Polar City Red

"Yes, Polar City Red was the first novel ever to be published and promoted explicitly as a cli-fi novel. I commissioned the novel back in 2010, to promote my work on the concept of ‘polar cities’ – with all credit and royalties going to Jim. To give the concept a literary handle, I asked Jim to write a novel under his own byline and with his own plot, timeframe and cast of characters, set in 2075. The only things I asked were that the book be about one such city in Alaska and that the title be Polar City Red . I was involved in promoting the idea that survival communities might be built in the far north of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Russia in the event that future global warming impact events forced millions of climate refugees to those regions. The New York Times wrote about my concept back in 2008 . Jim had written several science fiction novels already; he accepted the commission and published the book in early 2012. I wrote dozens of press releases and op-eds calling the novel a ‘cli-fi thriller.’ Margaret Atwood was kind enough to tweet, and with her large Twitter following, word got around. So Jim’s book gave birth to the cli-fi term, and Atwood’s tweet solidified its ascent. Polar City Red is about a family of Americans who are forced to leave their home in Minnesota and make their way north to a pioneering polar city in northern Alaska, threatened daily by looters, marauders and survivalists living around the fortified perimeters of Polar City Red. Laughter’s novel was a hybrid of science fiction and climate fiction, and thanks to Polar City Red , we’re talking about cli-fi today. That’s why I consider it a pivotal book in the early history of climate fiction literature. It’s still available in paperback."