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
Habt ihr schon mal ''cli-fi'' geschrieben? Cli-fi in Germany? Yes, cli-fi is a rising new literary genre in Germany now, too, and Tor Books is sponsoring a cli-fi short story contest this fall that is open to writers worldwide. However, only short stories written in German can be submitted.
Tor Books is a well-known global publisher of science fiction novels, with offices in New York and several other nations. Now the Germany unit of the sci-fi publisher is sponsoring a short story writing contest about cli-fi themes and written in German. The contest's details and submission guidelines are here.
With news of global warming making headlines around the world, and with cli-fi novels by such international writers as Paolo Bacigalupi, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood as examples, the editors at Tor Books in Germany, on the occasion of this year's World Climate Summit from November 6-17 in Bonn, are calling for a cli-fi short story contest with submissions in German.
The best submission will be published online on tor-online.de and a prize of 250 euros will be handed out to the finalist.
Editors ask that you send a previously unpublished short story on the subject of climate change before the October 31, 2017 deadline via e-mail and in an open format (.doc, .rtf, .odt) to Kontakt@tor-online.de. The text should be at least 5,000 and 50,000 characters (including spaces) long. The winner will be announced on November 17.
In the hills of southwest England, a British writer and his wife, also a novelist have surrounded their home with untamed delight, the New York Times Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous reporter Mary Kaye Schillingaug gushes
SHEEP OUTNUMBER PEOPLE in New Zealand, and for centuries, that was also true in the Cotswolds, the seat of England’s wool industry. Its merchants became fabulously wealthy, building some of the loveliest manors in the country’s southwest. Their distinctive gabled roofs still peek over the high hedges that line the winding roads.
The Cotswolds — a name that in middle English means ‘‘sheep enclosure in rolling hillside’’ — is a rural area known for its outlandishly quaint medieval towns (as featured in the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ films), a tradition of Protestant nonconformity and, now that the mills have closed, poverty. The manors remain, weekend playgrounds for rich Londoners, but the charm of the landscape — evoked by local hero Laurie Lee in his 1959 memoir ‘‘Cider With Rosie’’ (required reading in many British schools) — has diminished thanks to arable farming.
It made the novelist Ian McEwan, a devotee of wild beauty, wary of the area — so many of its pastures and hedgerows had been destroyed. He and his wife, the journalist and novelist Annalena McAfee, were in the midst of what would be an eight-year search for a country home in an unspoiled setting. ‘‘What we found in our travels was that many of England’s older places had been insensitively restored, and often in the process, stripped of charm,’’ he says.
The promise of a 16th-century house eventually lured them to the Cotswolds, but the house’s interior proved a disappointment. On the drive back to London, McEwan turned down a promising narrow road on impulse; the couple, passionate hikers, are always in search of new paths. Almost immediately, to their left, they glimpsed a large manor fashioned from the local limestone — a honey yellow elegant in both gloom and sunshine — with a three-gabled roof. Through the trees, they could make out large windows and high-ceilinged rooms, and on the gentle slope beyond the building lay a vista of pastures and woodland. ‘‘We simultaneously exclaimed, ‘Ah, that’s the house!’ ’’ McEwan says. The very next day, they learned it was about to go on sale.
The couple recall this serendipity as we sit on a wooden bench behind that house, theirs since 2012. It is a brisk evening in early June, and a Turner-worthy celestial beam is spotlighting the small lake before us. ‘‘We still sort of pinch ourselves,’’ McEwan says. ‘‘The idea that we live here.’’
The place has a bygone bucolic splendor reminiscent of that which McEwan made a leitmotif in his best-selling novel ‘‘Atonement.’’ The clouds — immense and low-hanging — move swiftly over the quilt of pastures that rolls into the horizon, changing as fast as the weather, which can go from bluster to sunshine from one breath to the next. The two spend their days here shaping worlds out of words (McEwan wrote his last two novels here, and McAfee her most recent), but they have also spent considerable time and effort shaping traditional sheep pastures into a shared natural fantasy.
The lake, for example, was a tiny, silty pond when they arrived. But McEwan noticed that the property had four underground springs that could be rerouted to create a much bigger body of water, something you could row a boat across — a process that created a ‘‘big, sludgy mud pit for the good part of a year,’’ he says. ‘‘But the great part about a lake is that creatures move in — ducks and newts and frogs.’’ As does algae, requiring experimentation with all manner of natural-born killers — native reeds and grasses planted to oxygenate the water. So far this process has merely replaced the algae with tangles of water plants. Now, McEwan sighs, ‘‘I just accept that there is this garden underwater.’’
McEWAN AND McAFEE have been married for 20 years. They met in 1994, when McAfee, then a journalist for The Financial Times, interviewed McEwan about his children’s book, ‘‘The Daydreamer.’’ Both had been married before; he had two sons and two stepdaughters. Among other things, they shared a working-class background and an intense longing for pastoral beauty.
McEwan grew up an army brat, spending his early years in places like North Africa, a dry landscape bereft of color. When he was 11, his parents sent him to Woolverstone Hall, a state boarding school in Suffolk. The main building, one of the country’s best examples of 18th-century Palladian architecture, was set on acres of green along the River Orwell. ‘‘It was a big moment of imprinting,’’ McEwan says, creating a persistent desire for ‘‘oaks and ferns and formal gardens fading away into natural landscape. For most of my life, that longing was expressed in hiking, rather than my own place.’’
McAfee’s early years were spent in a down-at-the-heels corner of a north London suburb. Her Scots-Irish father was a policeman, and they lived in a former Victorian police station, ‘‘complete with jail cells and a 60-foot air-raid siren,’’ she says. But outside were rambling grounds, where she and her four younger siblings ran wild. Her parents grew flowers, teaching her the Latin names, and in the summers, she and her brother were shipped off to an aunt’s in Glasgow, ‘‘whose council flat had a little patch of garden.’’ There she learned to grow plants from seed, as well as how to make little pots from newspaper that could be put straight into the ground.
MCAFFEE AND MCEWAN began tinkering with their home’s nine acres after they moved in, but the house itself was in remarkably good shape. The imposing building, while grand, is not what the British call ‘‘listed.’’ ‘‘It’s sort of a mongrel,’’ McEwan says. The core was built in 1923 by the noted Scottish architect Andrew Noble Prentice, who expanded upon the Cotswolds idiom with Arts and Crafts and Italianate flourishes. In 1997, the house was extended by the previous owner with the architect Robert Hardwick, who added some Strawberry Hill Gothic elements, including arched, cathedral-style windows and doors. Hardwick and his wife, Sallyann, landscaped the property in the Arts and Crafts style — tall yew-hedge rooms, low box hedges, lots of topiary — with bursts of soft drama: lily ponds, a pergola with pink roses, a laburnum arch that briefly explodes with psychedelic yellow blossoms in May. ‘‘We loved the geometry,’’ McEwan says, ‘‘but we wanted to play against that fabulous background, to introduce more color and chaos.’’
The gardens were also rigidly contained. Hardwick had designed two descending terraces below the house, the lower level enclosed by a wall, effectively dividing the land in two. ‘‘One of my earliest thoughts,’’ McEwan says, ‘‘was that the grounds should flow, that the dead center of the lawn should provide entry into the woodland and meadow and pasture.’’ He had Hardwick design a stately limestone staircase. ‘‘So after digging the lake, we started doing the steps down to the meadow, and it was a mud bath again.’’
