In 2019, climate change continues to wreak devastating havoc on the planet. Amy Brady from LitHub complied summaries of authors’ reactions to climate change.
“Fiddling while Rome burns, whistling from the coal mine, serenading the doomed while the ship sinks—I’d like to think that storytellers and poets have a more urgent role right now than this. As many other writers and critics have said, if you’re writing realistic fiction that’s set in the modern world right now, you’re already writing about climate change in some way. There’s nothing the least bit speculative about cli-fi anymore. We already know, because we can see it happening today. The economic and practical effects of climate change will be felt first and worst by the very populations that are the most at-risk and vulnerable. We have to tell those stories. Not just because it’s a moral imperative but because pretty soon, those stories are going to be representative of more of the audience for fiction. Writing fiction and poetry in the era of climate change is an opportunity and a privilege. The purpose of art is to generate radical empathy, to enlarge our understanding of ourselves and our world, through people and stories that dramatize what a climate report or news story can’t. And our world has never needed that generative power more than now. Who if not us?” –Siobhan Adcock, author of The Completionist
“I think the term ‘climate change fiction,’ as a descriptor of genre, will eventually fall out of use–much the same way we don’t tend to use the phrases ‘love fiction’ or ‘loss fiction’ to describe stories about foundational components of the human experience. The role of fiction in society is to wrestle with what it means to be human, and climate change is a deeply human thing. As such, I don’t think it imposes any new obligations on those who write about it, but rather indicts as delinquent those who don’t.” –Omar El Akkad, author of American War
“Our deepening climate crisis is going to require much more creativity and willpower from all of us, and we’re not going to get through this without the power of imagination. Which means that fiction and creative writing have a unique and super vital role to play in helping us to visualize what’s coming and how we’re going to cope with it. Seldom have fiction writers had such a rich opportunity.” –Charlie Jane Anders, author of The City in the Middle of the Night
“Humans are no good at the large-scale or the future tense. We tend to recoil from enormity in awe and stupefaction—a reaction that is terribly dangerous now, in the Anthropocene, when it is not nature but humanity that is the uncontrollable danger, the ungraspable vastness. Fiction is uniquely equipped to counter that paralysis by bringing readers a direct and human-sized experience of climate change: one family’s battle against rising water, one man’s flight from a forest fire. I have to believe that if we learn to see, up close, what we have done, we might begin to change.” –C. Morgan Babst, author of The Floating World
“One hard lesson I’ve learned from my fifteen years as a community organizer is that changing the minds of our enemies is less important than giving hope and power to our friends. I’m not writing for the people who are against us. I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to convince people with great art—other writers might legitimately feel like the role of fiction in the climate change fight is to convince the skeptical—but that’s not my priority. I want my fiction—and my activism—to galvanize and energize people who already know that something is wrong, but might not feel like they have the power to do anything about it. I want people to see their own power, and the power they can build with others, and to see that fighting back—and winning—isn’t just possible; it’s already happening, every day, all around us.” –Sam J. Miller, author of Blackfish City
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