort bien pu rester une astuce littéraire, ou un moment de radio. Qu’importe ? l’histoire est peut-être encore plus instructive ainsi, et renseigne sur la manière dont se cristallise une catégorie culturelle au sein des discours sociaux.
La cli-fi comme la sci-fi
Car une fois qu’on a dit que la « cli-fi » dérive de la « sci-fi », qu’a-t-on dit ? Ce nom de genre, en anglais, laisse planer une ambiguïté discrète : est-ce qu’on parle de climate / science fiction ou de climate science / fiction ? Autrement dit, est-ce qu’on parle d’une branche de la science-fiction qui raconte spécifiquement des histoires de climat, ou d’une branche de la fiction où les sciences du climat jouent un rôle majeur ? On verra tout à l’heure que ce n’est peut-être pas qu’un raffinement théorique. Les vocables abrégés, en tout cas : [klaj faj], [saj faj], ont bien évidemment favorisé le destin médiatique du nom du genre. Ce qui a « pris » (comme une mayonnaise), avec la cli-fi, c’est peut-être tout bêtement, et tout d’abord, ce sobriquet évocateur. Il faut rappeler que sci-fi a été formé dans les années 1950 par équivalence de « hi-fi », le diminutif de high fidelity, utilisé dans l’industrie phonographique (que le français a importé tel quel en francisant sa prononciation). Ce fut d’abord un diminutif à tendance péjorative pour la science-fiction : on abrégeait « SF » ou « sci-fi », et ça ne renvoyait pas à la même qualité littéraire. La réévaluation de la seconde abréviation est intervenue à la toute fin du XXe s., dans les années où la chaîne « SyFy » est lancée par Universal en 1992 (la déclinaison française date de 2005). C’est un moment où la critique de science-fiction a diversifié son approche, et ne s’est plus limitée à distinguer la bonne « SF » de créateurs ou de scientifiques, nourrie de spéculation et de plausibilité, et la mauvaise « sci-fi » industrielle et sérielle nourrie de pseudo-sciences et de bric-à-brac techno-scientifique. La théorie du genre a cessé progressivement d’être l’outil d’un jugement de valeur et cherche désormais à se saisir du genre comme un ensemble complexe de discours sociaux et de pratiques culturelles ; dans ce cadre, il ne s’agit plus de trancher entre une « vraie » SF (c’est-à-dire une bonne SF) et une qui ne le serait pas.
Cette évolution du regard théorique accompagne aussi l’évolution générationnelle du genre et de ses publics : la science-fiction, à la fin du XXe siècle, s’affirme d’abord et avant tout comme une « pop culture » et comme une fiction de genre (genre fiction), c’est-à-dire un type d’histoires à apprécier dans son environnement culturel global, proliférant et exubérant, avec ses codes et ses héritages. La hard SF pure et dure y côtoie les superhéros, le merveilleux y côtoie la science, et la conquête spatiale, les dystopies. Il y a donc des enjeux importants à nommer et populariser un nouveau genre « cli-fi », en le faisant dériver de « sci-fi », un nom lui-même dérivé de la science-fiction où le merveilleux scientifique, la spéculation rationnelle et l’anticipation ont agrégé toutes sortes d’histoires, des mondes perdus et des planètes étrangères, des IA maléfiques et des robots bienveillants, des aliens monstrueux et de sages extra-terrestres. La presse culturelle, les blogs et les forums d’amateurs parlent d’une voix remarquablement unanime : la cli-fi, c’est une manière de parler du climat qui se place dans le sillage de la science-fiction, mais d’une nouvelle manière. Cela engage tout le discours critique porté indirectement par la fiction.
