Neither fish nor fowl: Travelling across genres and disciplines through 21st century Australian Cli-Fi

Abstract

In 2014, Juliet McKenna wrote ‘The genre debate: Science fiction travels farther than literary fiction’ (McKenna 2014). This title aligns literature and genre with travel, but she also resorts to place-based metaphors to establish the distance between specific types of writing. ‘Speculative fiction’, she suggests, ‘prompts the reader to pay so much more attention, looking for the details that make sense of this strange world. Reading speculative fiction isn’t arriving in Manchester. It’s finding yourself in Outer Mongolia with no help from Lonely Planet or a rough Guide’. Cli-fi is notoriously difficult to locate generically, but thinking about it in relation to travel may assist in understanding how it works to develop contemporary identities. This paper therefore examines specifically Australian cli-fi, predominantly from the 21st century and its use of concepts familiar from travel writing. These include touristic alienation/authenticity, destination image perception as it relates to revisit intention, and mental time travel. This enables us to highlight local Australian literature in a global context in relation to cli-fi and travel. We argue that travel concepts as they are engaged in non-narrative travel literature enables an engagement with cli-fi that moves beyond debates about its generic or literary status to deeper more existentially relevant understandings of what it means to be human in the 21st century.