Mike Hill, author and professor of English at UAlbany, discusses how storytelling can help us understand and respond to the existential challenge that climate change poses for humanity and how fiction writing — like science to some extent — is an exercise in imagining different possible futures.
On his syllabus for a course called Realism and Climate Fiction, Mike Hill includes two texts that don’t — on their face —seem like obvious choices for a class exploring the emergence of cli-fi as a literary genre.
One is Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road and the other is Robinson Crusoe, the 1719 novel about a shipwrecked sailor, which not only pre-dates the cli-fi genre by about 300 years but also the modern notion of the novel.
Mike addressed both in a part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit.
The Road is on your syllabus. You don't get told in that book what happened. You’re vividly experiencing the aftermath of some cataclysm through a father and son, but it's not explicitly a climate book. Why do you teach that book, and what do you teach about it?
MH: I really, really love that book for so many reasons, and it is not a climate fiction book, but it is one that allows us to tell a history that precedes climate fiction that connects with the lineage. That's the way genres work. Sometimes they organize things in retrospect. I think about a novel like Robinson Crusoe. It’s very much an ecological kind of fiction. Although in the same way it would not have been called a novel in 1719 when it was written, it would not have been called a climate fiction novel until now.
For me, it's a way to make a point about how literary value changes over time and how genres, different kinds of writing, as they are invented can help us rethink older text that we can learn to read in a new way. [Crusoe] focuses on, as he calls himself, somebody who's of the middle-lower area in life. Somebody who has all these early modern ambitions about making it big in the world and not being an aristocrat — those Enlightenment kinds of principles. But at the same time, that ambition leads him out into the world in such a way that puts him in really intimate connection with the environment.
The Road is not a cli-fi text; however, it has to do exactly with those themes you were talking about before regarding good guys and bad guys. Do you remember the relationship between the father and the son? First of all, they're nameless. It’s placeless, but it has a very profound sense of place. The narrative technique is very minimalist — a lot of just one word back and forth. It's like a Waiting for Godot meets I don't know what — Mad Max or something, right? And what the child is asking the father very often is: Are they good guys? Are they bad guys? And sometimes they can't tell, and sometimes they get mistaken as bad guys by good guys and vice versa. So there is that slippage too, in terms of how to survive, how to do better, how to do well.
That novel could have ended with the death of the father, and we would've had a gloomy, unequivocally gloomy, text. But it doesn't. It continues. And in fact, there's a really interesting, very experienced, scarred-up survivor that comes in and gets in contact with the son after he has had this very reverential scene with his father. And the novel really begins where it ends. They say, “What are we going to now do out in the world?” And the prose opens up. It's no longer that minimalist kind of back and forth. And it seems to me to end with possibility,
It's uplifting?
MH: Well, I don’t know. At least it's not so down-putting that we stop in a fit of gloom. I think the ambiguity maybe is where the hope lies, to the extent there's hope. Because we don't want a hallmark ending, either. These aren't utopian forms of fiction. Neither are they dystopian. And so there is a sense of possibility. We have these futures that exist simultaneously. One is of existential doom, and the other is about survival and possibility.
Mike explores the ecological themes in Robinson Crusoe more deeply in this article: “Close Reading at a Distance: Genre, Realism, and Ecology in Robinson Crusoe"
He mentioned a lot of books during our conversation, including: Goat Days by Benyamin, Animal's People by Indra Sinha and Playground by Richard Powers.
He also mentioned Dan Bloom’s work to popularize the term cli-fi in the literary world. Bloom’s website documents those efforts.
Doom & Bloom Books has even more.
Mike’s most recent book is On Posthuman War: Computation and Military Violence, which explores “how demography, anthropology, and neuroscience have intertwined since 9/11.” His next volume in that project will be called Ecologies of War: Climate Change, Literary Realism, and Political Violence.
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Interview and episode notes by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
Photo by Brian Busher
Hosted and written by Erin Frick
Erin Frick:
Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions, and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Erin Frick in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
Mike Hill:
I find that there's a great hunger for students because they feel nervous about this stuff. They see it in the headlines and what can I possibly do? And the fact that they can read something that's interesting and entertaining and full of tension and suspense and have these things actually not become horror stories, I think is worthwhile.
Erin Frick:
I, unfortunately, missed the moon landing. But, I did feel my blood pressure spike watching Andy Weir’s sci-fi best seller turned box-office smash hit The Martian, wherein botanist-astronaut Mark Watney performs the most mind-bending science imaginable to survive solo on Mars, abandoned with scant supplies and no way to communicate.
If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I’ll try not to spoil it completely, but in that apex moment of cinematic tension, when you’re waiting, wondering if Mark will safely reunite with his crew, it felt possible to imagine the suspense of watching the grainy broadcast as Neil Armstrong—30 seconds of fuel remaining—manually navigated the Eagle to a safe lunar landing.
For anyone lucky enough to have witnessed this unparalleled triumph of science and problem solving firsthand, this fictional comparison will be laughable. However, the power of storytelling to pump our emotions and help us imagine solutions to complex, seemingly unsolvable problems—that much is solid.
But today we’re not talking about sci-fi. Instead, we’re focusing on its literary cousin, climate fiction, also known as cli-fi.
My colleague Jordan Carleo-Evangelist sat down with UAlbany English Professor Mike Hill to learn about the origins and rise of the climate fiction genre, and how, by marrying compelling narratives and hard climate science, it holds potential to help us navigate one of the most pressing existential challenges of our time.
As a California native, Mike is no stranger to the perennial threats driven by climate change. At UAlbany, he teaches a course on ‘realism and climate fiction’, which takes a close look at the ways literature has increasingly begun to grapple with ecological concepts.
Mike examines climate fiction as a tool to share scientific realities with a mass market audience in a way that most scientific reports or academic papers probably never could. And it’s not just about the science, cli-fi offers hope: a way to explore how we might work through the problem of climate change, together, through collective energy and action.
Mike has also closely explored the history of the novel— a medium with a strong track record of driving major social change. We saw this with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which played a pivotal role in the abolition of slavery. We saw it again with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which revealed the abuse of immigrant workers and unsanitary meatpacking conditions in the early twentieth century.
Today, climate fiction has a similar opportunity — to not only stoke our collective imagination, but to probe possibilities for how we might work through the climate change problem and build a sustainable future for our planet.
Here’s Mike and Jordan.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
Why don't we start just telling us a little bit about how you came to UAlbany and how you came to do what you do and teach what you teach and be interested in the things that you're interested in.
Mike Hill:
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. I've been at Albany for 25 years now. Started off in California where I'm born and raised and went to graduate school and then came here as an assistant professor. My background, though, was not in environmental humanities, it was really in the history of the novel, specifically around the 18th century. This goes back to people like Francis Bacon and the whole idea of the scientific revolution, and about the same time that that's happening, the media revolution is taking place that has to do with print culture. So, people are reading and writing en mass for really the first time. And one of the things that they're reading a lot of are novels and a specific genre of novel they were looking at, which was also a new invention. It was called realism. It was the idea that you could be thinking things about a world that was bigger than yourself, that had laws of the physical universe that didn't adhere necessarily to church dogma or to the King's direct orders. So, there is a lineage between my historical interests and my interest in the history of writing and ways of thinking about genre that connect to some of these questions about climate fiction,
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
Environmental humanities, and climate fiction. What are environmental humanities and what is climate fiction?
Mike Hill:
Disciplines have histories too, just like writing does. And the discipline of English literature also begins, in any real institutional sense, about the same period that realism and the scientific revolution does. And one of the things that happens along the way, especially when you get into the 19th centuries, that you start to see a little bit of a divergence between, let's just call them idealized values and all the kinds of things that we associate maybe too hastily with more traditional forms of humanities, which is a kind of a detachment maybe from the objective forms of reality that we tend to think of. But as I said before, disciplines change. They go through different mutations and different forms of explorations, and one of those things is environmental humanities. And so given the kinds of pressures that the headlines bring, if not also other forms of reality like climate change and really stark forms of pollution and environmental catastrophe, but solutions also, I suppose that go along with that.
The humanities have responded. One of the ways that we've responded is to think more seriously about the scientific and the objective, the ecological in those senses, and to bring those things a little bit closer together.
The term climate fiction, one easy way to think about it is an article that a person named Dan Bloom wrote in around 2015, I think it was, who began to see something that maybe those of us that were too close to more traditional ways of thinking about literature weren't seeing. And that is a quantitative spike in novels about climate and about ecological concerns. And so I think it's fair to say that Bloom more or less coined the term “climate fiction.” He certainly promoted it, and then it's derivative, “cli-fi.” Again, this is how genres work sometimes. You don't see them until after they're here.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
Why did climate fiction come into being?
Mike Hill:
Yeah, you know, I love that question because it asks me to do something that climate fiction maybe does at its best, and that is to speculate a little bit. One of the interesting things about climate fiction is that there is this commitment to scientific understanding that's a very strong attribute of the genre. People that write climate fiction tend to study science as well, but they're also futurists. So, they're thinking not just about one future, which is apocalyptic and existentially threatening for the human species and many others, but about problem solving as well. Maybe it's a historical full circle and we're coming back to some enlightenment or 18th century kinds of possibilities where science and lit, future studies, and knowing things about the world and acting better are maybe getting some new kinds of energy.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
When you first told me about climate fiction, I'm thinking this is how we cope with doomsday scenarios, but you just said something a little bit more hopeful, which is problem solving. It could be art as a way to work through how we not just sort of emotionally deal with catastrophic outcomes, but avoid them?
Mike Hill:
And there's certainly a moment within this emerging genre and the histories we're beginning to tell about it, which forefront disaster. It's kind of an escapist genre, whether it's Mad Max or The Day After, or there's something about the “gloom boom,” as they also call it, around first iterations of climate fiction that I think is different from some of the, I think more valuable and probably more predominant forms of climate fiction, which is exactly as you say. I mean, it's a technique for knowing things about the world before they've actually arrived.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
If you look at a lot of the media and art that was created in the 50s and 60s and 70s during the Cold War, when people were very worried that we were going to sort of obliterate each other with nuclear weapons, do you think that at some point, we'll look back at what we're creating now in climate fiction the same way that we look at that now because that media, that art feels very much like a time capsule for that period.
Mike Hill:
I think it's probably possible that we could look back at this particular development within environmental humanities and more specifically, climate fiction, as a way of working through problems. I think the good news about that historical moment is we managed not to do the things that we feared. And I have to tell you that it's very uneven in terms of the we that's involved in doing or not doing the things that we fear.
We are no longer a leader or even a participant for that matter, in actively and scientifically based ways of dealing with climate change and CO2 emissions. That's a very big and recent and fairly radical change. But that may change again. But if you go to places like China where I teach a lot, different things are happening. It's an 85% electric car economy. Some people call China the first electro state, and they're also huge suppliers, not just of electric cars, but all kinds of other ecological technology. And it's even in the Chinese constitution with something they call the “ecological society.” I'm not trying to extol in some abstract sense the virtues of one country over another, but the “we” in the question, what are we doing is very different from place to place.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
It almost seems impossible to talk about climate change in a way that is apolitical. But I'm sort of curious because you have this perspective of having done this internationally in China, which is a very different political system. They industrialized incredibly fast with a lot of environmental harm in the process.
Mike Hill:
Absolutely.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
But also, as you said, is ahead of us in many ways on new technologies that will ultimately be better for the environment. How is talking about climate change in popular culture and literature and art different in China than it is here?
Mike Hill:
Clearly, we have a heavy amount of influence, not just in our politics, but also our popular culture that's wielded by the oil companies. This is not a political soapbox speech. This is just a matter of historical record. And that's not the case, maybe, in other places where there's more explicit forms of state control and you can think more about longer-term forms of planning than you can in every four years, complete reversal in climate change policy and things of that nature. So, I think the US does have really particular challenges. It is not a good thing to have your politics precede your science.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
Can a gripping climate fiction bestseller move the population in a way that a sobering, accurate consensus scientific report can’t?
Mike Hill:
What a great question. And it also gives me hope for the future, the longevity, of my discipline, which is questionable sometimes. I think in English literary studies experience and apathy and the imagination. And so if you look at a novel like Playground by Richard Powers, one of my favorites, which is very, very historically and scientifically informed by mining practices in French Polynesia or a novel like Animal's People, which is about the Union Carbide incident in India some years ago. The ways in which these characters interact, the kinds of things that they go through, produces a possibility for interconnection, which avoids two big pitfalls. One is the blame game. What's wrong with me? I just did something that polluted. I mean, I'm just going to have that non-plastic straw, and everything will be okay. And so, we experience it in different ways. We have the capacities to do different things about it depending upon where we are, but that doesn't mean we don't have something in common even though we have all those differences. So, you get out of that sense of just eternal gloom or blame game through that form of empathy and mutual kinds of experience.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
So that notion of good stories need villains. Usually, big corporations seem like the logical villains in these stories about environmental degradation, and historically, often they have been. But one of the interesting things about climate change is that it is sort of a collective effect of a lot of very small individual level actions.
Mike Hill:
Absolutely.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
How does that manifest in the literature?
Mike Hill:
I just will say this maybe as a footnote that some of the villainy in question is even more villainous than we think. They had the knowledge. They know and they do it anyway. Call that a particular type of villainy, I'm not sure, but it certainly is repressive of knowledge. It’s anti-science. It also is incredibly selfish in terms of the kinds of sympathetic, empathetic kinds of understanding that we were just trying to promote.
But the harder question than just to name the villain and the villainy is to think about those differences in experience and the unevenness that good fiction, good climate fiction can handle between the person in the kind of place and time we live in and the kinds of contributions that we make. And then the differences between us and the people whose homes are sinking because of what they're now calling in Alaska “Alaskan quicksand,” the melting of the permafrost, their homes are going down, and to not feel that there's such a great distance there. But at the same time, not to get into that spiral of doom or self-flagellation and just ask ourselves honest questions about what we can and can't do.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
UAlbany happens to be a place where we also do a lot of climate research. And so, if you were in a room in the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center with the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, what is your pitch to the climate scientists about why they need the humanities to help the world understand the importance and the urgency of the challenges they're trying to solve?
Mike Hill:
The historical tendency for the sciences and the humanities not to connect in ways that I'm saying they should and that they do in some of the better work in environmental humanities and cli-fi. Climate fiction has proven that science can be put to work in literary text in really effective ways. I think that's a standard feature of the genre. But I think maybe too, I would ask them whether or not they would think of the kind of work that they do as fiction in a much more technical sense—that is, in the creation of possible worlds, the ways in which time can be expanded and contracted. And when people do climate forecasting, they use very sophisticated forms of computer modeling to say, “maybe this.” That's a technique for knowing about reality before it is quite there. I also love the way that scientific technology functions as a medium, and I think it has a lot to do with the technology called writing.
When you think of ice core drilling and you think of taking molecular structures and being able to tell stories about what the environment looked like in the age of the dinosaurs, the farther you go the further back you are in those models. And of course, that's all used through computation. And there's ways in which we work with media and with really big questions that tend to be on the philosophical side of things, like the nature of time, or what it means to have technological access to new forms of reality, what new knowledge is and new experiences go along with that. So, there's a lot more common ground, maybe.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
Nine out of 10 people are never going to read a UN climate study.
Mike Hill:
That's right.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
But they will probably read Florida or something like it. And so if you're going to get to people, if you're going to convince people that we need to act, I feel like science needs all different kinds of art. It happens in different settings, but it seems to me that if I'm a climate scientist I’m thinking rationally, about, how are we going to reach and convince people? Right. Humanities have to be part of that.
Mike Hill:
Yeah, I think that's a wonderful way to think about the interface and exchange between the two. My English students may not read the IPCC reports unless they take my class where we do read them, but the texts that we read, they've been read, and they're even in there in some regard, either in a fictional or in a real way. Many of the people who feature in some of these texts are people who have actually existed. And the students get the knowledge out of it, and they get the storytelling together, and they realize that the storytelling and the knowledge, the knowledge is partly about storytelling. And the storytelling is also about the advance of knowledge. And there is that science humanities kind of interconnection. And I love meeting scientists who are interested in talking about the imagination. It's so important to scientific inquiry too if you think about it.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist:
Do people want to read stories in which their choices are the problem? To the extent that we consume art as an escape from our actual daily problems, do we want to be a little bit the bad guy in the stories that we read?
Mike Hill:
Over time, that delicate balance between being implicated and having it not be an all or nothing game. We're implicated, but we're implicated differently. And there are things that one can do. There are ways to think through our own contributions to electoral politics or the ways in which we do things, the choices that we make in terms of what to teach, how to associate, what to consume, when and how to travel, all those kinds of things. And I think too, it has to do with that moment that I think my most successful students, at least from my perspective of success, have in a class like climate fiction, is that moment of recognition, Hey, that's not me whose house is sinking in Alaskan quicksand, but that doesn't mean I get to not think about this because I got a stake in this game too.
Erin Frick:
That was UAlbany’s Mike Hill, professor of English at the College of Arts and Sciences, in conversation with Jordan Carleo-Evangelist.
In this week’s episode, they discussed the role climate fiction plays in helping us make sense of big questions—how we relate to the natural world, how we shape the environment, and what these interactions reveal about our role in the future of our planet.
They also explored how storytelling can bridge science and the humanities, helping the public better understand climate change, spark collective imagination, and inspire meaningful action toward a sustainable future in which both humans and nature can thrive.
To hear Mike’s take on whether we can, some three hundred years later, retroactively classify Robinson Crusoe as climate fiction, and why the notoriously dark novel The Road left him feeling at least a little hopeful, check out the Long(er) Version, in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people.
Scott Freedman provided audio production and editing from the UAlbany Digital Media studio deep inside the Podium tunnels.
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist conducted this interview and spearheaded research, with an assist from Matt Pacenza—a former colleague who now teaches high school English in Salt Lake City.
We’ll be back next week with another short conversation about something interesting.
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