Superstorms evoke the right frisson of fear, but will we change our ways?

Hurricane Michael raging over the Florida panhandle in the US and Cyclone Titli swooping across Andhra Pradesh and Odisha have been dominating headlines for the last few days, with Typhoon Trami being last week’s villain.

Literature, cinema and TV, naturally, cannot remain unaffected by the awe-inspiring force of nature called ‘super storms’, given their unpredictability and undeniable propensity to wreak mass destruction. Satellite imagery of swirling masses of clouds bearing down on helpless communities trigger the right frisson of fear around the world.

That books, movies and serials featuring some unstoppable climatic spectre have gone up exponentially is not coincidental and clearly the genre needed a catchy name. Cli-fi, or climate fiction, is indeed an apt contender to give sci-fi a run for its box-office money. Of course, cli-fi is not a new phenomenon, given that countless authors from Jules Verne to Margaret Atwood have imagined worlds devastated by climate-related change or disaster.


But when comic book villains such as Poison Ivy morph into climate warriors — albeit with a dangerous formulae to bring climate-agnostic humans to book — it means the genre has caught the popular imagination. Whether climate changeepitomised by superstorms and other implacable destroyers will make us humans mend our ways is another matter.