Cli-fi’s orientation toward the future would make sense if we thought that climate change, unlike racism, were still avoidable. The trouble is that it is not. The too-lateness, in fact, is why I started this essay. If cli-fi acts as warning, and it is too late for warnings, what is the point? There must be another way.
Some would argue this is a bad premise. Maybe the point of future-oriented climate fiction is not to warn us of the dangers of global warming, but to make us ask, as Min Hyoung Song does in Climate Lyricism: “What is possible now?”
There is no future point of no return, beyond which unchecked climate change will become catastrophic. That point has already passed. Conditions are already catastrophic. And the present is more and more dominated by the contours of this worsening catastrophe. What is possible now?
I’ve been thinking about cli-fi as warning for the past few years, writing and researching, and have ended up with two questions. The first is: If it is difficult to write about massively distributed “hyperobjects” like global warming, then how do we explain the relative success (even while failing) with regard to hyperobjects like racism, sexism, and homophobia, for example? The second is: Is our failure to act on global warming our inability to comprehend it or our inability to story it?
The thing about storytelling and storytelling norms is that the more we hear a story, the more we are able to tell a story like it. In other words, we may be able to comprehend the story to be found in racism, for example, better than we are able to comprehend the story to be found in global warming, simply because we have consumed more stories about racism than about global warming.
On the other hand, I find this a dissatisfying answer. I actually think the answer lies elsewhere, and has something to do with why cli-fi keeps turning toward the future rather than the present.
Sci-fi author Samuel Delany (who famously said sci-fi is not about the future) argued that what sci-fi does is present us with a range of possibilities. Delany claims that by showing us as many alternatives (“good and bad”) of what the world could be, sci-fi gives us control over our present choices — by which, I take it, he means the choice of what kind of future world we want to make.
This is a vital role. Imagining something is a necessary first step in the process of creativity that leads to making that something real. Chimpanzees are able to use sticks as tools with which to eat termites because they are able to imagine feeding themselves as a possible use for sticks. Not many other species are.
I can think of several conventions of American contemporary fiction that might make hyperobjects difficult to imagine, especially conventions that have to do with agency and the project of the individual, such as a character-driven plot (internal causation over external causation). A focus on the individual may seem antithetical to comprehending massively distributed objects no individual is personally responsible for yet whose consequences every individual must deal with.
It’s easy to see sci-fi and cli-fi as useful exercises of the human imagination. But ultimately, I worry that the real-world effect of imagining solutions out of our control is a lot like the effect of an individual who does all of the little things that currently are
within our control: the individual who stops eating meat, uses very little electricity and water, always recycles, takes public transportation, etc. In other words: statistically insignificant. Very few have the power to make big changes real, and probably even fewer of those people are reading cli-fi.
My concern is one of audience. What can authors do for readers who face a world that will be vastly transformed by climate change during their lifetimes and who have little agency in that world? How can a novel story a kind of being in the world (to borrow Milan Kundera’s definition of a novel, itself borrowed from Heidegger) that might help its readers survive climate change?
(For this, we need to believe in fiction’s power in the real world. If we don’t believe in this, we should quit right now as writers.)