BRENT RYAN BELLAMY

science fiction studies, American literature and culture, energy humanities

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Survival to Reproduction: Rawles and DeNiro

As a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and survivalist, James Wesley, Rawles authors three books Patriots (1990-2009), Survivors (2011), Founders (2012), and Expatriates (2013) that imagine a near future in the wake of financial and social meltdown in the United States and negotiate a tricky ideological field between the potential and actual, the imagined and desired. The events of Patriots and Survivors occur simultaneously, suggesting that that much needs to be said about the time immediately following the disaster. Each book is subtitled A Novel of the Coming Collapse (1) and variously describe the stakes of catastrophe as “a full-scale socioeconomic collapse,” “the volatile era known as the ‘the Crunch,’” and “a perfect storm of reckless banking practices, hyperinflation, a stock market gone mad, and the negligence of our elected officials.” (2) Each description foregrounds the right conditions not only for collapse, but for the ‘know how’ and civilian expertise of the survivalist to become the ideal type, the ones who will thrive. Indeed, Patriots describes itself as “a thrilling narrative depicting fictional characters using authentic survivalist techniques to endure the collapse of American civilization. Reading this compelling, fast-paced novel could one day mean the difference between life and death,” (3) so the characters and stories may be fictional, but the techniques, militia code words, and munitions are all real—as the expansive glossaries at the back of each book suggest. Further, the index of each book isn’t for place names, character names, or events, but is rather for survival techniques and equipment, arms, and situations. Despite their exciting enticement to would be survivalists, each novel bears a weighty disclaimer that the book is not meant to take the place of a survival manual, to constitute legal or medical advice, or to instruct the reader on “the fabrication of devices that may be dangerous, illegal, or both.” In their exterior marketability these books label apocalypse as an object of desire, a moment for the role of the survivalist to move from being incidental to history towards its prime mover.

The final chapter of Patriots condenses its politics. Chapter 33 begins with an epigraph form Thomas Jefferson—“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms”(4)and is set 27 years after the collapse as Solomon Michael Lendel, a child born during the Crunch, attends his first classes at Boston College. The class is interrupted by a female student who notices Lendel’s gun and declares “He’s carrying a concealed weapon! That’s not allowed on campus!” (5) Rawles lets the tension hang as he describes the piece—“a well-worn XD .45 pistol and counter-balanced pair of spare loaded magazines in a hand-crafted shoulder holster. The leather rig was tooled in a floral Heiser renaissance pattern.” (6) The professor embarrasses the young lady and vindicates Lendel when he says, “I can see it plain as day,” and then offers a history lesson, engaging in current gun control legislation debates in the United States:

There is no University policy on the carrying of firearms, whether concealed or not. Nor should there be. Granted, open carry of guns has gradually gone out of style in the big cities these last few years. There isn’t much crime in the streets these days. However, this young gentleman’s choice to carry a gun—for whatever reason he chooses—is his own. He is a Sovereign Citizen and sui juris. The state has no say in the matter. It is strictly an individual choice, and a God-given right. The right to keep and bear arms is an absolute, secured by the Bill of Rights. I should also remind you that it is one of the main reasons we spent four horrendous years fighting the Second Civil War. How quickly we forget. Now let’s get on with class, shall we? (7) 

Rawles establishes a set of micro-power relations for political ends in this passage. The gun-toting Lendel, here, is an innocent bystander who is simply exercising his rights, while the nonplussed female student is given the voice of a reactionary, anti-gun liberal, which seems to mark her as anti-survivalist as well, finally, the professor is the bedrock voice of reason able to mediate these two positions in favour of divine law. In Rawles’s series survival becomes the baseline against which human actions and desire are chalked up.


The emphasis of Rawles’s novels situate survival as an obvious underpinning logic of post-apocalyptic fiction tout court, something David Seed locates as early as Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) in his study Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives (2013). By extension, survivalist writing marks the most extreme expression of this logic, a moment when a basic question of the genre, ‘who will survive the end of the world,’ becomes formalized in a set of characters with the particular knowledge and expertise called for by the apocalyptic situation. Why not equip your characters as trained individuals with survival know-how for the end of the world? In Rawles’s survivalist fiction, it isn’t ‘plain, ordinary folks’ who manage to escape death and rebuild a new life instead militia members, gun enthusiasts, ex-military, and woodsy types band together to safeguard themselves and the U.S. from looters, criminals, and thugs. In order to fold Rawles’s work back into the narrative movement of post-apocalyptic fiction, an emphasis could be placed on visible signs of the hidden ideologeme at the heart of this university scene: Lendel is a child born of the collapse and his return to school indicates both a restored United States, to use Brin’s phrase, and that the future is once again in the grips of the productions of the present. Framing survival through children and families, which are so often a part of post-apocalyptic fiction, shifts its ideological work towards reproduction.

