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Fiction has the potential to bring the climate crisis into the imagination and help readers understand and respond to climate change. From speculative 'cli-fi' to contemporary eco fiction, literary responses to climate change vary greatly and continue to evolve. Despite the ongoing popularity of speculative climate change fiction, climate change increasingly appears in realist genres, and in stories dealing with everyday domestic situations. Realist climate change stories come with both opportunities and challenges. The short story cycle form is particularly well-positioned to address such challenges through its capacity to create a sense of community, defamiliarise climate change discourse, generate ecological enchantment, and conceal overtly didactic messages. The short story cycle is a sustainable form because it is cyclical, iterative, and incomplete, in a way reminiscent of the natural environment. Using Richard Powers' short story cycle, The Overstory (2018), as a case study, this paper examines how realist expressions of climate change in fiction might be supported by the unique characteristics of the short story cycle form.
KEY WORDS: Eco fiction, short story cycle, short story, cli-fi.
Climate change has appeared as a theme in fiction for as long as it has been in the public consciousness, and as the impacts of climate change have increasingly been felt and encroached on daily life, the popularity of climate change fiction has grown. Fiction has been used to speculate and warn of potential futures, increase understanding or awareness of the climate crisis, or help process reactions and responses to the crisis. Climate change stories can appear in any genre, including the speculative 'cli-fi' genre, and increasingly, in realism. This research examines the challenges and opportunities for realist climate change stories and asserts that the short story cycle can address these challenges due to its capacity to create community, generate ecological enchantment, and conceal more overt, didactic, and therefore potentially off-putting messages.
This paper draws on ideas about speculative climate change fiction or 'cli-fi', the eco fiction genre, and the short story cycle to examine how realist expressions of climate change in fiction might be supported by the short story cycle form. Climate change first appeared as a major theme in science fiction novels in the late twentieth century. In 2007, Dan Bloom coined the term 'cli-fi', defining...