What is Climate Fiction?

In his essay “Raccontare il mutamento climatico: la climate fiction” (Telling Climate Change: Climate Fiction), the writer Bruno Arpaia reflects on the emerging role of cli-fi (climate fiction), a literary subgenre first defined in 2007 by American journalist Dan Bloom. Inspired in name by sci-fi (science fiction), cli-fi was born with the intent of narrating the real and potential consequences of the climate crisis through storytelling. But, as Arpaia emphasizes, it is no longer a niche phenomenon today: it has become a genuine literary, social, and cultural movement.

Unlike classic science fiction, which often projects itself into distant and highly dystopian futures, cli-fi tends to remain anchored to scientifically credible and temporally close scenarios. As Arpaia points out—and as Margaret Atwood, one of the genre’s most well-known authors, neatly summarizes—this is speculative fiction: conjectural novels based on real projections, scientific data, and developments already visible in our present reality.

A concrete example is Arpaia’s own novel Qualcosa, là fuori (Something, Out There). Set in a desertified and devastated Italy between 2070 and 2080, it tells the odyssey of thousands of climate migrants fleeing toward Northern Europe, where the climate has become more hospitable. The scenarios are grounded in reports by the IPCC and the European Environment Agency, as well as in more radical analyses by scientists like James Hansen (NASA) and Dennis Bushnell. Yet, despite this documentation, the narrative aims at emotions: hunger, thirst, hope, and fear are experienced with the protagonists, as if they were direct realities.

A New Way of Telling the Climate Crisis

The strength of cli-fi lies precisely here: transforming data, graphs, and scenarios into human stories—recognizable, moving, and compelling—capturing the interest of an ever-growing audience of readers. Not only literature: cinema and TV series—from Interstellar to Wall-E—reflect its rising influence as well.

Writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi, Jeff VanderMeer, T.C. Boyle, and Sarah Crossan are enriching the genre, fueling a new form of ecological cultural awareness. The hope, as Arpaia writes, is that cli-fi might combine scientific rigor, narrative power, and empathy to actively stir consciences, while also supporting concrete political action.

Of course, the futures described by cli-fi are far from reassuring: desertification, mass migrations, wars over water, and the collapse of democratic institutions. Yet, precisely because these scenarios are plausible, telling them is urgent. Fiction does not replace political action, but it can spark it. And if we truly want to avoid these possible worlds—terrifying, but increasingly probable—perhaps we should start living through them first, in stories.