Redefining Our Climate Future: New Approaches to Writing Climate Fiction

The genre term climate fiction ('cli-fi') refers to fiction in which climate change is a major theme. When situated at the intersection of Anthropocene and literary studies, its usage raises questions on how writers might depict a just and representative climate future through storytelling, especially when contemporary publishing grapples with which voices get published and read at all. Rooted in a writing experiment conducted with five UK-based writers of colour, who were instructed to write climate fiction stories over the course of a month, this article explores how a redefinition of climate fiction as a genre - and, in turn, the imagination of possible futures - might begin by closely studying writers' creative processes, and how their lived experiences in a warming world translate into text. By weaving together literary and geographical theories concerning storytelling and the creative writing process, it suggests how more urgent, topical, and relatable climate stories might be told via the use of embodied testimonies of climate change considering race, place, religion, and an intersectional awareness of global warming's disproportionate impacts.