Climate fiction, or cli-fi for low, has emerged as an increasingly popular genre that puts environmental issues front and center. Although often considered a subgenre within science fiction, it has long since moved beyond that realm as the impacts of a warming world, once thought far off, have become commonplace.
With the boundlessness that fiction offers, writers and artists can apply it as a vehicle to imagine a better future and the path we might take to get there. Or, they can model the kind of resilience and adaptation humanity will need in coming decades.
Below, we’ve categorized some of the genres and movements that inspire and inform climate fiction and reveal just how intersectional it is.
As its name suggests, futurism refers to art that imagines the future. It originated with an Italian art movement in the early 20th century that celebrated modernity and technological advances like aviation and cinematography. Contemporary fiction that embraces the idea often envision worlds that center justice and cultural identities alongside technology.
Afrofuturism
Broadly speaking, Afrofuturism is a literary genre, aesthetic, and musical and cultural movement that celebrates Black traditions and culture. It was the first “-futurism” rooted in a racial and cultural identity, and it has since encouraged other communities to envision their own futures.
The term, however, has troubled origins. White author and critic Mark Dery coined it in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future,” in which he asked, “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?”
Some scholars, like poet and professor Hope Wabuke, argue that Afrofuturism is bound by the white gaze and confined to views of the African American experience that began in 1619. But despite criticism, Afrofuturism has moved into the mainstream, and many consider it an empowering manifestation of unapologetic Blackness.
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Africanfuturism
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Indigenous futurism
“All forms of Indigenous futurisms are narratives of biskaabiiyang, an Anishinaabemowin word connoting the process of ‘returning to ourselves,’” she writes in the book’s introduction, “which involves discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world.”
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Read an Indigenous futurism story
A Séance in the Anthropocene
Disabled futurism
Disabled or “crip” futurism focuses on the perspectives of differently abled people, and affords an opportunity to imagine a more accessible world. This does not mean one in which technology or medical advancements have eliminated disability. Assistive technologies may appear in some works, but the greater exploration of crip futurism is how society may become more compassionate and accommodating — or how disability can ensure survival in a changed world. “A utopia should not be a place where no one is physically impaired or neurologically different,” notes the writer Nicola Griffith.
The author Kenny Fries invented the so-called Fries Test for disabled fiction. Much like the Bechdel Test for representation of women in fiction, it asks whether a work features more than a single disabled character; whether those characters serve a narrative purpose beyond educating or benefiting other characters; and whether those characters’ disabilities are not eradicated by curing or killing. Any work that checks all those boxes qualifies as representative disabled fiction. Set it in the future, and you’ve got crip futurism.
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Queer futurism
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“Punk” as a literary term has roots in the punk-rock scene of the 1970s. Bands like The Ramones, The Clash, and The Dead Kennedys inspired an aesthetic and a counterculture movement, which in turn sparked a handful of literary genres. In general, anything labeled “punk” is anti-establishment, rebellious, and transgressive.
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk stories first appeared in the 1980s, combining high-tech advancements (the “cyber”) with some societal decay or collapse. It is generally dystopian, featuring technology gone awry or the blurring of lines between real and virtual worlds.
Bruce Bethke, who established the term in his 1983 essay of the same title, claims that he made two lists of words — one for technology, one for troublemakers — and experimented with various combos until he landed on cyberpunk.
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- Blade Runner — a classic ’80s film based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- The Matrix — an Oscar-winning film series that debuted in 1999
- Ghost in the Shell — an anime series by Masamune Shirow, which was made into a live action film in 2017
Solarpunk
Although some solarpunk art is utopian — depicting idyllic societies that have achieved sustainability and egalitarianism — solarpunk fiction doesn’t go quite that far. It may show people adapting to or making the best of challenging circumstances (like a changing climate), but it recognizes that conflict will always exist. Though it may sound more harmonious than other conceptions of “punk,” solarpunk is still about rebellion — against the fossil fuel industry and the idea that a climate apocalypse is inevitable. “When the status quo is despair and defeat,” Ulibarri says, “then hope becomes an act of resistance.”
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Ecopunk
“Ecopunk” and “solarpunk” are fairly interchangeable terms — but where solarpunk sits in the realm of sci-fi and technologically advanced futures, ecopunk may be contemporary, realistic, or fantastical. “Characters in ecopunk fiction generally fight against environmental degradation using only tools and technology actually available in the real world,” Ulibarri says. Ecopunk plotlines tend to focus on one specific ecological problem, like protecting a habitat.
