In the Guardian, author Sarah Holding gives her Top 10 Cli-fi books. The list is focused on Young Adult and children’s lit, which is where cli-fi is really taking off. Early in February, Holding wrote a piece for the Guardian about why she considers her own work cli-fi. The next time I teach this class, we’ll definitely read something geared towards the YA market.
Coined by climate activist Dan Bloom to capture an emergent literary genre dealing with life on Earth after it’s been ravaged by climate change, this is fast becoming the most exciting and challenging subject area driving YA literature. Although catastrophic by nature, it is far from mere disaster-movie fodder; these books are posing new questions about what it means not just to survive but to be human. Don’t be put off by the preponderance of floodwater or the scarcity of basic resources – what you’ve got here are fast-paced, intrepid adventures into the unknown, most of which, interestingly enough, have a strong female character leading the way.
Pictured above: an ice-hopping polar bear, something our blog has been missing to this point. Photo credit: “Polar Bear AdF” by Arturo de Frias Marques – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
