“Cli-fi,” as it’s been dubbed — a genre of fiction that extrapolates the consequences of catastrophic climate change on Earth — is never only about the climate. In climate fiction narratives, the weather is generally one of many overlapping factors that create an inhospitable world. Or rather, such works show that we, humanity, have created a world that is inhospitable for ourselves, by our own carelessness. Cli-fi highlights how the climate is something over which our scientific interventions have very little control, especially in contrast to our industrial and petrochemical impact, and explores how we have been wantonly destructive toward the natural environment without thoughts of mitigation — or, in the case of the current administration of the world’s most powerful country, even recognition that there is a problem to be mitigated.
As VanderMeer says, cli-fi is not science fiction in any traditional sense. It extrapolates, but its predictions do not point toward things that are unlikely or improbable. Instead, it explores how the dominoes are already falling. We cannot, at this point, save ourselves from the damage we have done, but we can look ahead to consider where our already-chosen path is taking us.
It seems important today to find, question, and celebrate narratives that are striving to meet the challenges facing us and that provide persuasive visions of a better future. As Amitav Ghosh and others have argued, however, literary realism runs out of steam in the face of the climate crisis and its increasingly commonplace impossible events. Realism relies on an unspoken reliability of the social and material world for its verisimilitude, yet when the world refuses to function as the stable background for our kitchen-sink dramas, a realism which ignores the growing instability of the Earth’s climate increasingly feels like escapist fantasy.
This is why the most interesting literary work that addresses the Anthropocene and its attendant crises is emerging from speculative (rather than realistic) genres: science fiction, fantasy, and the weird. Speculative genres provide a means to think beyond the constraints of what we have inherited as “reasonable” — they reveal the fragility and contingency of such reasonableness, gesturing instead toward seemingly unreasonable alternatives that we desperately need.
When a writer is born into a family, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz said, that family is finished. Yes, but when a writer dies that family’s troubles have only just begun. Wills may be contradictory and instructions to literary executors confused. Works left behind on computers or in desk drawers may be of uncertain status: were they intended for publication or not? And if the writer is famous enough, there’ll be biographers to deal with: can they be trusted to paint a kindly portrait? In their lifetime, authors have a measure of control. Once they’re gone, it’s left to others to guard their reputations.
The vigilance can be fierce, with the appointed custodians (whether spouses, children, lawyers, agents, editors or friends) not so much keepers of the flame as dragons guarding a cave. Posterity is rarely kind to them: however they act, they will be accused of acting badly. If they deny the author’s wishes, as those acting for the French philosopher Michel Foucault have recently done by consenting to the publication of a book he hadn’t finished and didn’t want to come out, they will be called treacherous. And if they are overly loyal, destroying work the author disowned but that deserves to be saved, they will be called philistine or just plain stupid. Either way, they can’t shirk the role allotted them. They have an estate to manage: an acreage of words.