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CLI-FI: Canadian Tales of Climate Change
With the world facing the greatest global crisis of all time – climate change – personal and political indifference has wrought a series of unfolding complications that are altering our planet, and threatening our very existence. Reacting to the warnings sounded by scientists and thinkers, writers are responding imaginatively to the seriousness of changing ocean conditions, the widening disappearance of species, genetically modified organisms, increasing food shortages, mass migrations of refugees, and the hubris behind our provoking Mother Earth herself. These stories of Climate Fiction (Cli-fi) feature perspectives by culturally diverse Canadian writers of short fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and futurist works, and transcend traditional doomsday stories by inspiring us to overcome the bleak forecasted results of our current indifference.
304 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2017
3 people are currently reading
67 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Meyer
79 books21 followersDr. Bruce Meyer is an author of more than 45 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary journalism, scholarship, and pedagogy, and is a professor of English at Georgian College.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 12, 2017
Powerful and wealthy people are invested in the idea of constructing climate change as a fiction, projecting the idea that scientists are folk story tellers, inventing tales that don’t stem from observation. Constructing climate change as a fiction allows us to pretend that we don’t need to change anything about our behaviour, to believe that we can allow things to go on as they are without repercussions. Cli Fi: Canadian Tales of Climate Change uses the power of stories to shift the dialogue, to give us possible glimpses into futures that we are creating through our own inaction. Cli Fi like most speculative fiction, is ultimately about the present rather than the future climate issues it presents. This collection reveals the way that we centre human experiences while ignoring the rest of our world, the way that we ignore our problems in order to push them onto the future. As much as being a set of stories, Cli Fi is a call to change, a call to transform ourselves the way our fiction transforms our way of thinking about the world.
The anthology begins with tales from the perspective of aged protagonists, something that is rare in a society that doesn’t value aged bodies, and yet, the collection prefaces these bodies, positioning them as ones that have witnessed long term changes, long term development. Youth frequently don’t see changes as shockingly because everything is new and because they don’t have years of observation to back their ideas upon. When they see a news report that says that we are experiencing record temperature highs or record temperature lows, they are comforted when the news refers to these temperatures being reached at another time this century. But, they may miss the fact that the last few years have been ones where more records are being established, and where these records are being met or exceeded more often and in closer proximity. Whereas aged people can make observations about the longue duree, making observations over a longer period of time.
I shouldn’t suggest that by having ageing bodies at the outset, that this anthology is all about ageing. In fact, there are a wide variety of ages portrayed to add the perspective of the way that climate changes affect us as we age. Cli Fi provides stories that look at how the environment interweaves with our bodily experiences and existence, the way that we both shape and are shaped by our ecology, altered by and altering our world. These stories remind us that we are participants in creating the world that we want.
This is not a utopian collection. The stories in these pages invite us to ask some hard questions, and it is hard to read the collection in one sitting, but that time to pause is necessary. It invites us to ponder for long periods between stories, looking deeper into the tales and what they mean for us as people. The authors remind us of our connection to the world around us, pointing out that water makes up most of our bodies, just as it makes up most of our surface world, and water runs through these narratives as much as the ink runs onto paper. It binds us to our environments, a flowing story that speaks of history and change, but also of the danger of contamination and the vulnerability of our world to our pollution.
This is not just an anthology ABOUT climate change, it is one that invites us into the process of changing our climate. Cli Fi invites us to ask critical questions about the world around us and our relationship to that world, to interrogate the messages we receive from our environment and open critical dialogue about it. Cli Fi is an invitation to do no less than change our world. Although primarily speculative fiction, this collection opens up real world possibilities.
To explore reviews of individual short stories in this collection, check out:
Rati Mehrotra’s “Children of the Sea”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Sean Virgo’s “My Atlantis”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Kate Story’s “Animate”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Nina Munteanu’s “The Way of Water”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Wendy Bone’s “Abdul”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Phil Dwyer’s “Invasion”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Holly Schofield’s “Weight of the World”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s “Night Divers”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
To discover more about Cli Fi, visit Exile Editions’ website at http://www.exileeditions.com
The anthology begins with tales from the perspective of aged protagonists, something that is rare in a society that doesn’t value aged bodies, and yet, the collection prefaces these bodies, positioning them as ones that have witnessed long term changes, long term development. Youth frequently don’t see changes as shockingly because everything is new and because they don’t have years of observation to back their ideas upon. When they see a news report that says that we are experiencing record temperature highs or record temperature lows, they are comforted when the news refers to these temperatures being reached at another time this century. But, they may miss the fact that the last few years have been ones where more records are being established, and where these records are being met or exceeded more often and in closer proximity. Whereas aged people can make observations about the longue duree, making observations over a longer period of time.
I shouldn’t suggest that by having ageing bodies at the outset, that this anthology is all about ageing. In fact, there are a wide variety of ages portrayed to add the perspective of the way that climate changes affect us as we age. Cli Fi provides stories that look at how the environment interweaves with our bodily experiences and existence, the way that we both shape and are shaped by our ecology, altered by and altering our world. These stories remind us that we are participants in creating the world that we want.
This is not a utopian collection. The stories in these pages invite us to ask some hard questions, and it is hard to read the collection in one sitting, but that time to pause is necessary. It invites us to ponder for long periods between stories, looking deeper into the tales and what they mean for us as people. The authors remind us of our connection to the world around us, pointing out that water makes up most of our bodies, just as it makes up most of our surface world, and water runs through these narratives as much as the ink runs onto paper. It binds us to our environments, a flowing story that speaks of history and change, but also of the danger of contamination and the vulnerability of our world to our pollution.
This is not just an anthology ABOUT climate change, it is one that invites us into the process of changing our climate. Cli Fi invites us to ask critical questions about the world around us and our relationship to that world, to interrogate the messages we receive from our environment and open critical dialogue about it. Cli Fi is an invitation to do no less than change our world. Although primarily speculative fiction, this collection opens up real world possibilities.
To explore reviews of individual short stories in this collection, check out:
Rati Mehrotra’s “Children of the Sea”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Sean Virgo’s “My Atlantis”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Kate Story’s “Animate”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Nina Munteanu’s “The Way of Water”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Wendy Bone’s “Abdul”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Phil Dwyer’s “Invasion”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Holly Schofield’s “Weight of the World”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s “Night Divers”
https://speculatingcanada.ca/2017/05/...
To discover more about Cli Fi, visit Exile Editions’ website at http://www.exileeditions.com
July 4, 2025
*3.5 stars*. Okay…..this is a hard one to review. It was not what I thought I was going to be reading especially at the beginning. I did not like the first 6 stories-probably because I didn’t relate to or understand them-they were way too “literary” for me. But I did enjoy the rest of the stories, they were still “literary fiction” but much closer to the type of climate change/disaster stories I expected. I had quite a few that I thoroughly enjoyed: “Degas’ Ballerinas”-Leslie Goodreid (I’d like a whole book in this world); “Invasion”-Phil Dwyer (wow-talk about on point for the politics between Canada & the US right now); “The Way of Water”-Nina Munteanu (another politically applicable one for the moment); “Abdul”-Wendy Bone (this one made me cry hard); “After”-John Oughton (another one I’d like a whole novel); “Weight of the World”-Holly Schofield (fascinating and realistic about politics & science); “Lying in Bed Together”-Richard Van Camp (utterly surprising and intriguing). Overall this is a good collection and all of us should be reading it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews