When climate fiction stops being fiction
As Cop30 approaches, apocalyptic visions look more everyday than ever
Our shelves are increasingly loaded with cli-fi and cli-fact books. Image: TNW
COP30, the UN’s annual climate conference, opens in Brazil on November 10 at a time when our shelves are increasingly loaded with cli-fi and cli-fact books. The only problem: fiction and fact seem to be skewing ever closer.
What We Can Know, Ian McEwan’s new elegy for the scattershot climate-conscious efforts of our “resourceful raucous” 21st century, is a case in point. It takes cli-fi into the fact-based territory first mapped out by Amitav Ghosh nine years ago in his ecological treatise The Great Derangement.
McEwan’s novel is set in the post-derangement phase. Humankind is treading water (literally) after a climate disaster has halved the world population and surrendered swathes of land to the surging seas.
He is not the first author to paint such a picture. Two novels written within the past five years speak perfectly to our time of late-stage capitalism, climate-induced despondency… and survivalism.
Originally published at https://www.thenewworld.co.uk
