THE RISE OF “CLI-FI”: THE NARRATIVE FRAMING OF ENVIRONMENTAL ANXIETY, CLIMATE-INDUCED MIGRATION, AND ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE IN POST-2020 ANGLOPHONE SPECULATIVE FICTION

Abstract

This article examines the consolidation of climate fiction (“cli-fi”) as a distinct literary mode within contemporary Anglophone fiction, with particular attention to novels published after 2020. Drawing on Amitav Ghosh’s (2016) diagnosis of a representational “derangement” in realist fiction, Rob Nixon’s (2011) theory of slow violence, and recent affect-theoretical scholarship on eco-anxiety and solastalgia (Albrecht, 2019; Pihkala, 2022), this study analyzes how post-2020 novels—including Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), Richard Powers’s Bewilderment (2021), and Abi Daré’s And So I Roar (2024)—develop new narrative strategies for rendering the Anthropocene, climate-induced migration, and ecological collapse legible to readers. The paper argues that post-2020 cli-fi is characterized by four converging formal tendencies: scalar recalibration between the intimate and the planetary; fragmented and paratactic narration that mimics the affective texture of climate anxiety; a documentary-hybrid mode that borrows from policy discourse and nonhuman narration; and an emergent turn from dystopian spectacle toward “hopepunk” and “solarpunk” registers of collective agency. The study further situates climate-induced migration narratives, exemplified by Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and its post-2020 successors, within postcolonial and environmental-justice frameworks that resist the securitization of the “climate refugee.” The article concludes that cli-fi’s rise reflects not merely a thematic trend but a structural renegotiation of the novel form’s capacity to narrate the unrepresentable temporalities of planetary crisis.