ABSTRACT
This essay explores the fraught and polarized relationship between fiction, belief, and climate change to query the possible effects that climate change fiction, or cli-fi, stands to have on self-identified climate skeptics. Bringing together environmental humanities scholarship on the conventions of the emerging genre of cli-fi, empirical research into the identity and beliefs of real-world climate skeptics, and cognitive research on the ways in which narratives can impact readers, it explores formal trends of cli-fi and stories of climate skepticism to consider possible paths between reading fiction and real-world pro-environmental behavior.
