climoji by Nichole Duncan

During the Fall 2018 semester, I taught a course on the emerging literary genre called “Cli-Fi” (or climate fiction). The course examined short stories, novels, films, and various other forms of narrative fiction that concern themselves with climate change or global warming. Our discussions centered upon the various narrative strategies through which a number of late-twentieth and twenty-first century works (such as Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, among others) approach the environmental crises and social problems generated by a rapidly warming planet.

For their final assignments, students in the course produced their own “cli-fi.” The results were so exciting, I asked a number of students in the class for permission to publish their stories here. I have selected a stories that represented the variety of narrative strategies– not just conventional narrative, but a podcast, text messages, voicemails, film, and satire– the students employed. These stories also take up a number of themes and tropes— social breakdown, displacement,  flooding, resource scarcity, the ravages of capitalism, techno-utopianism, and more—central to many of the works of cli-fi we discussed over the course of the semester. This collection therefore represents both the students engagement with the genre conventions of climate fiction as well as their own interest in grappling imaginatively with the urgencies of climate change.

1. “The City of Rot” by Nichole Duncan

2. “The Ocean” by Spencer Bald

3. “Earth Artifacts: Coral Reefs” by Jared Lane

4. “Sunken” by Danielle Osborn

5. “So Long Land” by Collin Olson

6. “The Incalculable Malice of the Everyday” by Kyle Phillips

7. “A New Place” by Sean Ayres

8. “Eco Act” by Nicholas Drabant

9. “Carbon Spike” by Lauren Ramer

10. “Machine Messiah” by Jaymes Schutz

11. “Event 3” by Saeben Haverington