McEwan also removed four huge pyramidal yew trees that divided the long patio behind the house. ‘‘I was worried it might make the area look too large, like the terrace of a retirement home — old people sitting on benches with rugs on our laps,’’ McAfee says. (‘‘We are old people,’’ McEwan reminds her.) Rather, it opened the back of the house and filled the interior with light. To the wisteria and climbing roses on the back wall, the couple added a profusion of perennials and bulbs — hollyhocks, peonies, white delphiniums, agapanthus, acanthus and allium — and such fragrant shrubs as daphne and Mexican orange blossom to scent the evenings when they entertain outside. A rowdy diversion of wildflowers and herbs burst from the patio’s pavement cracks.
That last idea was borrowed from their friend the poet James Fenton, whose former place outside Oxford was an early inspiration. So too were the profuse herbaceous borders of Dartington Hall in Devon, Charleston in Sussex and the home of Mary Keen, a friend and neighbor and one of the world’s top landscape designers. It was Keen who planned the two long beds of flowers on the first terrace, where before there had been just lawn and formal columnar Irish yews.
Then, two and a half years ago, another evolution: The couple hired a full-time gardener, Stuart Panting, a former graphic designer who, McAfee says, combines an artist’s eye for color and form with the knowledge, skill and patience of a traditional plantsman. ‘‘One of Ian’s stipulations,’’ Panting says, ‘‘was that he never wanted to see the soil in the flower beds.’’ He enriched the plantings and extended flowering times so that there are blooms throughout the year. He has also introduced McAfee’s traditional cottage garden favorites: poppies, lupines, honesty and sweet woodruff, ‘‘which comes up,’’ she says, ‘‘like a white haze under the green arches of Solomon’s seal.’’
The result is a feeling of abundance, ‘‘with things overlapping and giving you a sense of eruption, with branches that are too long, spilling out onto the path,’’ says McEwan, who confesses that he doesn’t know much about plants. ‘‘But I do know about layout and landscape and trees.’’ A good number of the latter were cut down in front of the house, which was heavily overplanted, to give light to struggling specimens, while at least 20 trees were added to the back of the property — native species like alder and hawthorn, poplar and rowan. McAfee suggested four Caledonian pines, tall, spindly firs to remind her of Scotland. ‘‘They’re associated with the Jacobite cause,’’ says McAfee, a supporter of Scottish secession. (Her new novel, ‘‘Hame,’’ is, in part, a history of that country.) She also instigated her own muddy construction project, a solar-heated infinity pool — a Mediterranean flourish between the hedges, with ornamental cherry trees at one end and a singular view of sheep-dotted hills at the other. Swimming to the end of the pool, you can reach out and touch the oxeye daisies growing in the new wildflower meadow.
The meadow is a point of pride for McEwan, who has joined a movement of private gardeners trying to reintroduce wildflowers to the English countryside — a feature that began to disappear when the land was plowed for crops. Such meadows are intensely artificial constructs that require enormous effort in the absence of sheep: Grass, a much hardier species, must be completely eradicated before you can seed, and then you have to pray the delicate plants themselves will take. To help things along, Panting added native yellow rattle, which is partially parasitic to grass, to the mix of daisies, poppies and cornflowers. The meadow, planted last October, was a fourth massive project, creating another abyss of mud.
THE COTSWOLDS’ proximity to London, just two hours away, means there is rarely a weekend when the house is not filled with friends and family, including McEwan’s six grandchildren (with one more due in December).
When they are alone, the couple’s world is circumscribed by work. McEwan has a second career adapting his books for film. ‘‘The Children Act,’’ starring Emma Thompson, is in postproduction; ‘‘On Chesil Beach,’’ with Saoirse Ronan, is slated for a January release; and he is currently writing the screenplay for his 2012 novel, ‘‘Sweet Tooth.’’ McAfee is beginning a new book, and setting out to promote ‘‘Hame’’ in America. (It is being published here this month.) They descend from their studies for meals together, cooking to an eclectic soundtrack — Bach, Miles Davis, Lou Reed. On this June night, as McEwan prepares a French fish stew, Gregg Allman has recently died and the Allman Brothers are on heavy rotation.
In the afternoons, the couple takes a break to tramp the local countryside with their Border collie, Rab. But the restless McEwan craved a closer alternative for exercise and contemplation, and found inspiration at Down House, the former home of Charles Darwin in Kent. ‘‘He had a feature called a sandwalk,’’ McEwan says. ‘‘A path that took perhaps five minutes to stroll around — perfect walking-thinking time.’’ McEwan’s version, of mowed grass, runs around the lake and up through the wildflowers. Due to its grade, it required another crazy project to achieve perfection: cutting into the side of the meadow to create a level walkway, ‘‘so you don’t even have to think about your feet, your thoughts are free.’’ An extra effort, but as McEwan notes, it worked for Darwin: ‘‘He changed the world from there.’’
Australian novelist Harriet McKnight's debut cli-fi novel "Rain Birds" is released in Australia now in September 2017; North American readers will have to wait for USA edition of the book in April 2018. Why the long wait for the same book in the same English language between the two English-speaking nations? Shouldn't publication of such an important novel be simultaneous in all English-speaking nations (Australia, Canada, USA, UK, South Africa)?
Asked if the novel could be termed a cli-fi novel, Harriet's publisher told this blog, paraphrasing ["Yes, you can call it a cli-fi novel."] Verbatim response was: ''I'm sure it would fit in cli-fi. ''
So here is Harriet in her own words on landscape, climate change and writing ''Rain Birds''
[Harriet McKnight’s debut cli-fi novel is Rain Birds (Black Inc.), which she says was “brewed over a long period of time but written very quickly”. Here she explains the motivations behind Rain Birds.]
***
SHE SAYS:
''My childhood was split into two landscapes. My mother gave birth to my siblings and I in a stone house in the middle of the Gundaroo bush, outside of Canberra. It was romantic, dusty-gummed bush. When I was ten, we moved to the NSW South Coast. My mother’s house still sits on the edge of a large salt-water lake looking at the mountain behind it.
There are things I remember – circles of mushrooms appearing in the paddocks around the stone house after the winter rains, fairy rings. One summer dried the dam out and left the carp flapping in mud puddles. Once we’d moved to the coast, every February, the salt-water lake would flood across the road in front of Wallaga Lake Bridge and we’d have to drive right around to Cobargo to get out. Those rains aren’t as predictable now and the road hasn’t flooded for years.
''I didn’t deliberately set out to write a book about climate change.''
I’m not sure why landscapes have always been so important to me. I suppose growing up in the country means they’re inescapable – everything is there in front of you. The seasonal changes, the way they set off a chain reaction, the school mates that come to class with stories, Dad had to sell more cattle, there’s not enough feed for them all. As a child, the kinds of stories that captivated me were often the same – Playing Beatie Bow, Picnic At Hanging Rock, Wuthering Heights. Young women lost within landscape and time, trying to pitch themselves against something larger, more ancient, unknowable. The older I get, the more I feel rooted to the places I was grown up in. Every now and then someone will ask me, where’s your country? Belonging to a particular earth is important to knowing who you are. Harriet McKnightBut it can be a strange and uncomfortable thing to try and explain your connection to land. The country I was born on belongs to the Ngunawal people. The country I grew into my adulthood on belongs to the Yuin people. I’ve lived on Wurundjeri land and Larrakia land. My work currently takes me to Anmatyerr, Mantuyipi and Warlpiri lands. These landscapes are intrinsic to who I am but they are even more so to others. Issues on climate change and neglect of our natural spaces become even more wounding when we realise it’s not just a commodity we’re affecting but a breathing, dynamic entity with a long and continuous memory. What does it mean for us to be so callous with something like that?
''I think I’ve tried to avoid the obvious labels with this book despite the political issue at the heart of it.''
