Critical Component: Fiction in a Strange Climate; Practical Component: Children of Tomorrow

Climate fiction, or 'cli-fi', represents a valuable bridge for the communication of climate science. Although there is a developing body of scholarly literature on cli-fi, much of which appropriately draws on philosophy and close-reading practices, there are very few accounts that offer a taxonomy of the genre itself. The Critical Component, Fiction in a Strange Climate, advances a descriptive typology of climate fictions based upon a qualitative dataset of over two hundred fictions, which has been built especially for the purposes of this thesis. The creative component, a novel entitled Children of Tomorrow, also takes up the subject of anthropogenic climate change. Combined, the critical and practical components attempt to answer the central research question: how, and to what extent, has narrative fiction—in particular, the novel—engaged with anthropogenic climate change?