Cli-Fi

Once upon a time, there was "Chick lit"; then there was "Clit-lit".

Now there is Cli-fi, echoing Sci-fi, WiFi and Hi Fi, words that mean disparate things, but rhyme nonetheless). Cli-fi is a literary term, coined to denote works of fiction that grapple with global climate change.

Polar City Red, by Tulsa-based writer James Laughter, envisions life in the great frozen north, where populations migrate to after global warming has destroyed the earth's ecosystem. 

The hero of Odds Against Tomorrow is a mathematician who specializes in the math of catastrophe--global wars, natural disasters and ecological collapse. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters.

The novel is more about cultural fears brought on by the spectres of an apocalypse.

Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior is on global warming and the abysmal failure of public education in enlightening people about this most significant of issues in a scientific and reasonable way.

The name, Cli-fi, maybe new but as the New Yorker writes:

Environmental havoc has flourished in postapocalyptic fiction, where it makes for vivid, frightening atmospherics and, paradoxically, fosters a sense of unreality. In John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, from 1956, a new virus infects grasses across the globe, causing mass famine. The Drowned World, by J. G. Ballard, published in 1962, is set in 2145, after solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps and London has become a tropical swamp. T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, from 2000, is set in a nearly apocalyptic 2025—a hot, food-scarce U.S. that is plagued by mass extinction. Margaret Atwood’s great dystopian trilogy, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and the forthcoming MaddAddam, engages with similar disaster scenarios.