Miscellany
THE WORLD OF WRITING
MISCELLANY
The natural order, not enough voices of reason, too many hands typing, and OMG, please stop screamers! What’s hotting up the writing world this month?
Scary cli-fi spreads the word
Climate fiction, cli-fi, for short, which often depicts a grim future of a changed world ‘having to deal with years of environmental neglect’, is a genre which has seen a fourfold increase in published books in the past six years, Rio Fernandes wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Rio Fernandes reported in the Washington DC-based publication that Dan Bloom, a journalist who is often credited with having coined the term cli-fi in 2008, said: ‘Three years ago, there were only a handful of courses at North American colleges that would be considered cli-fi, he says, but that number has ballooned to at least 100 since then.’
Sina Farzin, a sociology professor at the University of Hamburg, who organised a workshop, Fact and Fiction: Climate-Change, observed: ‘This is not all great literature if you would measure by purely literary standards. Cli-fi authors comprise a large range of people, such as scientists and activists, which means the novels may not turn out as classics that stand the test of time.’