Rain Birds was brewed over a long period of time but written very quickly. It’s set in country that I chose because of its isolation, its wildness and the things those elements reflected in my characters. Recent studies from the University of Connecticut have indicated that by 2100, the Earth will have lost 17% of all species to climate change and that Australia is tipped to be one of the countries most affected with a loss of 14%. What this looks like is the rainforests of Queensland’s Wet Tropics – and the endemic species that live there – emptied by changes in climate. You can drown in numbers like that. With Rain Birds, the character of Arianna Brandt is a reflection of how paralysed I can feel in my own life under the realisation of just how big each tiny battle is inside the fight for the planet.
I think I’ve tried to avoid the obvious labels with this book despite the political issue at the heart of it. Because isn’t everything we do inherently political? The choices we make, the things we stand behind – they all reveal what is most important to us. I didn’t deliberately set out to write a book about climate change. I wrote something that feels intrinsic to me and important to my makeup, that’s a reflection of the things I think about. Which is that landscape is layered – with meaning, with stories, with significances I will never be able to know and don’t need to in order to feel deeply for it. In the end, I think this is what my book is really about. There are things that are crucial to us individually and globally. How are we meant to prioritise one above the other? What will happen if we don’t? I don’t think I have the answers.''
============
Rain Birds is the debut cli-fi novel by Harriet McKnight. Published by Black Inc. and available through blackincbooks.com or wherever books are sold in Australia only.
The USA edition will not be released until April 2018 for some odd reason that only publishers in Sydney and New York understand.
Australian novelist Harriet McKnight's debut cli-fi novel "Rain Birds" is released in Australia now in September 2017; North American readers will have to wait for USA edition of the book in April 2018. Why the long wait for the same book in the same English language between the two English-speaking nations? Shouldn't publication of such an important novel be simultaneous in all English-speaking nations (Australia, Canada, USA, UK, South Africa)?
The Madonna of Global Warming (photo by Yann Quero)
So there is no Planet B and we are leaving Planet A in ruins. But there is a Planet C and it looks like this:
No humans left (the last of their species died out in 2801 A.D.); but plenty of the nonhuman all over the place. For this we evolved from the Great Apes? The Cosmos certainly has a sense of humour, it seems. Or did. When there was a Planet A.
''I don't want to doom you out,'' as a friend of mine in Sweden puts it in a recent essay on Medium titled HOW CLIMATE CHANGE COMES, but in fact we need to be doomed out, repeatedly, often, until it sinks in. Most of us are still in denial. Oh yes, there will be a technological fix and we can all go back to watching baseball and football and soccer and the Oscars ceremony and the MTV Video Awards and get as distracted as we want to be, and take exotic vacations to Third World countries where we can feel superior to everyone else. But hey, there won't be any fixes. We really are doomed, doomed. Let that sink in. I don't want to doom you out, but maybe this needs to be said
On a future Planet A, or maybe it's Planet C, there are no humans left but there is grass, ferns, pine cones, baby tomatoes. Highland gorillas, lowland rivers, rainbows, moonrises, sunsets.
And lots of trees, rainforest, lakes, streams, trout ponds, earthworms, chickens, sharks, whales, cows, deer, horses, snakes.
There is no Planet B and now that we are ruining Planet A, there is only one more place: Planet C.
[NOTE TO READERS: Michael R. Griffiths' research lies at the intersection of concerns about the human and the nonhuman that begin with a version of Foucault’s question, “how are living beings made subjects of power?” His work particularly asks this question in (post)colonial contexts. He teaches in English at the University of Wollongong in Australia.]
For Theodor Adorno, the autonomy of the art work is the condition of possibility (and not the condition of refusal) of their political efficacy. As Adorno puts it:
Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity. Its contribution to society is not communication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance in which by virtue of inner-aesthetic development, social development is reproduced without being imitated.[1]
Where the setting of a text in the future would appear to distance speculative fiction from present political and ecological exigencies, I argue that this process of speculation proximates critiques of hegemony projecting its consequences. As Adorno suggests, then, mediation per se is a mode of rendering proximate. Similarly, Adorno once wrote that “[a]rtworks detach themselves from the empirical world, and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity.”[2] This piece is drawn from a longer essay, which was assembled for Responses to Climate Change — a symposium led by [Australian Indigenous writer] Tony Birch.
