Grenoble (France) 
12-14 Oct 2027

Call for papers

What defines climate fiction, often abbreviated to “cli-fi”, is the role played by the climate in the narration: from a simple setting, the climate becomes a narrative lever, or the main theme of the fiction (Langlet, Huz, 2023). The term “climate fiction” was first coined in 2007 by Dan Bloom, who was looking for a term to define “novels with climate themes”. He sees it as a “sister genre to sci-fi, but with a specific focus on climate change”1. Yet other terms have also been used to define this literary genre which suggest a broad range of responses to climate change: “climate science fiction”, “Anthropocene fiction”, “climate change fiction”, “ecofiction”, etc. Once simply used as a narration backdrop, the climate has thus become a trigger in the works’ diegesis or their main theme. Often ethical and political issues are discussed within the narration and our very survival as a species can be at risk.

An element that defines climate fiction is the role it plays in raising the general public’s awareness of climate problems. However, it does so generally in a very pessimistic way, something which certain critics, such as Tyler Harper2, see as problematic since much climate fiction is by nature dystopian, using a “cautionary tale” type format, which does not necessarily make its audience want to get involved in the climate struggle. Such works can indeed lead to a form of demoralisation, convincing people that climate activism may indeed be pointless if the Apocalypse is to come despite our best efforts. Another difficulty lies in the time scale of climate change, as Casey Williams observes: “Climate change doesn’t describe a single future catastrophe, but a slow and uneven unraveling, a drawn-out apocalypse that began long ago and that will stretch to an end that probably won’t feel like much of an ending at all”3. As Elizabeth Callaway points out, the difficulty lies in seeing what is right in front of us: “Climate change is notoriously difficult to render in artistic and literary works. […] It is not that climate change causes and effects are too slow or displaced to be felt with immediacy or that climate is too abstract. Rather, the novel indicates that climate effects are all around us all the time. Climate change is right here, available to our immediate experience”4. Many novels and films belonging to the climate fiction genre are indeed typically set in the present or a close future, and depict some form of disaster and its effect on human beings. Yet others still may look to the past in order to engage with issues of climate change, looking at history through a modern, climate-conscious lens.

Despite these potential problems, “climate fiction” is a fascinating new denomination for a genre which has in fact existed for several decades. Many works of science fiction indeed started dealing with the climate issue in the 1960s. Terms such as “proto-climate-fiction” (cf. Jim Clarke) have been used to describe J.G. Ballard’s 1960s dystopian novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965, originally published as The Burning World in 1964) and The Crystal World (1966), which explored extreme climate shifts, despite the fact that these novels “predate awareness of the effects of greenhouse gases” and often “attribute climatic change to natural causes”, as Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra point out5, although J.G. Ballard did include elements which attributed certain changes to human activity. These novels tended to explore existential dread when faced with nature’s indifference to man’s plight. During the same period, Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) presented an inhospitable planet on which humanity had to adapt to deep ecological problems by severely controlling its resources. Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966) imagined an overpopulated, overheated and polluted future in which a resource crisis had led to food and water shortages and extreme social problems. Philip K. Dick’s foundational work of science fiction, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco following a nuclear war, questioned the emotional and ethical consequences of humanity’s impact on our planet in a world where nature had been replaced by the synthetic. During this period, novels began to integrate more overt ecological critiques such as John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972) which presented similar themes of overpopulation and pollution leading to disturbing social problems or Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), one of the first ecological utopias. The same year, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The New Atlantis (1975) presented Anthropocentric climate change and the issues it entailed, and the following year, Marge Piercy wrote Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), a feminist utopian depiction of an environmentally-friendly future society6.

In more recent years, climate fiction seems to have shifted towards more explicit engagement, showing climate change as a central and more urgent theme, linked to a growing scientific consensus and more public awareness of the consequences of global warming. In the 1990s, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996), explored man’s settlement and terraforming on Mars, using new life on a different planet as a mirror through which to criticise our own planet’s environmental mismanagement and allowing his readers to imagine an alternative and more sustainable society. Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower(1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) imagined an unstable American society in which climate change, growing inequalities, and corporate greed had led to a post-Apocalyptic future, in which she emphasised resilience and community. In the years 2000, climate fiction became even more explicitly tied to our planet’s immediate crises as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy, Oryx and Crake(2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), in which she explored how biotechnology and environmental collapse can comingle to destroy our planet, while Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) presented a gruesome vision of environmental collapse and its human toll. Both authors merged cautionary tales with reflections and warnings on ethics in their visions of the future. In a more muted way, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) showed its protagonists evolving in a dystopian future where androids seemed to care more about the environmental degradation than humans did7. Furthermore, authors such as Ian McEwan, not generally associated with the speculative fiction genre, have also written novels which can be considered climate fiction, such as Solar (2010)8 and the more recent What We Can Know (2025).

