"The Virus will be Televised." Climate change too!: What I told a dictionary blog editor about the origins of the ''cli-fi'' term....

When a dictionary blog editor in New York asked me the other day where cli-fi came from, I told her I really didn't know how it all happened. But I tried to put it into words and this is what I told her:

I don't really understand how or why the ''cli-fi'' term became as popular and celebrated as it did. I'm mystified how it has become a calling card of the 21st century. I really didn't have a plan or an agenda, and in fact i really didn't have that much to do with it. I was just using it briefly for a book promotion for a novel I had commissioned in 2010 and which was published in 2012, ''Polar City Red'' by Jim Laughter in Oklahoma, and then I sent out some tweets and blog posts using the term, repeating it over and over wherever it made sense to do so, press releases too, to the New York Times and the UK Guardian and the BBC and The Wrap and over 100 news outlets day by day, week by week, month by month, and it somehow caught on with the literati and book reviewers and some influential newspapers like the New York Times and the Guardian, and by 2014 cli-fi as an independent standalone genre was on its way. I'm still mystified how these things catch on, especially as there wasn't a high-powered public relations agency in

New York or San Francisco or London behind it.

You could say it all happened by osmosis. Is that the right word?

The feeling was in the air. It caught on. Writers and literary critics gravitated to it. I didn't lift a finger.

To this day, in mid-2020, I'm mystified. Maybe it was meant to be, maybe it was in the cards. Lets see what happens next with cli-fi, lets see where it goes in the next ten years or so, the next 30 years. Ask me again in 2050.

I guess there was something impactful about the term that resonated somehow and reached with enough people where it was finally accepted and given spots on Wikipedia and in several online dictionaries.

There was no grand design behind cli-fi. It just happened. Happenstance. The power of language. ---------------------------------------