Un estrangement sans étrangeté
Parallèlement au petit nom de cli-fi, le lien complexe des fictions climatiques à la SF éclaire aussi un rapport au monde, et la cristallisation de la catégorie dans le public en témoigne. Un ouragan nommé Sandy touche New York au moment où un roman décrit la ville inondée : voilà bien une image frappante. On connaît cette antienne : La fiction rejoint la réalité ! On entre dans la quatrième dimension... Aujourd’hui c’est déjà demain ; la science-fiction, c’est maintenant. Sous leur allure de punchlines, ces clichés médiatiques touchent à l’un des piliers de la théorie de la science-fiction. À la base de l’édifice science-fictionnel, il y a en effet ce qu’on s’accorde à désigner comme un « novum », depuis le sémioticien Darko Suvin (1977). On appelle ainsi des objets, des êtres, des événements qui produisent une altérité surprenante, qui n’ont pas de référent dans le monde réel du lecteur, mais en ont un dans le monde de la fiction. La théorie de la SF appelle donc ces éléments des novums, leur effet un estrangement cognitif, et l’ensemble des savoirs qu’ils composent peu à peu à travers la lecture, et qui sous-tend le monde imaginaire, une « xéno-encyclopédie » complétant l’encyclopédie des savoirs de référence, cette xéno-encyclopédie elle-même venant prendre place dans une culture globale de SF développant sa propre intertextualité. Dans les romans de science-fiction classiques, les aventures des personnages forment l’armature narrative d’une élaboration de monde déclenchée par l’estrangement cognitif ; autrement dit, les péripéties soutiennent un effort mental nécessaire à la compréhension d’un monde différent du nôtre, qui fonctionne selon d’autres lois. La poursuite du récit implique, pour la lectrice, de spéculer sur ces lois, de façon au moins tendanciellement rationnelle, au plus rigoureusement scientifique (par exemple s’il s’agit du développement accéléré d’une civilisation d’êtres imaginaires vivant sur une étoile à neutrons, comme dans le roman typiquement hard SF L’Œuf du dragon, de Robert Forward). La critique de SF, parfois considérée comme moins soucieuse du style que la critique de littérature générale, est tout particulièrement attentive à la manipulation de ces novums diégétiques et à leur intégration au récit. Si « style » il y a dans la SF, il est là : dans l’habileté à articuler une altérité surprenante et son explicitation non surprenante ; de mener le récit comme si l’autre monde allait de soi ; et de faire coopérer le lecteur au déchiffrement in process de ces altérités. Les réponses formelles à ce défi composent, d’une certaine manière, l’histoire littéraire du genre, qui est aussi une histoire culturelle du rapport aux savoirs (laquelle inclut aussi des rapports émerveillés, magiques, mystiques aux savoirs). C’est là tout l’héritage structurant de la SF, son code de genre, au-delà de tous les aliens, IA, villes futures et vaisseaux spatiaux dont la culture visuelle a inondé les écrans de cinéma après avoir colonisé les couvertures bon marché des pulps et des livres de poche. En littérature, ces réponses formelles peuvent aller du long discours d’ingénieur à la Jules Verne à l’extrait d’Encyclopedia Galactica à la manière d’Asimov.
Or, dans la cli-fi, les novums ne font pas tant partie d’un monde imaginaire fondé sur des lois extraterrestres, ou futuristes, ou d’histoire parallèle, que d’un ensemble de craintes et de menaces dont le fonctionnement est déjà compris dans la réalité, en tant que probabilités. L’histoire se passe dans un monde défait, ou déviant, plutôt qu’un monde autre. La colonie de papillons du roman de Kingsolver, Dans la lumière, en donne un bon exemple thématique et formel : le monde réel est celui-là même des petits fermiers pauvres du Midwest, les animaux n’ont nullement muté, l’équipe scientifique est réaliste, son matériel n’est enjolivé par aucun gadget futuriste (une cocotte-minute y figure d’ailleurs en bonne place). Les papillons ont « simplement » changé de route migratoire, et se sont installés dans une forêt où ils ne sont pas censés pouvoir vivre ; leurs battements d’ailes donnent l’impression que le paysage prend feu. Ce n’est pas un hasard si ce paysage entraîne d’abord le roman vers un récit mystique, quasi-fantastique : Della, l’héroïne, pense d’abord sincèrement avoir eu une vision divine – vision qui l’a fait renoncer à l’adultère qu’elle se préparait à commettre. Le roman travaille alors, lentement, à la psychologisation de ce premier scénario mystique, tout en posant les bases d’un scénario scientifique. Le novum ne fait pas entrer dans un monde autre ; il fait entrer dans le nôtre, mieux compris – en particulier, on comprend mieux ses altérations déjà passées (les pluies incessantes, les glissements de terrain, les problèmes économiques des exploitants). De la sci-fi, la cli-fi retient donc une altération déterminante dans l’élaboration d’un monde, ainsi qu’un recours à la culture scientifique pour en déplier et comprendre les éléments ; mais le monde est le nôtre, et ce qui y surgit est déjà répertorié comme possible ou probable, sans nécessité de lois de fonctionnement inventées. Les ressorts narratifs de l’estrangement sont mis à profit, mais pour le développement d’un monde qui ne peut pas être perçu comme imaginaire, comme un « autre monde ».
