This is a global portal for all novels and movies about climate change and "The Virus," with news links and opeds from blogs to videos to Wikipedia to Twitter to news links and Facebook Groups. See this portal, the only such cli-fi sci-fi portal on the internet. MEDIA inquiries are okay at this point in time, and personal comments may be sent to the editor at danbloom ATMARK gmail DOT com
Citizens’ Climate Radio is a monthly podcast hosted by CCL volunteer Peterson Toscano. Browse all our past episode recaps here, or listen to past episodes here, and check out the latest episode in the post below. Princella Talley, one of three creative climate advocates featured in this podcast episodeBy Citizens Climate Lobby
Those of you who regularly listen to the Citizens’ Climate Radio podcast know the power of art in addressing climate change. Artists take on a unique role in helping the public better understand the many issues connected to climate change. They also play an important part in helping us process our strong emotions about our rapidly changing world.
Clara Fang
Poet and climate advocate Clara Fang shares her powerful and moving poem, “The Children on Why They are Striking for the Climate.” She also tells us about the poetry she reads and how it connects her to the natural world. Clara serves as Citizens’ Climate Lobby Student Engagement Coordinator. In her role, she engages students in climate advocacy and helps members conduct outreach to higher education. She holds a Master of Environmental Management from Yale University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from University of Utah. In the episode, she announces plans to organize a creative writing action group on CCL Community. Photographer, writer, and climate advocate Princella Talley tells us about the vital role of art in her life and her work. Her interests in visual art and storytelling started at a young age when observing dolphins in the ocean. After a successful career as a professional writer, Princella worked on a freelance writing assignment that ultimately drew her into the world of climate change and her role as diversity outreach coordinator at Citizens’ Climate Lobby. In her conversation with podcast host Peterson Toscano, Princella speaks candidly about the challenges of being a person of color in predominantly white climate spaces.
Before joining the Citizens’ Climate Education team, Princella spent more than a decade as a photographer and writer. She covered topics ranging from climate change and ecotourism to artificial intelligence and mobile app development for major news outlets with more than 60 million online visitors, independent publications, and tech startups in Silicon Valley. She’s written for CBS Las Vegas, worked as a copy editor for a digital publication with 135,000 weekly readers, and created content for a GRAMMYs campaign.
Krista Hiser, PhD
Princella is also a business owner of Louisiana Food Fellow, a cohort of change leaders working within local food systems. In central Louisiana, she partners with community leaders to provide environmental education and implement sustainable and eco-friendly programs in economically disadvantaged communities. Krista Hiser, PhD, is a professor of composition and rhetoric at Kapi’olani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii. She also directs the Center for Sustainability Across Curriculum within the University of Hawaii system. In the spring she taught the course “Landscapes in Literature—Cli-Fi, Sci-Fi, and the Culture of Sustainability.” In this episode, Dr. Hiser outlines for us the difference between science fiction and climate fiction and provides examples for each. She also raises concerns about the many apocalyptic narratives that flood the Cli-Fi market and that play a prominent role in climate conversations. She believes there are better ways to talk about climate change.
In Le grand vertige (published by Actes Sud in 2020), his new cli-fi novel, Mr. Pierre Ducrozet in France ....Twitter ID at (@pierreducrozet) ....stages the fight against global warming and questions, in a hollow, the best way to live in the world in the 21st century. All this through a gallery of characters who wonderfully embody the generational and ideological tensions of the moment. Interview with a man of his time.
If science fiction has been able to take up the theme
of global warming, sometimes to the point of saturation - climate fiction is now considered a literary current in its own right - contemporary novelists, with a few exceptions, still seem as timid as ever at the idea of tackling it in their turn. Pierre Ducrozet, for his part, is less pusillanimous. It is precisely in order to resonate with his time, that of a burning issue in the literal sense of the word, that he has chosen to make the climate issue the central subject of his new novel. A book whose title, The Great Vertigo, sounds like the title of a chapter in a history textbook that would look back over the period 2000-2030.