As well as being an acclaimed writer of Australian fiction, Birch is a Senior Research Fellow at the Moondani Balluk Indigenous Unit at Victoria University (Melbourne).
Birch’s work is concerned with methodologies for research around climate change that are grounded in Indigenous-led practice.
His keynote presentation from Responses to Climate Change laid out several key points that form part of his own research itinerary around ideas of place and ecology in the humanities. Crucially, Birch sees in the humanities’ open and speculative approach a promise to inform climate science.
First of all, Birch advised conference participants to, when doing research on climate change, keep in mind how we talk about this issue and who we are talking to about it.
He gave the example of working with children in Irish and inner city London schools as well as on Country around Victoria.
Birch’s approach was not to lecture to his students on climate change but to bring home to them the significance of place. He had the children record their most “special” places through writing and photography, before asking them what it would mean to them if these places were lost. This connects to another key point raised by Birch in his keynote, which was to empower people outside academia and politics.
Too often climate change researchers in the sciences and humanities operate in an echo chamber, which sees them communicating with one another but not with the wider world. It is incumbent upon researchers and practitioners to not only communicate beyond the academy (or the world of representative politics) but to think about the specific positionality of those with whom we are communicating.
Birch also suggested that scholars rethink models of collaboration between environmentalists and Aboriginal people. This must depend on seeing Country as having Aboriginal knowledge embedded within it and not by seeing “nature” as “pristine.”
Finally, Birch underscored the role of the humanities in this process. For him one of the challenges and the advantages of the humanities is the speculative ethos of engagement in a learning process.
While anthropogenic climate change is a certainty, its physical and social effects are unpredictable and a similarly open-minded, speculative approach is needed to engage it.
I want to follow Birch’s ideas about speculation here to foreground the role of cli-fi by Indigenous writers. I do so in order to emphasize my conviction that imaginative work (such as fiction) can open up crucial modes of questioning vis a vis climate change.
The crucial problem, I argue, arises in the tension between engagement and autonomy. Works of art and writing (like climate fictions) are autonomous, whereas understanding and taking action about climate change is (one would assume) a fundamentally engaged process.
In their future projections of dispossession, Indigenous climate fictions—with their simultaneous narration of the promises and pitfalls of resistance—dialectically intertwine to proffer a critique of settler interventions that are often named as progressive acts. By figuring an imagined future, these texts reveal the hypocrisies of dispossession present in the liberal policies of settler colonial governance extant today.
Consider, for instance, Alexis Wright’s 2013 cli-fi novel of—amidst much else—climate change and Indigenous futurity, The Swan Book. In Wright’s novel, dust settles on a lake and even as “the old story that lived inside the ancestral people of the lake” survives the dust. With the arrival of climate refugees, the swans themselves invade, “polluting” this sacred site, transformed as it is, into a swamp (Wright 8, 10). Wright’s narrator asks:
Could an ancient hand be responsible for this? The parched paper country looking as though the continent’s weather systems had been rolled like an ancient scroll from its top and bottom ends, and ping, sprung shut over the Tropic of Capricorn. The weather then flipped sides, swapping southern weather with that of the north, and this unique event of unrolling the climate upside down, left the entire continent covered in dust.[3]
—Alexis Wright, The Swan Book.
To speculate on the autonomy of art work is to speculate on an Australia where in North and South are “flipped.” Surely Waanyi country in the North of the Gulf of Carpentaria can find an affinal thread destined for the south.
-------------------------------------
[1] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 1997, 226. [2] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. 1. [3] Alexis Wright, The Swan Book. Sydney: Giramondo, 2013, 17–8. Hereafter cited parenthetically in text.
