The Blogs: Margaret Atwood, we need you more than ever!

Runaway climate change is happening 24/7, and our stories reflect it. Movies, novels, short stories, poems, stage plays, TV dramas. From sci-fi to cli-fi, pop culture in many countries now spins fictionalized versions of what some are calling the Climapocalypse. Do they work? Do they resonate?

Maybe.

The well-staged presence of climate representation across pop culture in over a dozen countries presents us with Hollywood and TV stories we can tell one another, as the world turns in 2020 and heads toward 2021. Cli-fi is catching on.

Yes, climate fiction (dubbed ”cli-fi”) already exists in mainstream literary culture. There are now loads of examples of polished, captivating productions and novels that feature compelling eco-catastrophes. But in order for what Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg (soon to turn 18) has termed “the climate emergency” to really sink into the global consciousness we need to see examples and episodes of it across our Netflix and Hulu platforms and our crime thrillers and TV dramas. Margaret Atwood, we need you more than ever!

There’s good news and it’s this: cli-fi is starting to peek out from the various hiding places of pop culture worldwide: in France, in Sweden, in Norway, in Canada, in Japan, in Italy, in Spain, in America and Canada and Mexico. Our theatrical visionaries are locked and loaded.

With our dreamers behind us, we will surely make it to the year 2100 A.D. in good shape and full of positive energy and optimism.