The Legend of Korra, cli-fi avatar. “I am certainly proud to add Korra to the pantheon, which is perpetually sorely lacking in multifaceted female characters who aren’t sidekicks, subordinates or mere trophies for male characters,” her creators told me.]
Like climate science, climate fiction aims to re-enchant and reorient terrorized Earthlings.
Through cultural influentials like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth legendarium, Frank Herbert’s desertified Dune series, Hayao Miyazaki’s earthy animation, and its elemental descendants like Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra; from the environmental and reproductive stressors of most of Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin’s literature, and toward Alfonso Cuaron’s empathic cinema, including Children of Men, Gravity and The Revenant; cli-fi anchors human evolution to Earth itself, not just the stars.
Recoding convention and tradition, cli-fi also reclaims sci-fi’s monstrous relations. Most specifically, Mary Shelley’s touchstone novella, Frankenstein, which shares oppositional kinship with the death drives of Wells’ foundational War of the Worlds. Cli-fi is deeply informed by Shelley’s productive, persevering labor over Frankenstein, written during The Little Ice Age, a period of dramatic environmental destabilization. Frankenstein‘s cli-fi origin story ends with its antihero, Mad Science’s discarded abomination, set adrift in solitude on a European glacier, the same melting glacier deconstructed in Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid.
Peace On Earth, intertextual extinction
Cli-fi is characterized by such circuits and circularities. Its mother tongue speaks to the roots of our shared planetary language and myth, in search of dreams and strategies for surviving an exponential unraveling. Some, like the Bible, are still taken for literal scripture: “Ye Shall Rebuild the Old Wastes” commands the Good Book in Hugh Harman’s antiwar cli-fi classic, Peace On Earth, a rewilding prophecy about the epic failure on men and machines which we may hopefully, finally heed, as our own real-time analogue phases between realism and fantasy.
Others, such as native spaces and resources in the crosshairs of perpetual war, from way before slavery to long after Standing Rock, are callously capitalized as the world burns. Like yin needs yang, this turburlent feedback between interconnection and intertextuality is expressed as cli-fi’s first principle.
“Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness,” Herman Melville’s metafictional masterpiece Moby-Dick memorably sermonized, expressing this principle well. “But I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!”
Anchored by the gravity of the first principle that everything is connected, cli-fi’s macrocosmic prism captures Earth in the throes of terraformation, as it phases between these extinctions and reconstructions.
Where cli-sci breaks down the catastrophic disruption the once-balanced thermohaline currents of Earth’s oceans, cli-fi screens numb, dumb disaster capitalist blockbusters like Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, as well patient, contemplative object lessons like Remi Chaye’s Long Way North. Both express Earth’s dizzying, dazzling transformations using what John Muir called the “glacial eye,” as they focus on the inexorable power of the North Pole.
Unlike Day After Tomorrow but like Long Way North, Tomm Moore’s stunning Song of the Sea is a shining light in cli-fi’s increasing orbit, deeply invested in mythic environmental interconnection. “Folklore and superstitions serve functions beyond entertainment,” Moore told me. “They bind people to the landscape, and that is being lost.”
After experiencing the gruesome aftermath of seal slaughter with his daughter, Song of the Sea quickly grew out of “an organic process,” Moore said. “I felt it important to reinforce that losing folklore from our everyday life means losing connection to our environment and culture. In Ireland, during the Celtic Tiger years, we were losing touch.”
When we try and pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
The whole wilderness in unity and interrelation is alive, and familiar. —- John Muir
Witnessed with Muir’s glacial eye, these meditative, metafictional explorations of our planet and its sheer power challenge viewers to sit still long enough to realize that it is also they who are pulled toward, and apart, by Earth’s poles, which have themselves begun to migrate, thanks to global warming. Their quests and expeditions to achieve resolution and salvation are ours as well, as Earth overheats beyond contemporary understanding to deliver catastrophe and revelation.
Muir’s glacial eye chills us out enough to comprehend that Song of the Sea, Long Way North, Day After Tomorrow, and further cli-fi expressions are defiant in our real-time destabilization. While they are created for an attention-deficient marketplace whose comprehension of current events are sadly constrained by the usual corporate complaints, cli-fi, introspective and macrocosmic, makes the time to take its time. Its glacial eyes are locked onto the Real World as things fall apart, quoting William Butler Yeats’ mythic “The Second Coming” — and as we, hopefully, come together.