Al Gore’s success in raising the profile of climate activism certainly had an impact on “climate fiction” and led to Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions. The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) in which they both explain how a new form of narration needs to emerge to better represent climate change, with a new narrative and epistemological regime, essentially with the aim of undoing the narrative hegemony of the human subject-character (heroic or otherwise) and inscribing multiple voices (notably non-human) and multiple scales (from the micro-sphere to the planetary sphere, and beyond)9 to enable the focus to no longer be on humans but on their impact on the environment and fauna. Since then, novels such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) have imagined less dystopian futures and more global cooperation and governance to mitigate climate change through geoengineering, while giving a voice to non-human entities10.

In cinema, cli-fi is most commonly associated with spectacular disaster movies about ecological collapse such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Yet film narratives of the Anthropocene have a longer history, the underlying motivations of which have changed over time, something we hope that this conference will explore. One could consider British and American sci-fi films of the 1950s-60s like The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), which Susan Sontag called the “fantasy of living through [the] death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself”11. Such films have been read as an attempt to “exorcise” the “mass trauma over the use of nuclear weapons”12. At that time, the nuclear threat in science-fiction film was inextricably bound up with Cold War anticommunism, “where technology, the army, or heroic initiative could repel alien threats13.”

With the so-called New Hollywood of the late 60s and 1970s, a more authentically climate-conscious American cinema could be said to emerge, where environmental collapse is not sublimated into narratives of alien invasion but is evidently man-made. One could cite Silent Running (1972) or Soylent Green (1973) as examples of more ecologically-minded dystopian sci-fi. Outside of the genre, films like Deliverance (1972)and Chinatown (1974) use the manipulation of natural resources, and particularly the re-diversion of water, as a narrative pivot equated to a form of rape. Deliverance bears comparison to the survival films that characterize a simultaneous cinematic new wave, that of Australia, where films like Wake in Fright (1971), Walkabout (1971), and Long Weekend (1978) all explored man’s ambivalent relationship to nature. Like Deliverance, these films stage struggles between metropolitan characters and the rural or indigenous population, often against a backdrop of exploitation of resources. Even more apocalyptic visions of ecological and societal collapse Down Under can be identified in Aussie New Wave films such as The Last Wave (1977), or – most famously of all – the original Mad Max (1979).

Over the same period in Britain, climate anxiety also found expression in television drama. Post-apocalyptic series such as Survivors (BBC, 1975-77) and the children’s drama serial Changes (1975) imagined different kinds of catastrophe that entailed characters having to “relearn the agricultural ways of yore14”. The notorious made-for-television film Threads (1984) and the serial Edge of Darkness (1985) mix nuclear paranoia with similar flights to the countryside. Rob Young traces many of these narratives and later ones back to John Wyndham’s novel TheDay of the Triffids (1951), and its adaptations for both the big screen and television, for combining “Cold War paranoia with a very early ecological consciousness”, in which “rural areas offered a refuge from societal collapse”15.

Theatre, too, has shown increasing engagement with climate change. Plays produced over the past fifteen years have also made use of fiction to portray the collective and personal struggles involved in making sense of and living with the environmental crisis. Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs (2011), Dawn King’s The Trials (2022), and Flora Wilson Brown’s The Beautiful Future Is Coming (2024) are some examples which show the recent evolution of contemporary British climate theatre by focusing on eco-anxiety, accountability and cautious hope16.