Un rapport aux sciences
Ce rapport au monde a partie liée avec la science et l’activité humaine. Dans la grande famille des fictions d’anticipation et des récits prophétiques, la cli-fi occupe une place originale. Si on remonte, comme Milner et Burgman, jusqu’à l’Antiquité, on repère une grande abondance de récits de déluge ; en descendant le cours de l’histoire littéraire, on atteint les fictions symétriques de réchauffement ou de nouvel âge glaciaire, nombreuses pendant le premier XXe s. dans les pulp magazines, sous l’influence des publications de James Croll et Svante Arrhenius – c’est-à-dire les théories des cycles glaciaires et de l’effet de serre. Les fictions de réchauffement sont plus tardives que les fictions de refroidissement, ce que l’on peut comprendre aussi en référence aux théories de l’entropie qui structurent puissamment l’imaginaire de fins du monde avant 1914. Dans tous ces cas, le changement climatique, dramatique ou plus diffus, est plutôt causé par des interventions divines (on peut donc le qualifier de théogénique), par un ensemble de fonctionnements du système-Terre comme les séismes, l’activité volcanique ou les oscillations de l’orbite (géogéniques), ou parfois par une intervention extra-terrestre (xénogénique). Le cas des fictions glaciaires permet bien de différencier, d’une part, les refroidissements liés à des cycles géologiques profonds, dont l’action humaine est bien plutôt victime qu’actrice, et d’autre part les fictions d’hiver nucléaire, où l’activité humaine est cruciale. Dans ces dernières, où le rôle humain est essentiel, le novum « changement climatique » reste un novum secondaire par rapport au nucléaire, et non le moteur de l’intrigue. Par contre, les fictions de réchauffement engagent beaucoup plus rapidement l’action humaine que les précédentes. Milner et Burgman dressent ainsi leur panorama généalogique de la cli-fi en articulant deux typologies : le rôle du changement climatique dans l’intrigue et le facteur déterminant du changement. La « cli-fi » contemporaine à proprement parler, celle que Dan Bloom baptise et promeut depuis la fin des années 2000, c’est celle qui émerge quand le facteur déterminant devient anthropogénique. Comparativement aux anciennes fictions de déluge ou de refroidissement, écrivent-ils,
la nouveauté de cette dernière étape d’une histoire longue des fictions climatiques, on peut la trouver précisément dans sa fidélité aux découvertes des sciences pertinentes. En bref, la cli-fi contemporaine, par comparaison avec les types littéraires proches qui l’ont précédée, est avant tout une fiction scientifique [« is above all a science fiction »].
Dans leur langue, Milner et Burgman jouent sur le premier terme de « science fiction » : ils désignent ainsi tout à la fois le nom de genre que tout le monde connaît (science-fiction, SF, sci-fi) et une caractérisation forte de la cli-fi, en l’adossant à la culture scientifique. Ils répondent ainsi à la question que nous posions plus haut : climate / science fiction ou climate science / fiction ? Pour eux, c’est très clair : on comprend mieux la cli-fi en relation avec la science-fiction qu’avec d’autres genres ou pas de genre du tout (comme une littérature générale). Les fictions climatiques, issues de la science-fiction, sont donc des fictions à caractère scientifique, même et surtout lorsque ce paramètre vient se confronter avec d’autres dimensions génériques, d’autres codes de genre, dans un système de genres élargi et brassant toutes sortes d’autres littératures de genre.
