[INTERVIEW] Kim Ki-chang: 'The climate crisis has already brought us halfway to an apocalyptic society'

Kim Ki-chang's new short story collection in the climate fiction genre, "Love in the Time of Climate Change," was published on April 2. Courtesy of Minumsa

Kim Ki-chang, author of "Love in the Time of Climate Change," pushes readers to feel climate crisis' effects

By Ko Dong-hwan

Novelist Kim Ki-chang believes that the world today is anything but predictable because of all the extreme weather phenomena around the planet ― collectively known as the "climate crisis." Our daily lives, he says, are instead irregular, risky and unstable.

He doesn't have to single out a particular event to recognize that the climate crisis is already here. He can now feel it almost naturally on a daily basis.

He expressed it in his latest work, "Love in the Time of Climate Change," with phrases like "hot winter," "chilly spring," or elaborated out to a grimmer degree in: "Sophie blocking her ears to stop hearing her skin being grilled under the sun," or "getting sunburnt under the morning sunlight without having closed the curtains over the windows last night."

Such vivid depictions put readers at the center of pain and horror against the real world that is becoming more and more unpredictable. This unpredictability is such an overwhelming force that, as he points out, even Korea's tech-savvy national meteorological center is sometimes left confused.

"These weather guys, in fact, forecast as they are shrouded in this unpredictability," Kim told The Korea Times. "The climate crisis has already brought us halfway to an apocalyptic society, where we can predict less and less every day."

The short story collection's ground zero consists of various real-life climate issues: rising temperatures, more frequent tornadoes, the effects of greenhouse gases, the Australian bushfires from 2019 that for months burned 14 percent of the world's forests, and global energy firms clashing over their interests. These problems are as close to apocalyptic as humanity has faced so far ― and it is very clear what direction they will take in the near future.

"Before working on this collection, I asked myself a question both desperate and abysmal: since climate crisis is no longer merely the problem of polar bears, but that of ourselves, and a very imminent one, what should I do then, or what can I do now?" Kim said.

The cover of "Love in the Time of Climate Change" / Courtesy of Minumsa

The climate crisis' unfair tolls

Published by Minumsa in early April, "Love in the Time of Climate Change" highlights the fact that the climate crisis has varying tolls on people of different social classes, nationalities and ethnicities.

It's depicted in the first three works that share the same fictitious world, where some so-called "chosen people" with enough money and particular socially acceptable backgrounds are allowed inside an air-conditioned artificial space, under a huge dome that protects residents from the scorching sun, while others who were ostracized or chose to live outside in nature lived outside the dome.

The two groups constantly battle. Outsiders dig underground tunnels to reach inside the dome, either to live there or overthrow the society inside; while insiders keep the society safe by preventing the outsiders from coming in. The plot reaches a climax when the outsiders inflate condom-balloons containing explosives and blow them over the dome, shattering its cover.

"I wanted to show that the climate crisis is not just an environmental issue, but it will also speed up its unfair tolls (physically and mentally) on different classes of people," Kim said.

He wanted to deliver this message in as entertaining a way as possible. He used characters and settings from various cultures and countries: from survivors in the dome society's apocalyptic world, to an uncivilized mute boy living in a cave, to a polar bear and its cub constantly encountering predators, to a newly formed couple who keep digging a hole and building a tower without any apparent reason, only to get murdered by neighbors.

"I wanted to show various aspects of how the climate crisis can affect people's lives and those in various relationships," said Kim. "What I didn't want was to overwhelm readers with a bunch of information, because it makes storytelling dull and I am not a news writer."

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Emotion, more powerful than knowledge

Prior to writing "Love in the Time of Climate Change," Kim was most strongly motivated by a campaign video jointly made by Greenpeace and the Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi, which alerted viewers about melting icebergs in the Arctic. Titled, "Elegy for the Arctic," the three-minute video shows Einaudi playing sorrowful music on a small floating iceberg, while the frozen lands in front of him begin to melt and crack.

Kim said that the icebergs in the video "rip like paper," a description he used in one of the short stories he wrote about polar bears searching for ways to survive amid melting glaciers.

"It's just like the Maldives, where the country gradually loses its land due to rising sea levels," said Kim. "The Arctic is more than just a sheet of ice. It's where people and animals have lived. With the story, I wanted to depict the surreal emotions of the sobbing Earth."

Using his literary imagination, Kim wanted to shatter the status quo, where people, although they have learned enough about climate crisis either voluntarily or by chance, don't go further than learning just the facts. He couldn't find any clues that may lead to resolving this impending phenomenon. So the author tried to shake up the stagnant situation by trying to move people with emotion, not merely by providing them with information.

"Fear may not be the most effective method for us to face the climate crisis, but when we face life-or-death situations that force us to decide what we should do in our final moments, what will ultimately drive us to make that final decision is emotion rather than information," Kim said.

If people's minds when they chose not to go further than learning the mere facts about the climate crisis could be conceived of as "placid," what Kim wanted to do was throw a rock into that water and disrupt it to make a "necessary ripple."

"I hope my stories will provide 'sense-oriented knowledge' instead of 'cognitive knowledge' to readers," Kim said. "Because so far, they have been reluctant to do anything (radical), although they know that what they will meet in the end will be their own self-destruction."

Kim, a self-claimed neophyte writer, said that there was one more story he failed to finish and include in the collection ― one mixed with unpredictable weather and unpredictable romance. "It was so hard to let 'unpredictability' slip into the plot that I eventually gave up," Kim said. "But do you know what's good about being a writer? Writers can keep challenging the narratives about various subjects."

"Love in the Time of Climate Change" is a new addition to "climate fiction," a genre not yet fully developed in Korea but already extensive in international book markets. Kim hopes that his latest work will encourage Korean readers to read more "cli-fi" books.

"I believe that a good book has the power to drive readers to continue reading another book," Kim said, mentioning "I'm With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet," by the Booker Prize-winning Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, and nine others as an example. "I hope my latest work gets translated someday and encourages more international readers to jump into the world of cli-fi."

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