&Now 2015: Blast Radius

Ben Lerner, at the latest Brooklyn Festival, claimed onstage that his new novel 10:04 was ‘‘science fiction.’’ The book’s settings are entirely realistic, however, and its two major events are two recent hurricanes, first Irene and then Sandy. Those were, of course, climate events—their damage exacerbated by humanity’s abuse of the environment.   

So too, the novels and stories known loosely as ‘‘cli-fi,’’ addressing the current climate crisis, challenge and destabilize conventional notions of ‘‘sci-fi.’’ On the one hand, such work imagines a changed world. On the other, cli-fi also eschews genre elements, such as the apparatus of time- or space-travel. Instead, such novels and stories tends to exist in an alternative ‘‘now,’’ different in some essential way from our own, but otherwise using machinery and social structures we recognize. That’s the case even in so accessible and celebrated a text as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. In that novel, the final chapters are set in an America at once our own and yet significantly otherwise. A similar alternative reality can be seen in lesser-known and more challenging fictions, by writers as diverse as George Saunders and Margaret Atwood. 

Our roundtable will address such literary work as both writers and readers. It will consider outstanding examples, such as those named already, and also grapple with difficulties of composition. In complicating our sense of the moment, cli-fi also transgresses boundaries between the artistic modes, and indeed all the arts.