Genres
Climate fiction
Literature that deals with climate change, generally speculative and inspired by climate science, set in the present, the near future or fictional worlds.
Climate fiction (shortened to cli-fi) is literature that deals with climate change, generally speculative and inspired by climate science, and set in the present world, the near future or fictional ones. Dan Bloom coined the abbreviation around 2007 to 2008, and mainstream media picked it up in 2013. The shelf predates the label: J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World (1962), Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future are its touchstones, and the genre frequently includes science-fictional, dystopian and utopian futures.
For writers the machinery is shared with dystopia: weather, scarcity and migration become the rules of the antagonist world, and the changed climate is canon every later chapter must respect. The research burden is real, because readers arrive already knowing the science.