So… who is Mitchell Zukor, and what does our answers to that question say about how Nathaniel Rich chose to develop the protagonist in his novel Odds Against Tomorrow?  Based on the group activity we completed in class today, I put together a word cloud that tracks our class’s answers to the question, who is Mitchell Zukor? The larger the size of the word, the more often it appeared across different groups’ answers.

(Click on the image for a larger version)

I find it interesting to see Mitchell’s character visualized like this as it makes salient some of the patterns in who he is, as well as some of the contradictions in who he is (like his being both socially awkward and persuasive, both introverted and caring).

When thinking about your final projects and creating your own works of cli-fi, you might want to consider the complexities of your own story’s characters and how different kinds of characterization might allow you to investigate different aspects of climate change.  For instance, in Odds Against Tomorrow, Nathaniel Rich seems to have created a protagonist who is obsessed with disaster in part as a way to explore our own culture’s obsession with apocalypse, and yet he makes Mitchell likable enough that we as readers seem to really care about what happens to him.