In search of the Cormac McCarthy of Italy. The Source, the literary competition that will choose the best Italian climate fiction stories, is starting. The initiative, promoted by the CAP Group, manager of the integrated water service of the Metropolitan City of Milan, in collaboration with Libromania, a company controlled by the DeA Planeta Libri publishing house, is inspired by the podcast of the same name, The Source, released this summer and available free of charge. on all the most important platforms, and which tells the effects and consequences of climate change in an Italy that for 15 years ignored the alarms of scientists, suddenly finding itself the victim of the first water crisis in history.
The competition, which kicks off today 22 September and ends on 30 November, re-launches the challenge to writers and aspiring writers: to write an unpublished story within the literary genre called climate fiction (Cli-Fi), that is the science fiction genre that it is measured with the theme of climate change.
In fact, cinema, theater and literature have always played a prophetic function. The narration of a possible future, the creation of an imaginary, from time to time apocalyptic, fairytale, allegorical is itself part of the narrative tradition of the world. The reflection on time and tomorrow has produced great masterpieces, and only in the mid-twentieth century, to circumscribe a macro-genre, was the term science fiction or science fiction coined.
Climate fiction, on the other hand, is a decidedly more recent label. Among the illustrious names that are measured there are, to limit ourselves to the most famous, James G. Ballard (The underwater world), Ian McEwan (Solar), Margaret Atwood, famous for The Handmaid’s Tale, (Maddaddam’s Trilogy) and , most famous of all, Cormac McCarthy, author of the post apocalyptic novel The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.
Climate change is an issue that is now the top priority on the agendas of governments and major international institutions. Melting ice, rising ocean levels, rainfall and extreme weather phenomena are increasingly common, while vast areas of the planet are hit by unprecedented droughts and heat waves. This summer in Italy, 158 hectares of land literally went up in smoke, an area equal to the cities of Rome, Naples and Milan put together. The floods that devastated central Europe in July caused more than 180 victims in Germany alone.
These are phenomena that, according to scientists, are destined to intensify: think that the decade 2010-2019 was the hottest since there are reliable and regular records of temperature. Changes that make hydrogeological instability phenomena, crisis of agricultural systems, water crisis, spread of epidemics and extinction of animal and plant species more and more frequent. The Source’s purpose is to make a contribution in terms of raising awareness and to do so through the tool of imagination and storytelling.
Until November 30, it will be possible to send your own climate fiction story, between 20 and 30 thousand characters, by uploading it to the official website thesource.gruppocap.it. The best works, selected by a jury, will be collected in a book-anthology edited in collaboration with Libromania, which will see the light in the spring of 2022.
The Source is just the latest of the many initiatives to raise awareness on environmental issues conceived by the CAP Group. Last year, the public company promoted the Let’s Green! Operation, a competition created with the aim of rewarding good sustainability practices of citizens and associations by electing the greener Municipalities of the Metropolitan City of Milan.
For more information, to listen to the episodes of The Source, and to consult the competition rules: https://thesource.gruppocap.it/
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