Editor’s Note: Ever since he coined the term “cli-fi,” SDJW correspondent Dan Bloom has monitored with satisfaction from his home in Chiayi City, Taiwan, the use of the term spreading in popular culture.
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Hollywood is catching up with the ”cli-fi” buzzword these days, as the popular TV show Jeopardy episode last March showed. Now a syndicated crossword puzzle on August 30 ran a clue that led to the answer which was ”cli-fi.” If you’re a wordnik, read on for the details.
When earlier this year a friendly English professor in New Jersey named Juda Bennett notified me by email that ”Episode 57” on Jeopardy on March 20 featured a ”Jeopardy” ”cli-fi” clue and its correct answer of ”climate fiction,” I was delighted.
Now comes news from a Twitter user (and dedicated wordnik and crossword maven) that Newsday, a New York daily newspaper, published a crossword puzzle on August 30 that had a clue for a 5-letter word in a “down” column that read: “Dystopian novels like The Carbon Diaries.
The answer, the crossword geek figured out using his crossword puzzle detective hat, had to be “cli–fi,” he reasoned, given the other words both “down” and “across”taking shape in the corner of the puzzle.
Cli-fi was a new word for him, something he was not familiar with, so he tweeted out his discovery to several of his friends, who joined in a friendly discussion of the new literary term none of them had heard of before.
This year has been a busy year for the cli–fi genre in pop culture circles, and the “Jeopardy” mention was just icing on the “global warming” cake, so to speak.
On March 13, New York literary critic Amy Brady, who has been writing a monthly ”cli-fi trends” column for the online Chicago Review of Books for the past two years where she is the editor in chief, wrote an article for the Oprah Winfrey magazine “O,” headlined “7 Books That Provocatively Tackle Climate Change: They Each Fit Into a New Genre: Cli–Fi.”
Who knew?
Jeopardy! Who would have guessed?
A syndicated crossword puzzle! What a surprise!
“O” introduced Ms. Brady this way: ”Environmental writer Amy Brady identifies an intriguing epidemic: the proliferation of provocative novels in which the enemy is climate change.”
“As news of the oceans warming and icebergs melting grows ever more urgent, the light drizzle of fiction about eco-disaster spawned by J.G. Ballard’s ahead-of-its-time cli-fi thriller The Drowned World (1962) has gone full-on flood, with apocalyptic visions from a diverse array of authors hitting the mainstream,” Brady told “O” readers online.
“In Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, pollution and other biospheric disruptions throw a colony of butterflies off their migration course to disastrous effect, while in Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, a California besieged by sandstorms illuminates social inequities and the excesses of Hollywood. So robust is the growing genre that it’s earned its own name: cli–fi (short for climate fiction),” Brady noted.
Add The Carbon Diaries by Saci Lloyd in Britain to the “O” list, thanks to a crossword puzzle editor in New York.
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Bloom is an inveterate web surfer and freelance writer based in Taiwan. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com