Climate fiction is thus an important genre in a time of climate change anxiety or eco-anxiety, which is especially present among the younger generations. It encompasses many different generic modes which engage with climate change in our world today, our world tomorrow and even our past. These examples from literature, post-war cinema and television are intended to open up a debate about climate fiction and representations of the Anthropocene in Anglophone culture that takes as long a perspective as possible, including a range of literary and visual media, including literature, film, television, TV series, theatre, poetry, art, photography, graphic novels, documentary or video games. We welcome submissions in English on the following themes in particular: 

  • Dystopian science fiction
  • Utopian speculative fiction
  • Representations of the Anthropocene
  • Representations of nuclear disaster and fallout
  • Nature writing
  • Post-colonial narratives of climate change
  • Narratives of corporate malpractice related to the environment
  • The allegorization of climate change
  • Climate fiction and activism
  • Non-Human perspectives
  • The role of science and technology in climate fiction 

Keynote speaker: Axel Goodbody

We are delighted to announce Axel Goodbody as one of the conference’s keynote speakers. Axel Goodbody is Professor Emeritus of German and European Culture at the University of Bath, England, and Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Centre for Environmental Humanities. His research has focused on representations of nature and environment in German and Anglophone literature, and ecocritical theory. He served as President of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment, and was Associate Editor of its journal Ecozon@ from 2010 to 2020. Recent publications have been concerned with climate fiction, energy narratives, human/ animal relations, and garden writing. He is a series editor of the De Gruyter/ Bril book series ‘Nature, Culture and Literature: Readings in Environmental Humanities’. Publications include Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis(co-authored 2019), Cli-Fi: A Companion (co-edited 2019), Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (co-edited 2011), Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature (2007), Literatur und Ökologie (ed. 1998), and Natursprache. Ein dichtungstheoretisches Konzept der Romantik und seine Wiederaufnahme in der modernen Naturlyrik (1984).

FORESEE

This international conference follows on from our series of seminars entitled “Climate Fiction(s)” (all the videos of the seminars can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/@ClimateFictions) which is part of the FORESEE programme. The FORESEE programme explores the experiences of individuals, organisations, territories and public action in the face of climate change. 

The ‘Climate Fiction(s)’ project, co-led by Marie Thevenon and James Dalrymple, is part of Axis 1 of the FORESEE programme, which focuses on individuals facing climate change: emotions, discourse and speculative narratives. This project explores different types of climate fiction, both in literature and the visual arts, from an anglophone perspective, with an emphasis on the representation of individuals facing climate change in speculative fiction.

To download a pdf version of this call for papers, please click here: Climate Fiction(s) Call for Papers 

Submissions

Proposals for papers, limited to 500 words, must be submitted in an anonymous file and include:

  • the title of the paper
  • a brief abstract
  • 5 key bibliographic references (not included in the 500 words).
  • Please add a brief bio-bibliographical note in a separate file.

The conference langage is English. Talks are limited to 20 minutes per paper.

Schedule

Submission deadline: 1st March 2027

Notification of acceptance: April 2027

Registration opens: July 2027

Publication

A selection of articles based on the papers presented at the conference will be considered for publication.

Contact 

If you have any questions, please contact Marie.Thevenon@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr and/or James.Dalrymple@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr.

1 https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/interview-dan-bloom-clifi-and-imagining-cities-future/1037731/

2 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230418-what-snowpiercer-and-climate-fiction-get-wrong

3 Casey Williams, Duke University, HuffPost, April 22, 2018. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/earth-day-eco-fiction-climate-change_n_5ad92237e4b0e4d0715ec872

4 Elizabeth Callaway, “Seeing What’s Right in Front of Us: The Bone Clocks, Climate Change, and Human Attention”. Humanities. 2018; 7(1):11.

5 Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra (eds), Cli-Fi: a companion, 2019. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019.

6 See “Climate Fiction(s)” seminar n°6 (29th April 2026) with guest-speaker Elisabetta Di Minico: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmUB5ToWFak.

7 See “Climate Fiction(s)” seminar n°4 (3rd December 2025) with guest-speaker James Dalrymple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NxkhVOerA.

8 See “Climate Fiction(s)” seminar n°3 (18th April 2025) with guest-speaker Marion Moussier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HHMZdLaUPE. 

9 Cf. Irène Langlet et Aurélie Huz, « Fictions climatiques. Introduction », ReS Futurae [En ligne], 21| 2023, mis en ligne le 28 juin 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/resf/12271 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/resf.12271 

10 See “Climate Fiction(s)” seminar n°2 (20th November 2024) with guest-speaker Nessa Cronin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbC_mI6r_fU.

11 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and other essays, New York: Picardor, 1964, p. 212.

12 Ibid., p. 218.

13 Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, fourth edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 25.

14 Rob Young, The Magic Box: Viewing Britain Through the Rectangular Window, London: Faber & Faber, 2021, p. 87.

15 Ibid.

16 See “Climate Fiction(s)” seminar n°7 (23rd June 2026) with guest-speaker Solange Ayache: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCl3auOuC8k.