Saturday, January 2, 2016

Cli-fi novelists at work: an online forum asks: "The legacy of Trump and racism into cli-fi plot - believable?"

An example on how cli-fi is catching on via forums and chat rooms:

http://www.writingforums.org/threads/legacy-of-trump-and-racism-into-cli-fi-plot-believable.143511/

Legacy of Trump and racism into ''cli-fi'' plot -- is this believable?

Discussion in 'Plot Development' started by Hubardo, Friday at 11:26 PM.
Update/note/afterthought/precaution:

The premise with Donald Trump getting elected within our lifetimes was not at all the starting point of this story, and I'm not trying to write some anti-Trump thing. I don't care enough about him to, at all. The main point here is supposed to be that shit is hitting the fan with climate change and there are absolutely clear racial divisions in how that shit is hitting the fan. Trump, in my mind, was just an easy way to amplify the historical explanation of how racial tensions ended up so much worse in the future. Hope that clarifies that this story is not about Trump.

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Premises:

-Trump was elected two terms in a row and had a long lasting, widespread impact on US policy and American culture
-Racial tensions between whites and everybody else has gotten way worse
-Superstorms are insane on the east coast now; certain eastern US cities are uninhabitable
-There are now semi-permanent climate refugee camps inland which are highly racially segregated
-Left/moderates use a sarcastic term -- Neo-Trumpites -- to refer to an intense resurgence of Trump-like rhetoric and policies; term has become fairly commonplace (like term neoconservative)
-Somewhere around 2050 or so, Neo-Trumpites have politically taken over the US again after the left had a decade or two of power

Here's the tricky plot setup I'm trying to pull off:

-Neo-Trumpites appointed a handful of idiots into top admin positions in the NOAA
-There has been a superstorm that displaced tens of thousands of predominantly African American and Latino people--> thousands of them were led into a somewhat more inland stadium for temporary shelter
-A second storm was detected coming and NOAA officials decided not to notify local emergency service personnel because (most controversial, possibly unbelievable element) they viewed it as an ethnic cleansing opportunity, letting them all die from a massive hurricane

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The MC somehow found out about this and her primary motive is to prove and expose it. There's other stuff but this is what's relevant for readers in this thread to know for now.

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