The average sci-fi story imagines brilliant discoveries, inventions, or technological transformations - say, the virtual reality world of Ready Player One - and plays out the ramifications on other spheres of society. In most science fiction, social change is driven by advancements in science and technology. I propose that science fiction has embedded in it a particular theory of social change.

How do we untangle these categories, while also making room for contributions to the growing body of climate fiction that don’t come out of the traditional quarters of science fiction? The past few years have seen a boomlet of literary takes on climate change, most recently Amazon’s Warmer, a collection featuring contributions from literary luminaries like Jane Smiley and Lauren Groff. For example, sci-fi can be “hard” or “soft” in its approach to physics and realism and can be bucketed into subgenres, such as space opera or various -punk movements.

Doesn’t that make climate fiction, or cli-fi, just a form of sci-fi? And since climate change is definitely going to be in our future one way or another, shouldn’t all science fiction also be climate fiction? Genre distinctions like this are always contested. These texts crack open the ominous cloudbank of our coming planetary storm, so that we may feel, just a bit ahead of schedule, the driving rain on our face or the sun, hot through the greenhouse air.īut what is climate fiction? Many stories set in the future are classified as science fiction, or sci-fi. I had the honor of having my story “Sunshine State,” cowritten with Adam Flynn, included in the first Everything Change collection. Today the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative released Everything Change, Volume II, a short story anthology collecting the finalists of their 2018 Climate Fiction Contest. This essay was originally published in Imaginary Papers, January 2019.

The Big Field by Anne Morddel