Between Fact and Fiction - Climate Change Literature

Novels and short stories that depict research on climate change and/or its ecological and social ramifications have been gaining in prominence. Examples are Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, Ian McEwan’s Solar, Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Goods, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy, as well as the short story anthology I’m with the Bears. In the U.S. in recent years, fiction that deals with climate change is being discussed in the media under the label “cli-fi” (climate fiction) and billed as a genre somewhere between the new lab-lit genre and science fiction. Cli-fi is moving into university curriculums and generating controversial debates about the function of literature and art in the societal reaction to climate change challenges. From a sociological perspective, we are interested not so much in the question of literary classification as in the (self-)positioning of cli-fi as a boundary genre that picks up literary, scientific, political, and general societal discourses and articulates them in a new way.
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