Why American climate fiction is fuelling age-old stereotypes about modern migration
While employing well-known ideas can help get points across about a potential future, there is a more compelling way to represent climate migration. 2 hours ago Wild fires on the US’s West Coast displaced many from their homes, making them climate change migrants. | Reuters
Typically set in the future, climate fiction (or “cli-fi”) showcases the disastrous consequences of climate change and anticipates the dramatic transformations to come. Among the various scenarios cli-fi considers is unprecedented population displacement due to droughts and disappearing coastlines. These stories echo assessments from the International Organization for Migration, which warned as early as 1990 that migration would perhaps be the “single greatest impact of climate change”.
Kitefin Li-Fi system. (Photo: pureLiFi)
US Army Europe and Africa embarks on the first large-scale deployment of Li-Fi communication technology.
The US Army is adopting Li-Fi optical wireless communication technology that uses the visible light, ultraviolet, and IR spectra to transmit data.
UK-based pureLiFi will provide its Kitefin system to the US Army Europe and Africa (USAREUR-AF) in a $4.2 million deal, in what the company described as ‘the world’s first large-scale deployment’ of the technology.
USAREUR-AF ‘is fielding the capability across its theatres of operations’, pureLiFi added.
By removing the need to use radio frequencies (RF), which can be detected and targeted kinetically and electronically, Li-Fi should increase the reliability and security of wireless communications as it emits a negligible electromagnetic signature.
BOOK REVIEW: Cli-fi coming soon to a planet near you Two new science-fiction books hope to wake us up to the frightening reality of what climate change means 21 January 2021 - 05:06 David Gorin Picture: 123RF/LILKAR
The awful attraction of climate-based science fiction, or “cli-fi”, is that it’s only borderline fiction. In real time we are witnesses to the formative aspects of the story, though we don’t want to believe what we see. Good cli-fi serves a vital purpose: literature may help to shake us from ignorance, indifference or inaction.
Two new novels do that, potently. Kim Stanley Robinson’s