‘All sci-fi will be cli-fi,’ opined Cat Sparks in Australia

If you’ve ever flown into Sydney, Australia from overseas at night while looking out the window of your 747, you might this Australian pop folksong titled “Have You Ever Seen Sydney From a 747 at Night?”

It’s an infectious little tune sung by a some tall Australians, and since this blog post is about the rise of a new literary genre dubbed ”cli-fi” in Australia, I thought this might be a nice musical way of getting into the mood.

At a recent literary conference in New South Wales, James Bradley and Cat Sparks spoke about the future of sci-fi and cli-fi.

“People just haven’t realized that we’re all writing anthropocene fiction,” Bradley told the audience.

And Sparks noted: “Post-apocalyptic fiction is a kind of contempt pornography… but I still like it.”

So there you have it. A well-attended literary conference in Australia featured a post-modern panel discussing post-modern literary theory, and the result was explosive and eye-opening. How sci-fi novelists and literary critics (and cli-fi novelists and literary critics) will react to the comments heard on the panel is anyone’s guess. But time will tell.

Cli-fi marches on.