At the heart of this story with its holistic ambition, divided into increasingly shorter chapters as we get closer to the end, we come across the boomer Adam Thobias, a pioneer of ecological thinking appointed to head an International Commission on Climate Change, which he will transform into a parallel network of activists in which June, 22 years old, agrees to participate, from millennium to caricature. In parallel, we follow the work of Nathan, a young biologist who is trying to unravel the mystery of perpetual motion - and thus of clean and infinite energy - through the study of the photosynthesis of a bionic plant.
While he looks less far into the future here than in his previous novel, L'invention des corps, which plunged the reader into the transhumanist fantasies of a Californian entrepreneur inspired by Peter Thiel, Pierre Ducrozet has the merit of taking up this time with his pen the challenge of the century, that of the climate. It was well worth a meeting to talk about the future. All the more so since the writer intends to play a full part in the "reinvention of artistic and literary forms" he so desperately wants.
Usbek & Rica: In L'Invention des corps (Actes Sud, 2017), you explore the future as it imagines itself in Silicon Valley, with characters inspired by real-life figures like Richard Stallman or Peter Thiel. Your new novel explores less the future than the present, but always with the same obsession for the body and movement ...
Pierre Ducrozet : I've always wanted to write about movement and travel. The body imposed itself as an obvious entry point for my previous book, but today it is more a question of the gesture of writing than a theme in itself. Afterwards, it's true that I like to "take" my characters in their bodies, in their movements, without dwelling on psychology. I like authors like Hemingway, Carver or Faulkner for precisely that reason, this way of being less in psychology than in action.
"The idea was to try to bring the whole world into a single narrative.
With The Great Vertigo, the idea was to try to bring the whole world into a single narrative, and to somehow manage to map the whole. During a conversation with my editor for my previous novel, she had this sentence: "In fact, your book, rather than The Invention of Bodies, could be called The Habitation of the World. "It worked for me and this new book is really that: we go beyond the body and we question the way we inhabit space, the world.
Apart from Ian McEwan's Solaire (Gallimard, 2011), or more recently Lieke Marsman's Le Contraire d'une personne (Rue de l'Échiquier, 2019), there are hardly any contemporary novels whose plot is based head-on on the fight against global warming. For having chosen this theme?
That's right. Moreover, it is also true for the subject of transhumanism, which was at the heart of The Invention of the Bodies. Why is the climate crisis always approached through science fiction and from a dystopian angle? To this day, I still haven't read a novel about the forces at work, about how we try and fail to fight global warming. Is it because the present time is difficult to "put" in a novel and is quickly perishing? I don't know. In any case, I find it very exciting. The climate challenge fascinates me more than it frightens me. And I really wonder why there aren't more of us fiction writers taking up this subject. It's such a huge thing that's going on...
To be credible on a subject like this, does the novelist have to do more research?
I had a lot of discussions with my brother, who is an economist, to evaluate the budget that the Climate Commission that I imagine in the book would have to spend.
I talked a lot with my brother, who is an economist, to evaluate the budget that the Climate Commission that I imagine in the book would have. Initially, I had in mind the sum of 7 billion euros and he told me: "But no, much more! ». In the end, I put in 120 billion... And it's true that for the past few months, between the climate crisis and the health crisis, it's perfectly normal to come across such dizzying amounts in the news.
For The Invention of Bodies, I had done a lot of investigative work. Documentary writing was more important, with passages on networks, the history of the Internet, research on the lengthening of life...
Here, global warming is naturally my subject. I've made a beautiful thematic library, of course, but I'm already in it every day. The idea was really to be as close as possible to what is happening in our reality. And all the places through which history passes are places that I know, from Burma to Kenya. More than a work of documentation, it was a question of constituting a rather coherent thought on this subject that we all know, of finding my own angle.
"Engaging in a form of austerity does not necessarily mean giving up all forms of mobility and life.
It is a novel whose plot is based on a series of tensions: between localism and globalization, between boomers and millennials, between militant radicalism and "cool transition" ...