Turning then to a novel about survival, rather than survivalists, the Epilogue of Alan DeNiro’s Total Oblivion, More or Less (2009) closes the novel on the same register on which it begins—that of the family. Macy, the young female protagonist, opens the novel by imagining, in advance of the struggles found in its plot, that “all of this trouble will pass over.” (8) The return to normalcy she longs for includes electricity, the retreat of horse warriors, the return of land captured by an Empire, that cars could run again, that the plague will be cured, and that, in her words,  “we’ll all go back to St. Paul and I’ll start my senior year, none the worse for wear.” (9) The stakes, for the protagonist, are already set at a continuation of how life is supposed to be. She longs for the natural carrying-on that she’s come to expect after sixteen years of life in the American mid-west. Her reflections at the end of the novel carry a weighty reminder that things may appear to have been altered, but some structures, some relations continue whether or not they have been consciously maintained. Thus, in the epilogue, as she laments the death of her Mother and her brother, she comes to a revelation: “I understand love a little bit more—and what it can cost. But it’s a cost I’m more willing to pay. Mother taught me that. Ciaran taught me that. My living breathing family is still teaching me that. I don’t pretend to be wise anymore, and I don’t try to stop being afraid when I’m afraid, or angry when I’m angry. It sounds so easy but it’s the hardest things in the world.” (10) In this passage, any vaguely utopian hope for the future, even if it’s that continuation of her life with electricity, cars, and high school, is evacuated, replaced with something almost unnamable, at least in this novel—the continuation of the family through the protagonist’s quiet acceptance.

Indeed, the agenda of the ideological lesson of the novel comes from a note enclosed just before the Epilogue written by Macy’s sister, Sophia. Sophia becomes a midwife in the midst of the great geographic and political changes that occur in the novel, which include the emergence of an empire—Nueva Roma—and the deepening of the Mississippi to well-nigh Marianas Trench fathoms. The note reads:

A Birth during Wartime: At 8:02 p.m., on the seventh day of the egret’s month, 120 yards below sea level, two miles northeast of Nueva Roma, Macy [last name redacted] was born to Em [last name redacted] and Wye [last name redacted]. / Her weight at birth: 5 pounds, 4 ounces. / She is of no nationality, no country. She is of the sea, and her parents. / The Birth proceeded without incident. / Macy is a name from Old French, which means “weapon.” / (log of Sophia Palmer, midwife(11)


Is this what makes up the “More or Less” of the title? It certainly marks the turn away from the rebirth of the nation and state that happen in Rawles’s novels. But it does imagine the future from within this structure of the family, “of the sea, and of her parents.” The redacted last names point to a negotiation between the past and the future, as the legacies and inheritances of the old family are replaced by the hope for the future that grows in the new one. Further, Macy, in a lovely utopian gesture, means “weapon,” and signals the birth of possibility for radical change even as it comes from the “Old French.” Like the end of Patriots, DeNiro’s novel highlights another structure—reproduction—that impinges upon the way post-apocalyptic fiction tends to imagine future with the family becoming its most outward and visible sign.


(1) The subtitle of Patriots is actually A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse while Expatriates is A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse.
(2) Quotes taken from the dustjackets of Patriots, Survivors, and Founders.
(3) Emphasis mine.
(4) James Wesley, Rawles, Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse (Berkeley: Ulysses Press, 1990-2009), 386.
(5) Rawles, Patriots, 386.
(6) Rawles, Patriots, 386.
(7) Rawles, Patriots, 387.
(8) Alan DeNiro, Total Oblivion. More or Less (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009), 3.
(9) DeNiro, Total Oblivion, 3.
(10) DeNiro, Total Oblivion, 306.
(11) DeNiro, Total Oblivion, 297.

