Apocalypse is traditional and familiar, and it is an actual
threat; it is feared, desired, and banal. Apocalypse in Crisis discusses
fictions from the 1940s to the present, examining shifts in the imagination of
apocalypse from the postwar British disaster novels, through novels of the
countercultural sixties, feminist interventions, and recent revisions and
critiques. As empire fades, ideas of sexuality
shift, and attitudes to nature and to the city change, so apocalyptic fictions
change. The individual subject is
asserted, immolated, transcended, abandoned; individual deaths are substituted
for mass death; death is faked or erased. The subjects and survivors of catastrophe set about re-establishing
civilization, or they abandon it, finding new ways of being and of dying; they
respond to it when it comes from outside, as an invasion, or they are immersed
in it, as it shifts from being an event to being a condition. They flee the city for the country, or accept
that 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, John
Wyndham, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, Angela
Carter, Anna Kavan, Arno Schmidt, Anthony Burgess, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom
Perrotta, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, China Mieville, Jeff VanderMeer, and
Kim Stanley Robinson.