Exactly, and that's really deliberate. I published last year, with Julieta Canepa, a children's book on Ces jeunes qui changent le monde (Lamartinière, 2019), and published in the last few months in Libération several articles on these subjects. Let's say that I believe that committing to a form of austerity does not necessarily have to mean giving up all forms of mobility and life. It is necessary to be able to find a new impetus, a new hedonism. How can we do this economically and politically? How to articulate global and local? One must read Bruno Latour on this subject, when he digs into these contradictions to define his concept of "terrestrial". We need a myriad of experiences and local systems, but it is essential to also invent the superstructure that will link the whole.
"How could we have believed that our species could "settle down" definitively when everything, everywhere, is in movement on this planet? »
Finding "a perpetual movement, but without leaving traces", as one of your characters says, is that what we are talking about today?
That's what it's all about. In 2020, we collectively realized that our system was not sustainable, that it was a sand castle of hallucinating fragility. How could we have believed that our species could somehow "settle down" definitively when everything, everywhere, is in movement on this planet? This is an incredible historical error, hence the historical detour I make in the heart of the novel about the digging of the very first oil well, on August 17, 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania. I don't believe at all that ecology is just being content with the local and renouncing any form of displacement. That's not the solution: you need movement, but another movement.
An oil well An oil well / Floréalréal - CC BY-SA 4.0
June, the heroine, thinks like you: she is radical in her ecological commitment but doesn't want to feel guilty when she takes a bubble bath...
June is 22 years old. And she should be living like a hermit with the excesses of previous generations? Why should she? And moreover, this generation is criticized for "not being very fun"... Let's not exaggerate anyway! It's not because boomers have been bathed in champagne that we should do the same thing, but I don't see why June should have to grow up with permanent guilt. Besides, you don't win political battles with the spring of guilt. In fact, today we need to talk about "challenge" more than "climate" crisis: it's a great time to reinvent a lot of things. A moment of joy too, as May '68 could be. It's like technology: it's still extraordinary what you can do with the Internet... Confinement has shown us once again: it was the experience of "world space" from home, between the hyperlocal and the hypermondial.
"Ecological, racial and gender struggles have no borders.
In the aftermath of the municipal elections, the ecologist Noël Mamère told us that he believed in the emergence of justice as a new marker of the convergence of struggles, at least for the "climate generation". Do you agree?
"The idea of a national novel, in my eyes, no longer makes any sense.
At the moment, there is this fashionable formula, in science fiction, but not that: we would need a "war of the imaginary", that would be the precondition for a possible change in the state of the world. Are you part of this movement?
As long as we don't imagine a new way of being alive, as long as we don't manage to create new collective and individual narratives, we're not going to succeed. In literature, what excites me is to see how this transformation, this change of world, will be embodied in new artistic forms. Artistic history, especially literary history, is always linked to the great history. For example, the idea of the "national novel", in my opinion, no longer makes sense. The "great American novel," moreover, should eventually cease to exist... We need to adhere to the great porosity of the world we inhabit. We need to go beyond fixed artistic forms and codes, and that starts by decentralizing the place of the human in the stories. So yes, we need new narratives, and we need to get started without delay!
Since late 2019, a savvy Twitter account at @nyttypos run by a man somewhere in the USA who describes himself in his Twitter bio as “appellate lawyer and persnickety dude” has quiety been pointing out typos and ''atomic typos'' that he hopes editors at the New York Times will correct online when time permits.
Call him "Mr Persnicketty" but know that he remains anonymous and nobody knows his name.
Well, one man, a newspaper detective named Ben Lindbergh knows his name but Ben says he is sworn to secrecy and cannot reveal the government lawyers's name.Not now, not yet, not ever.
Here's Lindbergh in his essay: "On October 19, @nyttypos spotted a “happened” instead of a “happen” in a story about Brexit; a missing space and a picture of three people captioned with five names in a story about TikTok clubs; a missing comma and a “statue” in place of a “statute” in a story about U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to host the G7 Summit at his own Doral resort; a subject-verb agreement error in a story about Venezuela’s water quality; a misplaced comma in a story about Bernie Sanders accepting an endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and a missing space between quotation marks and a quote in a story about Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.''
According to Lindberg, Mr Persnickety has enough time on his hands during his free time to ''editorialize about the supposedly sorry state of the Times.'
“It’s kind of a shame that virtually each and every piece of content the Times produces, even the pretty great ones like this, has a typo in it,” @nyttypos tweeted about an opinion piece that contained a wayward word, Ben shares, adding: " On the same day, a story about a German YouTuber that contained a duplicated phrase prompted an observation by the man who tries to deliver first aide to the newspaper: “At times I really have a hard time believing that this paper is edited at all.”
"While working for a government office on appeals for the federal courts of appeals and the Supreme Court, he has diligently, competently, and caustically grammar-policed the paper of record in his spare time, producing more than 20,000 tweets over the past 11 months," Lindbergh shares. "His account is a cross between an ego trip, a crusade, and a compulsion. His quixotic quest to flag the words that weren’t fit to print has attracted roughly 8,000 followers, yielded countless corrections, and made its anonymous owner the object of some fascination within the walls and Slack chats of the Times, while exposing the trade-offs in copy quality that competitive publishing in the age of algorithms demands."
Some of the editors at the Times are paying attention now.Two of them even told me recently that almost everyone at the Times has read the Lindbergh piece.
“He’s obviously a smart, well-read, knowledgeable person,” Jason Bailey, an editor on the national desk at the Times, told Ben. “And he’s almost always right ... [and] for the most part, if it comes to grammar, he’s correct. And to be honest, I’ve learned some things from him, because I’m not an English major or a grammarian in a traditional sense. I kind of edit by ear a little bit. So some of those more technical details, he’s been helpful with.”
And there's this: Lindberg reveals that "despite his proficiency and apparent command of syntactic arcana, @nyttypos is self-taught, too. Studying Latin in high school helped him learn the parts of speech, but he majored in philosophy, and his experience in journalism is limited to a short-lived column in his college paper. “I don’t think that I have a terribly great grasp on grammar, to be honest with you,” he told Ben on the phone. “I think I intuit some things.”
Lindbergh notes that "sometimes [Typo Man] researches rules before tweeting, lest the master of spotting mistakes commit a mistake of his own.
“I don’t like to be wrong about things,” he told Ben.
EUROPÄISCHE KLIMA-LITERATUR:Krise der Vorstellungby VICTOR SATTLER in Germany In einem digitalen Essay versammelt das Literarische Colloquium Berlin die europäische „Cli-Fi“, die sich um Klima und Umwelt dreht. Wie viel Fiktion darf es sein, wie viel Politik? In a digital essay, the Berlin Literary Colloquium has brought together the European “Cli-Fi” that revolves around climate and the environment. How much fiction can it be, how much politics? At this year's Bachmann Prize competition, the juror Insa Wilke criticized an attitude that seemed to have bothered her in previous years. “We always talk about visions of the future,” she said of texts that describe destroyed environments. There are contemporary texts. Wilke refused to put a story about a desolate, rubbish future in the corner of science fiction and put the stamp of genre literature on it. Because: Can something that, according to scientists, threaten the continued existence of mankind really only be one genre among many? The playwright Thomas Köck now argues similarly at an event of the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB). He too wants to distance himself from science fiction, the “most fictional” of all fictions. But where is the climate and environmental literature better kept? Köck is one of ten European authors who are concerned with this question. The LCB and Freie Universität Berlin have brought them together for a digital essay consisting of videos from panel discussions, readings and other formats. You can scroll through the entire mini festival on the LCB website and get an introduction to the young movement. Bruno Arpaia wrote the first Italian ''cli-fi'' novel in 2016. María Bonete Escoto contributed a story to the first Spanish climate anthology in 2018. And the Polish writer Julia Fiedorczuk even founded Europe's first school for “eco-poetics”, in which new, better metaphors for the crisis in the Aristotelian sense are “made”. Disqualified: A time traveling polar bear Everything "Cli-Fi", a modification of Sci-Fi for climate fictions. Some also flirt with Margaret Atwood's concept of "speculative fiction". This obliges to take up currently existing elements or developments. As a reward you can count yourself to high culture like Atwood. Bruno Arpaia therefore emphasizes: Just as in his novel “Qualcosa, là fuori” the “Northern Union” from Scandinavia locks out climate refugees - including Germans - the European Union is already doing today. "I only went 25 years into the future", meanwhile the Scot Vicki Jarrett defends herself against the genre allegation. But then she has to admit that there is a polar bear traveling through time in her novel “Always North”, which disqualifies him as “speculative fiction”. On the other hand, Jarrett's Fantasy or Bonete Escoto's horror also have a big advantage. Realpolitik can be avoided with surreal elements. The "Fridays for Future" activist Clara Mayer, who moderates one of the panels, reads literature very literally and gives her novel "The Carbon Diaries: 2015" back to the British, for revision: He portrays climate legislation too negatively, that's just scare. In the novel, the British government is forced to ration emissions like food in war. “I just wanted to make a few jokes,” says Lloyd, a little grumpy and explains: At each of her readings there is a boy who is a big Porsche fan and who therefore hates the environmental issues in her literature. If she could make him laugh, she won. Plot and characters should not be sacrificed to the political message, otherwise it would be wooden. Well informed and yet at a loss The others see it similarly. Again and again two terms come up that help when asked whether your topic is fictional. Although the crisis can already be experienced drastically in some places, it can never be grasped as a "hyper object" in its entire temporal and spatial extent. This leads to a “crisis of imagination” among people, and it is only against this crisis that literature can help. Even a motive for this has already established itself in the European "Cli-Fi". With Jarrett and Köck you can find an eternal day, which for her is the polar summer and for him it is technically illuminated. MORE ON THE SUBJECT If everyone in the world were to live like Germany, three Earths would be needed to compensate for the consumption of resources. EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY:Humanity lives beyond its means SVEA BOYPublished / Updated:Comments:57,Recommendations:95Quite idyllic, even if the mood can change quickly: Neu Meteln.TO THE BACHMANN PRIZE WINNER:Behind the grain edge JAN WIELE, NEU METELNPublished / Updated:Recommendations:14thWhoever walks through this exhibition space is geer in the truest sense of the word
Beim diesjährigen Bachmannpreis-Wettbewerb kritisierte die Jurorin Insa Wilke eine Haltung, die sie schon in den Vorjahren gestört zu haben schien. „Wir reden immer von Zukunftsvisionen“, sagte sie über Texte, die zerstörte Umwelten beschreiben. Dabei seien es Gegenwartstexte. Wilke weigerte sich, eine Geschichte über eine desolate, vermüllte Zukunft in die Ecke der Science-Fiction zu stellen und ihr den Stempel der Genreliteratur aufzudrücken. Denn: Kann etwas, das laut Wissenschaftlern das Fortbestehen der Menschheit bedroht, wirklich nur ein Genre von vielen sein?
Ähnlich argumentiert nun der Dramatiker Thomas Köck bei einer Veranstaltung des Literarischen Colloquiums Berlin (LCB). Auch er will sich von Science-Fiction, der „fiktivsten“ unter den Fiktionen, abgrenzen. Doch wo ist die Klima- und Umweltliteratur besser aufgehoben? Köck ist einer von zehn europäischen Autorinnen und Autoren, die diese Frage beschäftigt. Das LCB hat sie gemeinsam mit der Freien Universität Berlin zu einem digitalen Essay versammelt, das aus Videos von Panel-Diskussionen, Lesungen und anderen Formaten besteht. Durch das ganze Minifestival kann man auf der Website des LCB scrollen und bekommt so eine Einführung in die junge Bewegung. Bruno Arpaia hat 2016 den ersten italienischen Klima-Roman geschrieben. María Bonete Escoto trug 2018 zur ersten spanischen Klima-Anthologie eine Geschichte bei. Und die Polin Julia Fiedorczuk hat sogar die europaweit erste Schule für „Ökopoetik“ gegründet, in der neue, bessere Metaphern für die Krise im aristotelischen Sinne „gemacht“ werden.