Science Fiction and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

I gave this paper at MLG-ICS 2013 in Columbus, Ohio. It is a development of my earlier post on Immobility, but here frames some of the problems of that text within the larger problematics of the genre question: post-apocalyptic fiction or science fiction?


The science-fictional world is not only one different in time or place from our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference makes.

—Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction

Much as the historical novel fascinated the attention of Georg Lukács, science fiction has attracted the attention of Marxist critics for its attentiveness to history and historical movement. What then to make of post-apocalyptic fiction, that rapidly growing set of texts written by genre writers and literary authors alike, authors writing, at times, in the mode of science fiction and the older realism of which Lukács was enamoured? Little has been written specifically engaging post-apocalyptic fiction. James Berger and Evan Calder Williams have separately grappled with the implications of post-apocalyptic film; while, Teresa Heffernan has engaged the shifting valences of apocalyptic culture in the wake of postmodern theory. All three read post-apocalyptic cultural forms as a sign of the waning of the explanatory power of the apocalypse as a narrative that guides and structures meaning today or at least as a sign that its role has changed. I see post-apocalyptic fiction continuing the work of positing a telos to strive towards, but it seems to me that the end point posited by many works in this genre emphasize a reproduction of the present state of things over and above the type of radical break one could anticipate from either science fiction or an apocalyptic event. Indeed, post-apocalyptic fiction seems to arrive at an epistemological limit – things could be different from the present – but instead of crossing it, instead of extrapolating a radically different future, it imagines the continuation of the present ad infinitum.

In order to elaborate this mode, I’d like to make a distinction between the way science fiction figures the present as a historical moment subject to change, and the tendency of U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction to frame the contemporary as a perpetual present. I read the way post-apocalyptic fiction repeatedly dramatizes this limit in relation to critical discussions of science fiction, contrasting the form that enacts the future without difference to the form for thinking the future asdifference. In developing this comparison, I move first to what Mark Bould has dubbed the “Suvin Event” (19); that is, Darko Suvin’s introduction of cognitive estrangement to discussions of the poetics of science fiction. I finish by reading Brian Evenson’s Immobility (2012) through Suvin’s poetics of estrangement to distinguish the inner logics of post-apocalyptic fiction from science fiction and to insist on the need for a constant and rigorous engagement with those novels that represent the stasis of life after the end and the theories of science fiction that insist on and demand that we think of the future.

Science fiction is, and has been, deeply indebted to the social contexts and historical moment from its own present, which it estranges in its extrapolations of the future. The way science fiction generates its extrapolations remains inseparable from its narrative operations as described by Suvin’s still-contested contribution to science fiction studies: cognitive estrangement. Cognitive estrangement describes the displacement of contemporary ideological and material commitments and presuppositions onto a fictional world which appears different from our own in a process that then necessarily allows us to perceive those elements with fresh eyes. So, science fiction is always already, on Suvin’s account, about the present. Within the estranged space-time, the cognitive mode of science fiction plays out a logical narrative, so that technological advancements and characters’ actions and relations develop and operate in rational accordance with the spatio-temporal conceit of the fiction. Cognitive estrangement works on both a formal level and the level of content, as it enables science fiction to warn, diagnose, proscribe, and act as “a mapping of possible alternatives” (12). Suvin argues that a common method for accustoming a reader to a new space and time was to “have the hero or heroine define it for the reader by growing into it” (79). The mediation of the protagonist, then, allows the reader to slowly come to terms with the estranging situation.

While science fiction remains punctuated by moments of radical difference, I argue, the apocalyptic event of post-apocalyptic fiction tends to resonate as a difference that makes no difference. Translating Suvin’s reading of science fiction characters, the narrative strategy of having characters grow into the world stands out as a hallmark of post-apocalyptic fiction as well. But, rather than emphasizing difference and extrapolation, post-apocalyptic fiction tends depict a return to the all too familiar. The movement from apocalypse to reproduction describes the impasse that lies at the heart of post-apocalyptic narrative form. The apocalyptic event is an alibi, a dead letter, a formal placeholder preventing radical difference, keeping any real event at bay. If this is the case, then the estrangement of post-apocalyptic fiction doesn’t herald the advent of some new content or reveal any alternatives to the present, but exists purely in a formal capacity as accumulated formal sediment from earlier moments of science fiction, a generic residue of previous nows that continues to radiate meaning by structuring post-apocalyptic narratives. Which brings us to my question: what is at stake in a form that seems best read as science fiction, but under closer scrutiny is so in name only?

