''Cli-Fi'' – A new way to talk about climate change
I've flown overseas to interview an elfin little man named
Danny Bloom, the transnational climate activist who, probably
more than anyone else on the planet, has done so much
to popularize and promote the the new literary term known
as cli-fi. Yes, that guy, and yes, that term.
We're sitting in a leafy park on a hot summer day, and Bloom
who coined the term in 2011 whilst he was doing some PR
work for a sci-fi writer named Jim Laughter in Tulsa,
Oklahoma and his new SF thriller novel titled "Polar City Red.''
Bloom had commissioned the book the previous year, after
putting out some online advertisements asking
for experienced novelists who might want to tackle writing
a speculative fiction novel about so-called "polar cities" housing
survivors of global warming impact events in the distant
future. Laughter got the gig, and he wrote the book as
quick as he could. It came out on Earth Day 2012, published
by a Texas imprint that Laughter had worked with
before. Polar cities, you ask? Read the book, or for now,
Google it at its Amazon site or on Laugher's own website.
He's in the Google book. See www.google.com
and www.amazon.com
So I ask Danny just how came to be doing PR for
a sci-fi writer in Tulsa.
"I was looking for someone to wrote a dystopian sci-fi novel
about survivors of global warming impact events in
some distant, way distant, future, like around 500 years from
now," he said. "The person I found online was Jim Laughter,
and after I outlined my commission request, he took a day
to think it over and immediately said he would write it. The
deal was that I would title the novel as "Polar City Red" but
that the entire plot and cast of chararacters would be his
to write and work out. Also, all payments and royalties for
the novel would go to Jim. All I wanted to hold in my hand
at some point was his novel.''
"When the time came to promote the book, I decided to
call it a cli-fi thriller, cli-fi standing for climate fiction, of
course, like the way sci-fi stands for science fiction,"
Bloom, now in his early 70, told me. "I sent out a bunch of
online press releases to newspapers and websites
worldwide, using the cli-fi term for the first time. Nobody
replied to me, and nothing happened at first. But then I
sent a short note to novelist Margaret Atwood in Canada via
Twitter and she kindly retweeted my tweet about "a new cli-fi thriller
titled 'Polar City Red' by Jim Laugher."
Atwood at that time, 2011, had 600,000 Twitter followers. Now she
has almost 2 million followers. So while Bloom's press
release went nowhere, Atwood's brief tweet about a cli-fi thriller
that nobody had ever heard of before got picked up by
media worldwide. Some outlets even credited Atwood with
coining the term, and one newspaper in Ireland said it was
her coinage.
I asked Danny how he felt about Atwood getting the credit
for coining cli-fi in the Irish Times and he said he loved it.
"Doesn't matter who coined it or when or how, the main thing
is the term got out there, and it made literary history," he said.
"I can't thank Dr Atwood enough for her help with this."
Bloom also published a series of opeds about Laughter's cli-fi
thriller and placed them in newspaper and blogs and websites
worldwide, as part of his PR campaign for the novel.
"Lo and behold, the term caught on," Bloom says, as if he
still can't believe it. "An important climate blogger at Emory
University, Judith Curry, picked up the term in a popular
blog she titled "Cli-Fi" with over 300 comments coming in
to her. Then in April 2013, a year after Jim's little paperback
came out, NPR radio did a viral post headlined "It's so hot
now, there's even a new literary genre for these novels: cli-fi."
The NPR reporter, Angela Evancie, put cli-fi on the national literary
map that day. And her post was followed in the next few weeks
with stories about cli-fi in the UK Guardian, The Christian Science
Monitor, The Financial Times, The New York Times and the BBC,
Bloom says.
"It was in the air," he notes. "The time was just perfect
for cli-fi to catch on and it did."
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