What is Cli-Fi?

Abstract

This essay begins by reviewing the theoretical debates within literary-critical “ecocriticism” over what Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer termed the “anthropocene” and what Jason Moore terms the “capitalocene.” It explains how those debates are implicated in recent climate fiction, which Daniel Bloom dubs “cli-fi.” These debates have direct implications for the possibilities and prospects for environmental education, insofar as both “high” literature and “popular” fiction remain important objects of educational practice. The essay proceeds to a critical account of the climate fictions of the Californian science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, arguably the leading contemporary Anglophone cli-fi writer, whose work regularly features in environmental education programmes.