Why I Write Cli-Fi

by Mary Flodin

Mary Flodin is the author of contemporary thriller, Fruit of the Devil, in which a teacher investigates the strawberry field pesticides which are making her students ill, only to get caught up in a web of gangs, drugs, trafficking, and high-level corporate crime.

As Isaac Asimov said, “I write for the same reason that I breathe—because I have to.” I knew by the time I could print my name that I was born to be a writer. That certainty and compulsion has never left me. I still remember trying to explain it to my family when I was about eight years old — stutteringly telling them that I was here to be “like the secretary of the world, to write down everything that happens.”

I’ve written poetry, articles for periodicals, and short stories all my life. In my thirties, I became an educator. From 1984 to 2010 in K-12 public school classrooms in Central California, I taught standards-based multiple subjects — math, science, history, language arts, art, and how to differentiate between fact and opinion, how to fact check, how to research, and how to defend one’s opinion with logic and reason. While working as a teacher, I never lost my compulsion to write.

But why do I write climate fiction? Bottom line: I learned as an educator that one of the best ways to teach people about something is to tell them a story. Global climate change is the most important story today — the single most critical issue affecting all life on Planet Earth.

As temperatures have heated up, sea levels have risen, and loss of arable land has resulted in mass starvation, large swathes around the Earth have already become unliveable. People are being forced to migrate in order to survive. According to an August 31, 2022, Time Magazine article by Gaia Vince, the number of climate migrants world-wide has doubled over the past decade. Nowhere on the planet will be unaffected. In order to survive, humanity must learn to cooperate, and transition rapidly to new, climate-resilient social and technological systems in every aspect of life — from energy and transportation to agriculture, education, and housing.

Climate Change trumps politics, the economy, and the latest football scores. If we do not focus on addressing climate chaos now, then soon, none of that other stuff will exist. It is crucial that humans understand the science of climate change and what is at stake. And so, I weave climate science into my (hopefully entertaining) stories.

What, to be clear, is cli-fi? It’s a literary genre in fiction or poetry wherein the theme of global climate change influences the plot and affects the lives of the characters.

In the 1990’s, when I first started using the term cli-fi to describe my fiction, I only knew of one other person — an old science nerd I met on Twitter — who was using the handle. I pitched my first novel, Fruit of the Devil, with the cli-fi tag, and I got eye rolls and immediate rejections. Feeling like an ugly duckling, alone and misunderstood, I dropped the cli-fi tag. But then in 2019, I attended an ASLE conference — the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, at University of California Davis. There, I found my flock, and— amazed and relieved – scrambled aboard the ASLE raft with my fellow cli-fi writers.

“The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment is a scholarly international organization, which seeks to inspire and promote intellectual work in the environmental humanities and arts. ASLE is an inclusive community whose members are committed to environmental research, education, literature, art and service, environmental justice, and ecological sustainability.” Every other year, ASLE holds a conference hosted by a university somewhere on the globe.

Unlike the world of commercial fiction, where most agents and publishers still do not acknowledge cli-fi as a valid genre, and give authors pitching it a hard “No,” the ASLE world is populated by scholars and academics who have been studying the genre for decades. After attending the 2019 ASLE conference, I no longer felt alone and ahead of my times, but instead felt like a late-comer to the cli-fi party.

I learned that apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature, which became very popular at the end of the twentieth century, and has been around at least since the Epic of Gilgamesh, c. 2000-1500 BCE, can be labelled cli-fi if it involves the destruction of the world due to a cataclysmic climate event.

If you ask Google’s AI bot about the oldest cli-fi, it will tell you that, “According to many literary critics, one of the oldest works considered ‘cli-fi’ (climate fiction) is Lord Byron's poem Darkness, written in 1816, which depicts a world plunged into darkness due to a climate catastrophe. Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel Dune, set on a fictional desert planet, has been proposed as a pioneer of modern climate fiction for its themes of ecology and environmentalism.”

One of my favorite contemporary cli-fi authors is Octavia E. Butler. Her Parable of the Sower (1993) imagines a near-future for the United States where climate change, wealth inequality, and corporate greed cause apocalyptic chaos. Butler explores themes of survival and resilience as she describes how instability and corrupt political power exacerbate society's underlying racism, sexism, and cruelty.