Evenson’s Immobilityoffers a glimpse of the operations and politics of post-apocalyptic fiction. The world of Evenson’s novel, full of complexities that are never fully revealed, is focalized through the central character, who wakes from a stasis-like deep freeze at the novel’s start. The starting point of the novel’s meditation on immobility is that of the paraplegic protagonist, who cannot use his legs and is told he needs to receive a drug-cocktail shot to his spine every twenty-four hours in order to slow its deterioration and stave off his encroaching death. The novel follows this disabled amnesiac across a torn and hostile post-nuclear landscape as he is carried by two special clones, a.k.a. “mules,” designed to heft a burden for several days before deteriorating beyond use. While the novel is named for the character’s own paralysis, it also flags the way communities in the novel seem to be trapped between extinction and reproduction.

The novel thinks several ways out of stasis that form both an itinerary of the novel’s narrative movement and a set of future possibilities. In terms of its narrative form, Immobilitycan be described as the movement through a set of estranging episodes, each linked by the focalizing character’s journey from one to the next: 1. Survival; 2. Long Term Solutions; 3. Extinction; 4. Difference; and, 5. Reproduction. In what follows, I move through each of these scenes, which at the same time promise different alternatives for the protagonist. Through each of these spaces, the novel presents a world where one can never be sure what will survive and return, indeed one bit of advice often repeated is “Always remove the head” (232). In this way, the novel provides instructions for how to read it through its estranging prose and makes its relation to cognitive estrangement central in measuring it against the operations of science fiction.

The first estranging situation, survival, blends familiarity with unease as it establishes the movement of both the protagonist and the plot. The novel opens with the main character waking to confusion – he eventually remembers his name is Joseph Horkai. We know that he has been in deep freeze storage, has been tasked with a mission for his “community,” and is unlike any of the people within this community. One benefit of this difference is his ability to withstand the hostile, post-apocalyptic environment outside. Horkai remains uncertain about his identity, whereabouts, history, and whether he can or should trust anyone. He writes a note to himself to make sense of his situation. It should be noted that his first reaction to the others around him is violent and hostile, but he is pacified and before he can learn any more about his past or his identity, he is tasked with retrieving a stolen item, “seeds,” from a place called Granite Mountain. Since he cannot walk, he is carried by the aforementioned mules.

The next scene, long-term solutions, hinges on a long term solution. Horkai discovers that the others who are holding the stolen item are just like him; this has the effect of intensifying the level of estrangement just at the moment when Horkai and the reader begin to understand more of the world around him. The reason he was selected for the mission becomes slightly less opaque – these others can withstand the outside, look like him, and greet him as a companion. Under Granite Mountain, there are a number of others frozen in storage, and Mahonri, the one who greets him, explains that the procedure of leaving one sentinel out while the remaining beings sleep allows them to guard a number of preserved seeds. In other words, the freezing extends their lives and their stewardship hopefully long enough to witness a return of flora and, with it, humanity. For a moment, here, the future seems uncertain: Horkai could attempt to retrieve the stolen item from the deep freeze or stay along with Mahonri and help them in their temporal bid to restart the experiment of life on Earth. Ultimately, and violently, Horkai maintains fidelity to his “community,” brutally killing Mahonri in his sleep and escaping with the stolen seeds. But, he doesn’t take the grisly advice to “remove the head,” Mahonri revives and gives chase. One narrative possibility for the future, staying with those like him, gives way to another, flight through the wracked countryside, and Horkai finds himself moving on to a third configuration of estrangement and another possible future.

The novel accounts for each situation from within a new set of uncertainties, which act as a rewiring of the novel’s estrangement that sends jolts back to the start of the novel. Horkai escapes, the mules expire, and he tries to drag himself the rest of the way home. Much of this interstitial section is narrated in fragments filtered through Horkai’s delirium. During this scenario, he is visited by at least one group and one individual: the first take some of his precious treasure and the second rescues him and nurses him back to health. Between both encounters we learn about the stakes of Horkai’s mission – the stolen container holds not seeds but frozen fertilized human eggs. Horkai has in his hands the potentiality of an ambivalent future; here the novel deepens its debt to a science fictional setting and operations, and clearly reveals its investment in questions of futurity and reproduction. Horkai, a distinctly different entity, though not singularly so, holds the reproduction of a particular community in his hands. The significance of his power over the future connects to the previous situation, where Mahonri planned to use the fertilized eggs in the distant future. The novel has been working through both different spaces and different futures simultaneously: the community needs the eggs now; while, Mahonri needs them should the planet become hospitable once more. Both possibilities mark the novel’s concern with limits to the future and how integral reproduction – sexual, social, and, as we shall see, ideological – is to maintaining a particular shape of the present.

