Future present: cli-fi’s representational challenge

Abstract

Time is central to climate change fiction (cli-fi). One of the key challenges of the rapidly evolving genre has to do with bringing the future to the present and retaining a semblance of entertainment while using over-exposed material from the clutter of data and mass media narratives. People are numbed by it all, and offering effective narratives is no easy task. While some cli-fi writers look to the past for answers and others to the present and its hedonistic obsessions, it is finally all really about the future and understanding both how the future structures the present and how we need to reset our current trajectories. It is becoming increasingly clear that climate change is too big for what literary genres can currently handle. The changes will be tectonic, it seems, and Kim Stanley Robinson is a potent force pushing at the fault-lines and leading the changes to what may very well be a new genre—one sufficient to encompass the vastness that bringing the future present demands. If it is to push us to act meaningfully on the crises we face, then cli-fi indeed must bring the future present and compel understandings of how the future structures the present.