Brassages littéraires
Certains de ces brassages sont déjà familiers au public. Le thriller scientifique, par exemple, a absorbé les codes du roman d’espionnage, voire du roman de guerre, nourri par la compétition techno-scientifique des deux blocs politiques dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. La grande peur nucléaire a cédé la place, après les traités de non-prolifération des années 1980 et la fin de la géopolitique des blocs, aux dystopies et aux fictions de fin du monde. Ces fictions de fin du monde adoptent des scénarios militaristes, post-apocalyptiques et survivalistes au tournant du XXIe, alors qu’elles étaient plutôt mélancoliques et méditatives au tournant du XXe siècle. Les fictions climatiques se coulent dans ces modèles parfois composites, parfois épurés. C’est le roman catastrophe et d’apocalypse chez Ligny, dont les Exodes du titre ne promettent aucun salut. Pour Nathaniel Rich, c’est un mélange de roman catastrophe, de roman d’amour et d’étude sociale de l’upper class américaine. Robinson, qui a forgé ses armes d’écrivain avec un thème typique de la hard science fiction, la terraformation, revient à la terre et à ses climats avec un art consommé du roman polyphonique (trilogie Capital Code, New York 2140).
L’hybridation de la science-fiction et du roman sentimental est moins fréquente, et d’autant plus remarquable. La science-fiction comptait déjà quelques exemples de romans composés comme des journaux intimes d’adolescentes : Journal de nuit, de Jack Womack, ou le cycle des « Paraboles » d’Octavia Butler, ont marqué les années 1990 en mettant la forme diariste au service d’une narration fortement dystopique. Carbon Diaries 2015, de Saci Lloyd, adopte à nouveau la formule pour brosser une cli-fi du proche futur, dans un Royaume-Uni soumis à un strict rationnement énergétique. Le roman de Kingsolver qu’on a évoqué plus haut est plus original. Il s’inscrit dans une double tradition : le roman d’amour psychologique d’une part, le roman rural redneck d’Américains pauvres d’autre part. Dans le système des genres, ceux-ci forment son socle principal. La cli-fi qui se développe à partir de là transmet le message d’un épanouissement rationnel : Della, à la fin de l’aventure, a clarifié ses sentiments pour son mari, ses amies, sa belle-mère, et pour le séduisant universitaire venu étudier les papillons près de chez elle ; mais elle a aussi acquis des connaissances scientifiques, et le courage de mettre fin à son mariage malheureux. Plus encore qu’une prise de conscience, c’est une prise d’autonomie pour ce personnage. La nuance n’est pas subtile, car elle engage plus largement la capacité d’agir (agency) qui est au cœur de l’urgence politique de la crise climatique. Le discours scientifique, dans ce roman, n’est donc pas le moteur de l’intrigue et le vecteur des émotions ; il est pourtant très minutieusement documenté, et participe du cheminement du personnage vers la maîtrise des sentiments et de leur formulation. Mais il est frappant d’observer qu’il n’offre jamais de vision globale.
Conclusion
Telle qu’elle a été activement promue depuis dix ans, la cli-fi occupe une place originale dans le système des genres et dans le discours social qui les construit. Les filières du roman catastrophe, du roman post-apocalyptique, du thriller scientifique, du récit de terraformation, ou de la dystopie s’y croisent, s’y concurrencent ou s’y renforcent, tout en attirant des traditions littéraires apparemment éloignées (la littérature sentimentale, le teen-novel ou roman pour adolescents et jeunes adultes). Il est essentiel de lire ce genre comme inscrit dans ce bouillonnement littéraire et médiatique ; d’abord cela permet de comprendre sa puissance intermédiatique, car dans notre monde contemporain les images mentales du récit littéraire sont toujours peu ou prou doublées par leurs répliques visuelles au cinéma, dans la bande dessinée, dans le jeu vidéo et dans la culture numérique du web social ; de plus, les langages narratifs font écho aux langages journalistiques ou politiques. Ensuite cela permet de comprendre un langage culturel global, des rapports complexes au monde, à l’espace et au temps, et pas seulement les variantes sérielles d’une vulgate climatologique. La fiction climatique y prend le sens d’une perspective à la fois absolument certaine dans son principe et inconnaissable dans ses moments : une sorte de « suspense sans surprise », qui confine parfois à une mélancolie déjà présente face à cet inconnu qui reste à venir tout en étant inévitable. C’est la condition humaine de notre temps.
par , le 7 juillet
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