Climate Change Fiction

[close] This is an online book club organised by the INTER-ACTIO teaching innovation project at the University of Valladolid. If you are a university student of English or Spanish as a second/foreign language and would like to meet and discuss literature and other related topics with students from other countries, this book club is for you. Monthly online meetings will be held from February to May (2025) to discuss texts connected with the notion of "futurities", that is,future events or prospects -or rather how literature imagines the future. Before each meeting, you will be expected to read two short texts (one in English and another one in Spanish -if you are proficient in just one of the two languages, you can participate as well).

[close] This group is open to all those who are reading books passed forward by other readers. This was initiated at a live reading at Malmö University Climate Action Weeks 2025.

[close] **SPOILER ALERT** The book 'The Ministry of the Future' by Kim Stanley Robinson, (whom we may more commonly reference as KSR or Stan) is a speculative cli-fi book about the very near future, challenges and solutions we will be encountering there. This group will consist almost completely of spoilers! We will try to remember to label the topics with the header *SPOILER* and then the CHAPTER(S) that are being spoiled. You may want to read the book before you visit this club, or follow along carefully for the technicals and policy wonkery we'll be sharing here. We will endeavor to provide links and media that is understandable and comprehensive. This will be a spoiler heavy group but is mostly aimed at real comprehension of concepts, processes, etc. Please label new topics and include the warning *SPOILER*. Have fun talking and learning about what it will take and how we're not all completely, necessarily doomed!!!

[close] The term "Climate Fiction" (CF) was first used by Australian novelist James Bradley in 2010 on his online blog Cityoftongues, where he claimed that realistic novels are “hopelessly inadequate” to discuss the implications of climate change, for they would violate the urgency and difficulty of the problem for the sake of coherence. In CF, climate crisis occur in what literary critic Darko Suvin calls novums: fictional worlds validated by cognitive logic. Usually, CF depicts extremely dystopian scenarios characterised by the anthropogenic nature of the environmental threats, which will eventually lead to an apocalyptic scenario. Climate Fiction is at the core of my PhD project at University of Ferrara and I would love to discuss instances of CF with all members of the club.