The Fiction of Climate Change
The fiction of climate change
A couple of months ago, I started to dive into climate fiction as a literary genre. I read my first cli-fi novel, Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, in 2006, a couple of years before climate activist Dan Bloom coined the term climate fiction. But I got a formal introduction to cli-fi as a literary genre by reading The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Indian author Amitav Ghosh who dedicated an entire book to exploring the meaning and importance of writing climate fiction. Last Monday, I finished reading War girls by Nigerian author Tochi Onyebuchi, a fiction novel about two sisters caught in the middle of a Nigerian Civil War in 2172 in a world largely rendered unliveable by climate change and nuclear disaster. The historical Nigerian Civil War, known also as the Nigerian-Biafran War or the Biafran War, was fought between 1967 and 1970 and served as a basis for the book. Currently, I am reading the second volume in this series Rebel Sisters.From this initial r…