Cli-fi and Five Narratives of Future Warming

This chapter demonstrates how literary and cinematic fiction from the Global North engage with anthropogenic global warming. First by introducing and defining the phenomenon climate fiction (cli-fi) and then by explicating how cli-fi from the Global North have so far been tied to five narratives of future warming. This chapter sketches how these narratives have in part been constructed on the basis of some of the most well-known narratives in the cultural history of the West but also how these narratives are adjusted so that they add new layers to the imaginaries of the future that presently drive the world-building of societies and humans forward. On this ground, this chapter claims that cli-fi represents an important affective, cognitive, and imaginative supplement to the climate scientific projections appearing in the reports by UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).