Climate fiction is an emerging literary genre. What comes to mind when you hear the term? Do you imagine a utopian story where we’ve solved greenhouse gas pollution and social inequality? Or, are you thinking of a dystopian future, where we are living with the consequences of a scorched earth? In a world that loves labels, how should we define it?
Dan Bloom claims to have invented the term “cli-fi” in 2007, though he defined cli-fi as a sub-genre of science fiction. More recently, Mary Flodin defined climate fiction in a post she wrote for the Climate Fiction Writers League as simply when “global climate change influences the plot and affects the lives of the characters.”
Writing about global climate change includes talking about its impacts: heat waves, droughts, sea level rise, and wildfires, to name a few. We can also write about the ways that people and nature are adapting to these impacts, such as when cities raise roads or species migrate to escape changing weather conditions. Not all climate change work is about responding to the impacts, though. Plenty of people are working to mitigate the impacts by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate Fiction Genre Time Period
I like Flodin’s definition because it doesn’t limit the genre to science fiction or the future. Authors can set the cli-fi story in any time period. We can look back to agricultural practices in Karen Russell’s The Antidote, for example, to see how conventional farming practices helped contribute to this mess. We can see how climate change is causing angst in contemporary times, like in Jenny Offill’s Weather. And certainly, we have a fair share of foreboding tales like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife or Octavia Butler’s classic Parable of the Sower.
Is Climate Fiction Always Doom and Gloom?
Cli-fi isn’t restricted to doomsday cautionary tales. Grist, a nonprofit media organization, “celebrates stories that invite us to imagine the future we want — futures in which climate solutions flourish and we all thrive.” See Jaime Liu’s Grist 2024-winning short story submission “To Labor for the Hive” for an example. Grist’s optimistic stance helped inspire me to launch Doom & Bloom Books.
Cli-Fi Social Importance
Using global warming or sustainability as a plot tool can be more than a means for entertainment. When done well, cli-fi is a powerful advocacy tool for global change, something that literature is uniquely positioned to do. For example, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior shows what happens to a Tennessee community when climate change causes butterflies to migrate to their mountains. She humanizes climate change impacts and puts it right in front of people, rather than presenting climate change as an abstract concept that will happen in year 2100. As Abi Daré said when accepting the Climate Spring’s inaugural 2025 Climate Fiction prize, “We need targets and pledges, but we also need stories.” What better way can we open our hearts to what matters and our minds to what’s possible?