Disqualifiziert: Ein zeitreisender Eisbär
Alles „Cli-Fi“ also, eine Abwandlung von Sci-Fi für Klima-Fiktionen. Manche liebäugeln auch mit Margaret Atwoods Begriff der „spekulativen Fiktion“. Diese verpflichtet dazu, gegenwärtig vorhandene Elemente oder Entwicklungen aufzugreifen. Als Belohnung darf man sich dann wie Atwood zur Hochkultur zählen. Bruno Arpaia betont deshalb: So wie in seinem Roman „Qualcosa, là fuori“ die aus Skandinavien bestehende „Nördliche Union“ Klimaflüchtlinge – darunter auch deutsche – aussperrt, mache es die Europäische Union doch bereits heute. „Ich bin nur 25 Jahre in die Zukunft gegangen“, verteidigt sich derweil die Schottin Vicki Jarrett gegen den Genre-Vorwurf. Sie muss dann aber gestehen, dass es in ihrem Roman „Always North“ einen durch die Zeit reisenden Eisbären gibt, was ihn als „spekulative Fiktion“ disqualifiziert.
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Andererseits haben die Fantasy von Jarrett oder der Horror von Bonete Escoto auch einen großen Vorteil. Mit surrealen Elementen lässt sich der Realpolitik aus dem Weg gehen. Die „Fridays for Future“- Aktivistin Clara Mayer, die eines der Panels moderiert, liest Literatur sehr wörtlich und gibt der Britin Saci Lloyd ihren Roman „The Carbon Diaries: 2015“ zur Überarbeitung zurück: Er stelle die Klima-Gesetzgebung zu negativ dar, das verschrecke nur. In dem Roman sieht sich die britische Regierung gezwungen, Emissionen zu rationieren wie Essen im Krieg. „Ich wollte nur ein paar Witze machen“, sagt Lloyd dazu ein wenig knatschig und erklärt: Bei jeder ihrer Lesungen gebe es einen Jungen, der großer Porsche-Fan sei und sie deshalb für die Umweltthemen in ihrer Literatur hasse. Wenn sie ihn zum Lachen bringen könne, habe sie gewonnen. Plot und Figuren dürften der politischen Botschaft nicht geopfert werden, sonst werde es hölzern.
Bestens informiert und doch ratlos
Das sehen die anderen ähnlich. Immer wieder fallen zwei Begriffe, die bei der Frage, ob ihr Thema fiktiv ist, helfen. Zwar ist die Krise mancherorts bereits drastisch erfahrbar, als ein „Hyperobjekt“ aber nie in ihrer ganzen zeitlichen und räumlichen Ausdehnung fassbar. Das führe bei den Menschen zu einer „Krise der Vorstellungskraft“, und nur gegen diese Krise helfe die Literatur. Sogar eine Motivik hat sich dafür in der europäischen „Cli-Fi“ schon etablieren können. Bei Jarrett und Köck findet man etwa einen ewigen Tag, der bei ihr der Polarsommer und bei ihm technisch ausgeleuchtet ist.
Zwei Milliarden Menschen könnte das Klima bis zum Jahr 2100 aus ihrer Heimat vertreiben – nur was soll das heißen? Ständig zitieren die Autorinnen und Autoren IPCC-Berichte aus dem Effeff, stehen aber ratlos vor der Zeitdimension ihres Stoffes. Die Tagebuch- oder Logbuchform, in der mehrere Texte verfasst sind, macht die Unzuverlässigkeit der Jahre noch deutlicher. Zukunftsvisionen und Gegenwartstexte lassen sich bald kaum mehr voneinander unterscheiden.
