Climate Fiction... Sounds more post apocalyptic. I guess Bloom wanted to be the cool guy. Anyway, not wanting to sound a grumpy git. I love sci-fi. Love it! Here's a link to a definition and sub defs for cli-fi: http://pcillu101.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/cli-fi-as-new-term-for-literary.html I had to google it myself, you see. *grins*
I'm writing a short story right now, which could be described as 'cli-fi' I suppose. 'Cli Fi Dark' according to the definition found by doghouse. But mine is actually pre-apocalyptic, rather than 'post'.
As a sci-fi and post-apocalyptic lover, when I used to write plots for RPG Maker games I aways chased the cli-fi theme, earth was aways devastated by some natural catastrophe, but now that you asks I wonder. A asteroid hitting Earth is cli-fi?
I would simply call it sci-fi. Everyone knows (more or less) what that is, and ecology and climatology ARE sciences. Cli-fi could very rapidly become cli-che (a metaphor or phrase that has lost, though overuse, whatever impact it may have originally had).
of course it would change the climate, but then so would a world-wide nuclear war... it's still gonna be 'sci-fi' or 'post-apocalyptic' to agents and publishers, depending on when it takes place and what happens in the story... i can't see 'cli-fi' being adopted as a standard genre because it's really only a sub-genre of one of those...
One of my favorite recent reads, The Windup Girl has been tagged as biopunk. I was like, "Stop it! Stop it right now!"
