ABSTRACT
Both nuclear holocaust fiction and climate fiction are subgenres of disaster fiction and reflect the anxieties and fears evoked by the rapid technological development of the twentieth century that has resulted in an environmental crisis and, perhaps, in a threat to biological life on earth. These labels are used to refer to fiction written in the last seventy years and were coined to emphasise the common features these texts have: they address our apprehensions regarding, respectively, the creation and use of atom bombs and nuclear energy plants, and anthropogenic climate change. The labels were given retrospectively, and the classification of texts into these categories is to a certain extent arbitrary; for example, Dan Bloom, who coined the term cli-fi, included books written long before climate change discussions began in the genre. In general, critics do not agree on how to divide disaster fiction, and blogs devoted to recent literature, encyclopaedias, and lexicons of science fiction all give several related entries whose scope overlaps: apocalyptic fiction, holocaust and postholocaust fiction, ecocide fiction, environmental science fiction, eco-dystopias, to name a few.
