Climate Fiction and Literary Activism: Imagining the Anthropocene through Narrative Intervention

Abstract

This article examines climate fiction (commonly abbreviated as cli-fi) as a site where literary form and political action converge in the era of anthropogenic ecological crisis. Drawing on ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies, postcolonial environmental humanities, and recent empirical reception research, the essay argues that climate fiction operates not merely as thematic engagement with environmental concern but as a mode of literary activism: a discursive intervention that reorganises perception, reshapes affect, and recalibrates the moral imagination of its readers. Beginning with the genealogy and contested definition of the genre, the discussion moves through major Anglophone novels (Atwood, Robinson, McCarthy, Powers, Kingsolver), Global South and decolonial counter-narratives (Ghosh, Habila, Sinha), and emergent forms such as solarpunk, Indigenous futurisms, and young-adult cli-fi. The article identifies four mechanisms by which climate fiction performs activism—cognitive scaling, affective rehearsal, ethical extension, and counter-discursive imagining—while taking the critiques of genre commodification, anthropocentric humanism, and the limited empirical evidence of behavioral change seriously. The essay concludes that climate fiction's activist value lies less in producing converts than in furnishing a shared vocabulary of catastrophe and possibility, without which collective political imagination cannot proceed.