This year, 2024, in Europe, the first ever literary prize for climate fiction was announced. Perhaps cli-fi is finally moving into the mainstream.

So far, most climate fiction conveys messages of hopelessness and despair. But through my stories, I attempt to shift the narrative — providing positive examples of social cooperation, new resilience and hope.

In the ‘90’s, while teaching elementary school in Watsonville, California, I had a lived experience that catalysed my transformation into a cli-fi author. My school was on the Monterey Bay coast, surrounded by commercial strawberry fields. My colleagues and I became aware that the pesticides being used to fumigate the strawberry fields were categorized as Class-1 acutely toxic chemicals, and were causing great harm to humans as well as to the sensitive maritime ecosystem. One of the main pesticides being applied next to our school was methyl bromide.

I’m married to a scientist who was working at the time in the atmospheric and planetary sciences division at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. He was assigned to NASA’s ozone hole research team. Through him, I witnessed the political-economy versus science struggle that resulted in landmark legislation banning methyl bromide globally: the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (considered to be the most successful model of human cooperation to resolve a critical environmental issue as yet accomplished). Methyl bromide was not only one of the chemicals banned by the protocol; it was also identified as a potent greenhouse gas causing global warming. But corporate strawberry growers’ congressional lobbyists obtained exemptions allowing the use of methyl bromide in the fields next to our school, long past the time the substance was legally banned, despite dire health consequences to migrant farmworkers, students, and our community. We were transformed into environmental and social justice activists, and we organized. My first cli-fi novel, Fruit of the Devil, grew out of this experience. I was fortunate to be introduced to the visionary owner of a small independent press who was not afraid to publish cli-fi. Fruit of the Devil was published by Paper Angel Press in 2019.

It has become clear to me that everything I care passionately about — sustainable agriculture, saving endangered habitats like our redwood forests and watersheds; the endangered birds migrating on the Pacific flyway; our endangered Pacific salmon; social justice; preserving the purity of our water, food, and air; public health; the need for excellent standards-based education so that all students can thrive and fulfil their full potential; the preservation of culture and democracy; the urgent need to transition to sustainable energy, transportation, and housing . . . everything intersects under the umbrella of global climate change.

Today, the dual beating drums of escalating climate chaos and climate denialism are growing louder and more urgent. My husband has retired from his NASA sanctuary of scientific truth and reason, with its careful languaging — couched in delicate theoreticals and scrupulously free of hyperbole — to teach college students, in plain language, the math, science, ecology, and political economy of climate change. I’m still writing. My new cli-fi eco-thriller, Incident at Cougar Creek, will be released in 2025.

It’s our hope that humans will have time to learn to cooperate and create an environmentally sustainable, socially just world where all beings can live happily and at peace.

Find out more about Mary’s cli-fi eco-thriller, Fruit of the Devil.

Before settling into the writer’s life, Mary Flodin taught environmental education, English, and art in California public schools.

She lives in a cottage on the Central California Coast with her husband — retired from NASA-Ames atmospheric and planetary sciences (ozone hole, climate change, MARS project, SETI) — and their dog, koi, chickens, and gopher herd, where she spends her time practicing permaculture gardening, plein air painting, making pottery, bird watching, swimming, and enjoying life on the Monterey Bay … and, of course, writing.

An early draft of Fruit of the Devil was a finalist for the Pen Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Fruit of the Devil is Mary’s first published novel. Her second cli-fi eco-thriller, The Last Transit of Venus, is complete and coming out soon.

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Solutions Spotlight

In The Burning Years, Felicity Harley considers the dangers of geoengineering:

When I took on my government position, after I graduated from University, the “Weather Wars” were in full force. The United States had been investing in HAARP (The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) since 1960 and had moved it from Alaska to an underground facility, Area 52, in the Nevada desert, where its scientists worked on research that would enable us to continue to geo-engineer the weather.

By 2030 they had developed in that facility a way to push and relocate weather and, as climate change happened, they believed they could ensure our national survival by redirecting extreme weather events meant for us into various parts of the world. Then other developed countries began to tinker with the weather as well, which set off massive droughts everywhere.

While we had international environmental agreements, as the impending cataclysm approached, countries panicked. That’s how the “Weather Wars” started. In 2045, because we were all trying to save ourselves from the effects of climate change, treaties and agreements between countries became obsolete as conventional weapons were now useless.

Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases had risen to such an extent into the atmosphere around the globe that they had formed a thick blanket holding in heat. As these heat-trapping gas concentrations increased, the blanket’s thickness also increased and trapped even more heat in our lower atmosphere. Heat that had been designed by nature to escape through the stratosphere was now no longer able to do so, and resulted in it being much cooler than it should have been.

This abnormal coolness then contributed to ozone loss, which effectively cancelled out any progress we had made in the past, by reducing CFC’s. Like us, most developed countries didn’t care what happened in other parts of the world and were using any number of untested methods to reduce the effects of regional climate change.

These methods included blocking a portion of the sun’s rays; fertilizing nearby oceans with iron to pull carbon out of the atmosphere; covering their land with vast sheets of white plastic, making them look like snowfields, to reflect sunlight back into space; and building machines that could suck carbon out of the air.

We, in the United States, led the pack and after I joined DARPA, my job was to control the giant space mirrors in place in the ionosphere. We were brightening clouds above the Earth, and spraying seawater into the sky with cannons to make more clouds. We’d also stolen Tesla’s resonance theories and were sending sonic pulsars up into the atmosphere.

The pulsars caused volcanoes to spew out Sulphur dioxide, which would supposedly increase our cloud cover, but ended up on top of everything else causing earthquakes and tidal waves, inadvertently wiping out large parts of our land, including Florida and the West Coast.

In my heart, I knew what we were really doing, all of us together, was causing our ‘mother,’ Gaia, to go crazy, as we played out the final scenario of the Industrial Revolution during which we had somehow believed we could tame nature and make it our own.

‘Solar Radiation Management,’ as we called it euphemistically in our department, would fail in the long term to cool our continental landmass. And, as we engineered what we called ‘global dimming,’ we drove away our blue skies and all we saw now was white above us, like an unremitting autumnal fog so that at night we could no longer see the moon or the stars.

The ‘ones in the know,’ the elite in all the countries, understood the tiny particles of Sulphur we had been putting into the atmosphere for years, would eventually deplete the radiation shield from our planet. Because they knew what others didn’t, these elite were preparing their underground cities where they, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren would live until years into the future, when their descendants could re-emerge, like mole-people, onto an Earth’s surface that was perhaps beginning to heal.

Many of these ‘elites’ including our politicians, were the same ones who had been responsible in the first place for causing the methane leaks, using extra-dirty coal, creating tar sand deposits, and turning a blind eye to the massive spillage of natural gas from their gargantuan projects.

To add fuel to this destructive fire we had started, in 2050 we also caused the Arctic to finally all but melt away, and in doing so inadvertently released several pre-historic viruses that had been trapped for millions of years under the perma-frost. The release of these viruses caused the deaths of millions of the poor and disenfranchised, who were not allowed access to the limited, expensive, and hastily developed vaccines controlled by private pharmaceutical companies.

Now, ten years after I joined DARPA, in the year 2060, it was the right time for me to be exactly where I was. My husband, Peter, and I had the ability to use any information we obtained at our jobs for the construction of a survivalist community we were building on the great underground Ogallala Aquifer.

Felicity says, “Despite wanting to introduce a lot of complex scientific concepts into my books, I knew at the core of them I wanted to ask the question - what does it mean to be human? Is the way we treat each other the most important thing about us?

As a writer I wanted to create a speculative drama based on theoretical science in which humanistic events such as love, loss and self-discovery are played out. I believe human beings in isolation are meaningless and I strongly support the idea of the human collective and know that we will emerge or fail as a race together. However, if we don’t soon understand how we are all connected to each other and the planet on which we live, even though we might be a civilization that has so far survived for thousands of years, this will not save us.

After completing all my research, I carefully chose the scientific theories, or the bones on which I would build my series of five books. After putting these in place, I started to develop my characters. To do so I read about future bionic humans who would be linked to the web through implants, about manipulating the human brain so false memories could be easily implanted, and about genetically engineered humans and clones. I also read many different genres of science fiction and finally decided on a Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure-style story that would be slightly dystopian. My characters, like my family, would come from multiple races and genders, and women would play major roles.”