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Hopepunk
The ethos behind hopepunk challenges the narratives of cynicism and nihilism that its counterpoint “grimdark” often embraces, making basic kindness an act of rebellion. It isn’t about vanquishing evil and achieving some great peace or perfection. “It’s about being kind merely for the sake of kindness, and because you have the means to be, and giving a fuck because the world is (somehow, mysteriously, against all evidence) worth it and we don’t have anywhere else to go anyway,” writes fantasy author Alexandra Rowland, who coined the term in 2017.
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- A Choir of Lies — the sequel to Rowland’s A Conspiracy of Truths, written with hopepunk in mind
- Blackfish City — a 2018 novel by Sam J. Miller
- Sense8 — a two-season Netflix series that debuted in 2015
A topia is simply a place with specified characteristics. (From the Greek topos, meaning place.) In cli-fi and other fiction, we can think of the topia as the setting — whether idyllic, disturbing, or something in between. Genres that apply “topia” as a suffix usually involve extensive world-building, making the setting a major part of the story.
Utopia
Dictionaries define utopia as “the good place.” Etymologically, it’s almost that. Although the Greek prefix eu means “good,” the word utopia is rooted in ou, meaning “not.” Invented by humanist Sir Thomas More in the early 1500s, the word was a pun — it’s nowhere. Like the imaginary island society in Utopia, the novel More wrote in 1516, it’s a perfect world that does not and cannot exist.
Because perfection can’t be achieved, and because stories without conflict are dull, the plotlines of many utopian works poke holes in or expose the seedy underbelly of a supposedly perfect society, as seen in films like The Truman Show and Pleasantville.
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- The Dispossessed — a 1974 novel by the celebrated speculative-fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin
- Tomorrowland — a Disney movie starring George Clooney
- Black Panther — wait, haven’t we seen this before? Yep, it’s the same comic and movie, set in the Afrofuturist, utopic land of Wakanda
Dystopia
Given the Greek root dys means “bad” or “hard,” dystopia is the opposite of utopia — “the bad place.” As a noun, dystopia wasn’t used until the 1950s, though the idea (and the adjective “dystopian”) originated centuries earlier. In literature, a dystopia is a state or society characterized by suffering, injustice, or bleakness. These are often depicted as having totalitarian regimes and are sometimes set in the aftermath of an apocalypse (although dystopian fiction is distinct from post-apocalyptic fiction, which tends to show the dissolution of society, not necessarily the existence of a shitty society).
Dystopias often serve as a form of social commentary, emphasizing things like oppressive governments, police brutality, surveillance, ecological devastation, or technology gone wrong — problems that have roots in the real world.
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- 1984 — a 1949 novel by George Orwell
- Bioshock — a video game about unfettered market capitalism and addiction
- A Clockwork Orange — the terrifying 1971 Stanley Kubrick film adapted from the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess
Read more about utopias in fiction
When a queer witch writes climate fiction, utopia isn’t the goal
Ustopia
A hybrid term created by author Margaret Atwood, “ustopia” speaks to the impossibility of a purely utopian or dystopian world. “In my view, each contains a latent version of the other,” wrote Atwood in a 2011 essay for The Guardian. Topias, in addition to being physical, mapped locations, are also states of mind. Realistically, no character in any environment is either perfectly content or perfectly miserable at all times.
Atwood’s logic seems to suggest that there is always hope, even in a dystopia. Similarly, there is always fear in a utopia — that it won’t last or that it may turn out to be based on something unsavory. What we’re left with, then, is ustopia.
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- The Lorax — a classic children’s book by Dr. Seuss
- The Children of Men — a heartbreaking yet hopeful movie by Alfonso Cuarón
- The Hunger Games — the wildly popular books by Suzanne Collins, which became a series of blockbuster films
Ecotopia
An ecotopia is a form of utopia, predicated on ecological harmony. It’s also the title of a 1975 novel by Ernest Callenbach, a seminal work in this genre — if one that may have aged a bit awkwardly.
Whether technological or agrarian, realistic or fantastical, an ecotopia is built on synergy and regeneration with its surrounding environment.
Find it in:
- Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston — the pioneering work by Ernest Callenbach
- Ecotopia 2121 — an illustrated book based on a project that imagines 100 cities, 100 years from now, in their greenest, most prosperous forms
- Black Panther — our aged friend, here again to show us what ecotopia looks like in the most technologically advanced country in the world. Wakanda forever.
