Essay: Mapping the Culture and History of Taiwan

by Dan Bloom

Taiwan sits on a piece of colourful and multi-splendoured island real estate, south of Japan and east of Hong Kong and China. As an independent, sovereign nation since 1945, it has produced its share of Asian literature since the beginning of the Japanese Colonial Period (1895-1945) to the present. In this brief essay, I want to introduce two Taiwanese writers; one a novelist with an international reputation, Wu Ming-yi, who writes in Chinese, and the other a short story writer based in Taipei, Jane Wu, who writes in English and has recently published a collection of nine stories about the martial law period of Taiwan history (1949 to 1987).

Nature writer and university professor Wu Ming-yi (吳明益) wrote a popular novel titled The Man with the Compound Eyes in 2011, with translations in English and French following in 2013 and 2014. Largely ignored at first for the novel that was published in Chinese, Wu’s eco-fantasy later attracted attention overseas in translated editions, thanks for the eagle eye and savvy marketing skills of Taipei-based literary agent Gray Tan, who took Wu under his wing and introduced the novel to agents and publishers in Europe and America.

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Writing Matters: In conversation with Dan Bloom

Dan Bloom is a journalist with an optimistic outlook and dreams of hope and happiness for the great green planet we live on. With his need to do something for the welfare of an endangered Earth, he came up with the term ‘cli-fi’, a new genre of fiction.

In an earlier interview last year, he said after reading the 2006 report released by The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and an interview with British scientist, environmentalist, futurist James Lovelock in The Independent, he was moved to act. James Lovelock wrote of population decimation due to global warming. Dan Bloom claimed: “That bit sent shivers down my spine. It was a ‘eureka’ moment, a wake-up call.”

In 2011, he came up with the term ‘cli-fi’ while doing a marketing campaign for a near future novel he commissioned from a sci-fi writer in Oklahoma, James Laughter, that was titled Polar City Red. Well-known novelist Margaret Atwood tweeted about the novel, calling it a “cli-fi thriller”. Two years later in 2013, NPR (National Public Radio, USA) did a 5-minute radio segment about the new genre that was headlined ” So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created A New Literary Genre?”

Dan Bloom, received his MA in speech and communications from Oregon University and worked as a newspaper editor in Alaska, Japan and Taiwan. He is now retired and devoting himself fulltime to promoting cli-fi worldwide. In this exclusive to Team Kitaab, Dan Bloom discusses the present and future of cli-fi and climate change.

Team Kitaab: What is cli-fi?

Dan Bloom: Cli-Fi is a standalone, independent literary genre that came to life in the early part of the 21st century, a popular term used by journalists, newspaper editors, headline writers, literary critics, book reviewers, academics and novelists in the Anglophone world. It became a buzzword and a nickname for novels that explored various issues of climate change, either directly or indirectly in theme or story. There is no cli-fi canon and there is no cli-fi agenda. Novelists go where their imaginations and storytelling skills take them. It’s a catchy linguistic portmanteau for “climate change fiction”.

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Essay: Climate Change Fiction Catapults to life as ‘Cli-fi’

by Dan Bloom( Dan Bloom coined the term cli-fi )

Foyles bookshop in London has jumped on the cli-fi trend, creating a climate fact and fiction display table.

Based as a newspaper reporter and climate blogger in Taiwan, since 2011 I’ve been promoting the rising ‘cli-fi’ movement to boost the literary fortunes of ‘climate change fiction’, a new genre of literature now accompanying ‘sci-fi’ within modern literature’s classification system. I’m not a novelist or a short story writer myself, just a reader and what I described as ‘a climate activist of the literary kind’. I use my PR skills learned over a lifetime of newspaper and magazine work in North America, Europe, Japan and Taiwan to communicate my cli-fi passion with editors, novelists, literary critics and fellow readers.

I’m not the only one doing this now. There’s a veritable army of PR people and literary critics shepherding cli-fi novels and short story anthologies into publication in over a dozen languages. What started out as a small movement in the anglophone world in 2011, has now become a global phenomenon among literary people in India, Singapore, Sweden, France and Australia. among other nations.

So what is cli-fi? As a subgenre of science fiction, it crosses the boundary between literary fiction and sci-fi to imagine the past, present, and future effects of man-made climate change, allowing readers to see what life might be like on a burning, drowning, dying planet. But the genre also encompasses writers who pen utopian novels and short stories full of hope and optimism. Cli-fi is not all dystopian and nightmarish visions of the future. There’s a lot of room for hope and better days, too.

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