What is Cli-Fi? Transcript (English Subtitles Available in Video)
By Georgia Grace Wright and James Grey Lindgren
MA Students in Rhetoric & Composition
You may have heard the song “Feels Like Summer” by Childish Gambino on the radio, or maybe it’s even on your summer playlist, but have you ever really listened to the lyrics? On the surface, the music and vocals curate a relaxed vibe – one you could listen to in the car with your arm out the window or lying on a beach with your eyes closed. But when we pay attention to the words and use of repetition, we start to uncover the message beneath the atmosphere.
Consider your current associations with summer–maybe you think about beach days and no homework, warm weather and time to relax. Childish Gambino draws on this association to bring you into the mood of the song while simultaneously commenting on the warming climate and the ways that we distract ourselves from that crisis. A major portion of this song consists of repeating the line “it feels like summer,” which could be read as a good thing until it is repeated over and over again and you begin to wonder–why does it still feel like summer?
Then, as you are sitting with that question, the lyrics turn a bit darker, saying, “Every day gets hotter than the one before / Running out of water, it’s about to go down” and then, “Air that kill the bees that we depend upon / Birds were made for singing / Waking up to no sound.” Here, while maintaining the relaxing sound, we are forced to reckon with the fact that things are not as they should be–after all, if “birds were made for singing,” then why are we “waking up to no sound”? Childish Gambino answers this question by taking responsibility for the lack of change because we are all too distracted by the music. If we think about this song in this way, we could classify it as “cli-fi”.
Climate change is at the core of many global issues as rising tides and temperatures steadily impact our daily life. This monumental crisis has reshaped the way that we tell stories and become a massive theme in the modern arts—playing out in everything from full-length best-selling novels like Babara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior to short stories, many of which are freely available on sites like Grist where authors explore imagined presents and futures in the climate crisis. All of these could be considered “cli-fi,” but what makes something “cli-fi”?
A term coined by Dan Bloom as a short-form of Climate Fiction, cli-fi is a genre, which as you may recall from the Literary Term video “What is Genre?” refers to a classification of texts that share similar characters, settings, plots, or themes. The term cli-fi, you may have already guessed, borrows from its adjacent genre, Sci-fi, or Science Fiction. However, cli-fi differs from Science Fiction in a couple significant ways—for one, and this may be fairly intuitive, cli-fi must include the theme of climate change. Second, cli-fi imagined pasts, presents, and futures that build on reality–like Childish Gambino referring to birds no longer singing–and often serve as a kind of warning that catastrophic futures may be very possible. But if cli-fi only requires a few characteristics, can the genre even be narrowed down to one specific definition?
The answer is yes. And no. And sometimes. Maybe. For some, cli-fi refers only to a subgenre of science fiction or literary fiction. Others expand the term to include all sorts of creative works. The truth is, cli-fi is an imperfect term for an expansive genre that could potentially include anything from narrative poetry to full-length novels to songs or even memes circulating on the internet. One could even argue that the “this is fine” meme, mentioned before in our “What is Irony?” video, of the dog surrounded by fire could be considered cli-fi because it symbolizes a message similar to “Feels Like Summer” – that the world is heating up and burning all around us, while we do nothing to try and change it.
For our purposes, we are taking a generative and expansive approach to cli-fi, one where it refers to a broad genre that often includes themes of human and nonhuman survival, environmental damage and sometimes justice, and humans’ relationship with the environment around them. We see dystopian near-futures caused by the failure of infrastructural design, utopian imaginings achieved through collective action, and the collective identity of humanity in a world that will never be the same. Narratives often center catastrophic climactic events like mass floods and deadly heatwaves, but they can also shed light on what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence” or the incremental changes to daily life in various parts of the world caused by a warming climate, like in “Feels like Summer” where Childish Gambino calls attention to the fact that summers are becoming longer and hotter.
Cli-fi stories carry in them a unique rhetorical power that utilizes the compelling nature of fictional narratives to educate and encourage conversations about climate change by provoking readers to consider the world around them in new, critical ways. By imagining potential realities, we allow ourselves to ask questions about how we want to live in the world. What kind of future do we want to have? How can we move toward that reality?
In our upcoming new video series, we will explore the ways that formal literary devices are utilized and transformed within cli-fi. You can learn more about the monumental impact of setting in climate fiction, how narrative arcs are altered and reimagined, the ways that protagonists are collectivized, and a new way to understand the uncanny through our environment. Through this series, we hope to join forces with artists and thinkers around the world in pushing everyone to see past the distraction and hear the message behind the music, to change the world by first recognizing the problem and collectively finding our way to a better reality.
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Wright, Georgia Grace and James Grey Lindgren. "What is ‘Cli-Fi’?" Oregon State Guide to Climate-Change Literature, edited by Rachael Garcia, 14 Jun. 2024, Oregon State University, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-cli-fi-definition-and-exam…. Accessed [insert date].
Interested in more video lessons? View the full series:
The Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms