When Jennifer Mills began writing her Miles Franklin longlisted book Dyschronia in 2011, there weren't a great deal of Australian novels grappling with a post climate change world.
Fast forward several years and a large number of critically-acclaimed works have featured some sort of environmental catastrophe. Australian publishers and booksellers have even adopted a term to help classify the string of books blurring the lines between genre and literary fiction: cli-fi.
"It's an exciting time to be a novelist," Mills says. "But in some ways I wish it wasn't."
Australian author Mireille Juchau believes writers can help make the climate change debate more nuanced and empathetic. Credit:James Brickwood
Sydney-based author Mireille Juchau is another writer who explores ecological disasters. Her most recent novel, The World Without Us, won a Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 2016 and was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize. The book explores grief and family through a world in which bees are dying out as a result of climate change. It has also been optioned for television.
Juchau believes climate change novels are popular because Australians are increasingly bombarded with alarming statistics. Fiction, she believes, is uniquely placed to explore what happens when those projections become reality.
"I feel like the current political debate – not just in this country, but particularly in this country – is impoverished," she says. "Fiction can help fill those gaps by providing a much more nuanced, exciting, imaginative and profound exploration of what is happening in our current moment. Fiction has this unique ability to articulate the inner life."
James Bradley, who has featured climate breakdown in several of his books, agrees.
Jennifer Mills says she hopes fiction can help people work through their fear and anger over climate change.
"It's not a coincidence there are so many dystopias around or that we keep telling stories about zombies and the undead, or even time travel stories," he says. "They're all expressions of a larger sense of a future that's slipping out of our control."
But Victoria University professor and author of the new book The White Girl, Tony Birch, is sceptical about what kind of impact "cli-fi" books can have on people's opinions – let alone government policy.
"I've read some really great fiction dealing with climate change and I hope the genre continues," he says. "But like any other form of communication, its impact will remain limited while we are subject to the deafening shriek of denialism."
Potential outcomes aside, Mills says one thing is clear: these themes aren't going away any time soon. Frequent bushfires and rising oceans haven't been restricted to fiction, either. Flood Damages, a book by young Australian poet Eunice Andrada, recently won the prestigious Anne Elder Award.
"Having done six years of fiction editing … I've read a lot of emerging writers' submissions," Mills says. "If anything, the new generation of writers are more passionate about this, more engaged and more aware."
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