Cli-fi and the Future of the Novel: Building on Helena Feder’s “Ecocriticism and Biology” Special Issue

The topic of climate change is epic in every sense of the word. Established conventions of the novel simply may not be equal to the task of representing the enormity of the issues we currently face, and climate change fiction authors are radically refashioning the novel. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future shakes the genre with its innumerable narrators and points of view, nonlinear narratives, radically weakened characterizations, dizzying narrative jolts and spasms, and its wealth of mechanically scripted hard science. In The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh offers a more engaging narrative with a more passive science that listens not only to the data but also to local knowledges. Drawing on the work of Vandana Shiva and Macarena GómezBarris and building in the spaces opened up by the 2010 Configurations issue “Ecocriticism and Biology” (one of which has come to be known as “the blue humanities”), this article shows that how we conceptualize science will in large part determine the impact of the narrativization of scientific data on literary genres. Focusing on a facet of “the blue humanities,” this article argues that increasingly, there is serious attention—in both theoretical and fictional work dealing with climate change—to questions about what happens to biological systems and microfauna when aquatic systems are disrupted, to ways in which our oceans are becoming slimy, and to what our responses to this sliming may mean, questions that are vital to how we will proceed and how literary genres will fare.