Saturday, April 30, 2016

The Four Questions (Sometimes Five)

This interview is part of a series we are calling The Four Questions (Sometimes Five). That’s how many we’ll be seeking answers for from a wide variety of climate activists and cli-fi novelists, some well-known and some you’ve probably never heard of. 


QUESTION ONE: When you first came up with your personal concept and coinage of the "cli-fi" term in 2008, a term which was largely ignored by the blogosphere and the mainstream media until Judith Curry at Georgeia Tech blogged about cli-fi on her "Climate Etc" blog in late 2012 and just a few month later blasted into the ethersphere by Angela Evancie's brilliant piece  for NPR on April 20, 2013 -- and with your self-appointed mission with using the eye-catching new genre to help spur more novels and movies about global warming isses -- you appeared to express some optimism about the chances of the term catching on and serving as a literary platform for interested novelists and screenwriters in Hollywood.  In the years since then, have you become more optimistic or less optimistic?

QUESTION TWO: Do you think national leaders an  world leaders across the globe have heard of the cli-fi genre and "get" it?  And, if not, why not?

QUESTION THREE: Who are your own climate activist heroes? Name five?

DAN BLOOM: Andy Revkin at his ''Dot Earth'' blog carried by the New York Times; Margaret Atwood with her solid Twitter following and tweets about climate issues both in her native Canada and worldwde; Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction writer with a deep sense of  concern for future generations in terms of what global warming impact events might do to our descendants 500 years from now (and with his new cli-fi novel "New York 2140" set for release on Spring Equinox Day on March 21, 2017); David Brin, the science fiction writer with a deep concern for climate change issues as both a physiticist and a novelist especially for his novels ''Earth'' and ''The Postman;" and journalist Eliza Cozzarina in Italy for her contiuing reporting on cli-fi novelists in Italy and around the world.



QUESTION FOUR: You have said in several interviews that one thing you are doing with the cli-fi meme and motif is that you are looking for the "On The Beach" of climate change, hopefully to be published with the fame kind of global impact that that 1957 novel (and movie) by Nevil Shute had in the 1950s and 1960s over nuclear war and nuclear winter issues. Have you found that book yet, or the person who might write it?

DAN BLOOM: I am still looking. It might not surface for another 30 or 40 years. These things take time to incubate. But I am sure it will be published sometime in the 21st Century for sure.

QUESTION FIVE: Many of us know now that the personal is political. But if you had to urge people to to do just one personal thing and one political thing to address climate change, what would those be?

DAN BLOOM: On a personal level, spend more time being a climate activist in your own local way, and based on your own personal skill sets (and at the same time stop spending so much time on internet cat videos and pop culture distractions ... and on a political level, stop using cars and airplanes, period. Vote with your feet. We are at war.
 

No comments: