Reading Climate Fiction (and Nonfiction) through First Nations Cultural Genre Theory

Abstract For Indigenous peoples, all stories begin with Country. And as climate change reveals, all stories will end with Country too. This paper re-examines popular framings of the climate fiction (cli-fi) genre, and the ways ancient and contemporary First Nations realities disorganise colonial and western conceptions of what we call climate stories. For context, I’ll first illustrate how my research project Laying Down the Lore re-organises speculative fiction (spec fic) genre theory more broadly in an indigenous cultural sense.