Apocalypse in Crisis

Apocalypse is traditional and familiar, and it is an actualthreat; it is feared, desired, and banal. Apocalypse in Crisis discussesfictions from the 1940s to the present, examining shifts in the imagination ofapocalypse from the postwar British disaster novels, through novels of thecountercultural sixties, feminist interventions, and recent revisions andcritiques. As empire fades, ideas of sexualityshift, and attitudes to nature and to the city change, so apocalyptic fictionschange. The individual subject isasserted, immolated, transcended, abandoned; individual deaths are substitutedfor mass death; death is faked or erased. The subjects and survivors of catastrophe set about re-establishingcivilization, or they abandon it, finding new ways of being and of dying; theyrespond to it when it comes from outside, as an invasion, or they are immersedin it, as it shifts from being an event to being a condition. They flee the city for the country, or acceptthat they must draw on the energies of the world city in order to survive.

The book includes detailed discussion of novels by H. G. Wells, George M. Stewart, Nevil Shute, JohnWyndham, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, AngelaCarter, Anna Kavan, Arno Schmidt, Anthony Burgess, Ursula K. Le Guin, TomPerrotta, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, andKim Stanley Robinson.