Paper short abstract:

Post-apocalyptic fiction offers a unique temporal structure where the present is defamiliarized as the recent past. By exposing the consequences of climate change and viral outbreak, these fictional future histories allow readers to consider how our present conditions can influence the future.

Paper long abstract:

Apocalyptic fiction has long been used as cautionary tales that reflect both the aspirations and fears of the moment in which it is produced. Though rooted in ancient religious texts, contemporary Western culture maintains a widespread obsession with imagining the eventual and seemingly inevitable collapse of modern society. Indeed, we are living in what many would term a pre-apocalyptic moment, constantly inundated with news of climate change and viral outbreak – compounding threats that seem almost impossible to solve and too significant to ignore. My paper argues that narratives about the end of the world offer a unique temporal structure that defamiliarizes the contemporary moment in which the text was produced as a pre-catastrophic past. And by asking readers to remember and reflect on fictionalized histories that have not yet (and may never) come to pass, post-apocalyptic fiction creates a space where readers are able critique the ways that the conditions of our present influence the future. As Raffaella Baccolini argues, “history, its knowledge, and memory are . . . dangerous elements that can give the dystopian citizen a potential instrument of resistance” (115). As such, by engaging with these post-apocalyptic histories of the future, like Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves where climate change creates global conditions where disease and pandemic outbreak are pervasive, readers are better able to critically examine our current trajectory toward possible mass-destruction and then consider the implications and possibilities of redesigning a more sustainable society from the bottom up.