It’s supposedly a new sub-genre of science fiction; cli-fi or climate fiction.
There are already classics in this style (Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole) as well as plenty of books and movies (including Waterworld, Snowpiercer and Interstellar).
The themes are simple, the earth’s climate has been radically altered (usually by something humans have done) and now the characters have to cope with it. More
Someone formed a cli-fi book club in Minnesota and there’s even a handy web site to help high school teachers and college profs. bring the new genre into their classrooms.
Cli-Lie – A better name of climate Porn
OMG!!!!!! They’ve invented LONG FORM TROLLING!!!!!
I’m submitting a story where every year….. the temperature drops. EVERY YEAR!!!!! Imagine the horror …… two young lovers on a late summer lake when suddenly a slightly chill breeze develops forcing the pair to…….. DON SWEATERS!!!!
I may not be able to finish this instant horror classic…. so spooky.
As a SF devourer since 1962
I avoid boring pap that attempts
to affirm the current fads.
I read less of the new stuff every
year as the diversity/pc bugs have
invaded what should be a leap into
a detailed alternate future and turned it into thinly veiled,
preachy agitprop.
I might think about going to a movie theater if only someone would start writing Free-Fi scripts, where in a dystopian collectivist authoritarian future, freedom-loving individualists plot and successfully carry out a massacre of the tyrants and enforcers and get to live challenging but happy entrepreneurial and self-directed lives without coercion of any kind.
Yeah, just call me a dreamer…
@John – I assume you’re a Hal Clement fan. In case not, he’s among the very best hard science fiction writers. Mission of Gravity is terrific.
And I enjoy re-reading E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman and Skylard series every decade or so. Even though he would occasionally get kinda preachy, those are very good total escape reading.
“Allen crawled across the desert floor, his parka drenched in sweat. He sat back against a rock, reeling from the heat. 6 months ago this entire basin was covered in a light dusting of snow. Now…. the entire basis was full of hot death….”
Now why would high school teachers assign cli-fi movies to their students?
With “cli-if” and “porn” in the headline, I had a completely different mental image.
If Mother Nature, that whore, didn’t want to get boned then she should have kept her burqa on.
Uncle Al you still can’t beat EE “Doc” Smith for pulse pounding escapist sci fi space operas. Great stuff, he was originally for the Spokane and N Idaho area, he grew up along the Pend Oreille River between Newport, Wa. and Sandpoint, Idaho in the early 20th century where he grew a very vivid and wild imagination. I have a copy of an early Amazing Science Fiction from 1939 with his first Lensman story as well as a story by Robert A Heinlein. I grew up reading all the classic sci fi of “Doc” Smith, Heinlein, Clifford D Simak, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov etc. Clifford D Simak’s short story Small Deer in one of his newest anthologies is probably the wildest whatever happened to the dinosaurs stories ever, I highly recommend it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear
“The last man on Earth sat alone
in a room and there was a knock
at the door.” Now THAT’s Sci-Fi
circa the 1960’s. I still remember
that opening line after 50 years.
Allen listened to the short wave radio, desperately searching for any signs of survivors of the global catastrophy. Suddenly the radio crackled into life as Allen heard the ski report for Cooma Australia. A ski report… in the middle if July… Allen wept silently. Outside of the Yucaipa Ranger station where he had found shelter, it was nearly one hundred and seven degrees Fahrenheit. Yet in Australia…. the other side of the world…. it was winter.
“This is madness!!!!” Croaked Allen before passing out and falling to the floor of the air conditioned ranger station.
Cli