The narrative regains coherence once Horkai is safe and we enter the next scene, extinction. He learns that he is not paralyzed after all from his saviour, Rykte; the injections he received from the community were responsible for his immobility in the first place. The tension in this section escalates when members of Horkai’s community find them and beg him to return. He now faces a variant of stasis: extinction; that is, to follow Rykte and let the humans die. Again, he decides to return, but not without wondering: “Is Rykte right…is it better for humanity to die out?” (227). The novel’s insistence seems to be that though many alternatives confront the protagonist, in the form of contrasting versions of the future, he cannot veer from his path. Here the post-apocalyptic drive towards a difference that makes no difference at all accelerates as Horkai’s leaves Rykte bound for the community.

The fourth scene, difference, marks the closest that post-apocalyptic fiction comes to science fiction in Evenson’s novel and is also the clearest point of their divergence. On his way back to the community, Horkai is sidetracked by a strange building he remembers from a moment of delirium. What he discovers marks both the most opaque moment in the novel, a moment the novel itself cannot seem to resolve, and the closest Horkai comes to deviating from his path and breaking the cycle of stasis:

He moved carefully forward, rifle ready. The body was relatively recent, not the desiccated corpses he’d seen while travelling with the mules. It was naked. A stake had been hammered into its chest. It was extremely pale and hairless, just like him. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman; the facial features were ambiguous and the hips could have belonged to a boyish girl or an effeminate man. It had what looked like the beginnings of breasts, but the body itself was chubby and the nipples looked more like those of a man than a woman. Between the legs was no sex, neither male nor female, but instead a strange gelatinous casing that seemed to have been extruded from the flesh itself. He bent to have a closer look, but couldn’t figure their purpose. He was just reaching out to touch them when the creature opened one eye. (231)

The moment of the strangest occurrence is followed immediately by the moment Horkai’s decision to return to the community is the sharpest. Horkai thinks, “Back to the original purpose . . . focus Horkai” (232). Here stands the strongest example of how the novel tends to shrink away from difference, to yearn for more of the same, and to reject an as yet unknowable future, which places it squarely outside the progressive, even radical, tendencies of SF.

Given Horkai’s decision to turn away from the most radically unknowable difference in the novel, the twist at the end is almost unsurprising: Horkai completes his mission and is forcibly sequestered back into the deep freeze. A short fifth section, and reproduction may not be quite the right name for it, concludes the novel, ending with the line: “Ah, he thought, just before the sudden inrush of extreme cold. I’ve been in storage. They must just be waking me up” (253). At this moment in the novel, a comment of Fredric Jameson’s refreshes itself, “a narrative must have an ending, even if it is ingeniously organized around the structural repression of ending as such” (283). While the overt lesson of the novel’s closure seems to be one about political attachment and faith, its true lesson, about aesthetic-epistemological limits to imagining the future, arrives as the cycle apparently starts over again in the image what came before.

Horkai’s return to the community measures the depth of collective belonging as the ending of Immobility insists on the reproduction of a certain set of relations. The takeaway of this approach to post-apocalyptic fiction is that the genre seems to be about arriving at epistemological limits in a positive sense; it thinks of the future based upon the present as more of the same. Indeed this is part of the takeaway for science fiction, too, which always has a penchant for allowing us to think the present as history. But, as I have been arguing here, post-apocalyptic fiction is not science fiction, though it may seem to operate like it. Post-apocalyptic fiction preoccupies itself with managing and containing difference. A rephrasing of Freedman’s statement, that science fiction is a genre that thinks the difference that difference makes, could be that “post-apocalyptic fiction is about the difference that makes no difference at all.” Thus, I would suggest that what Evenson’s novel so wonderfully captures is not only the universal stuck-ness and stasis of our contemporary, global condition, but the immobility that lies at the heart of the post-apocalyptic genre itself. That Horkai is a character apart marks the hidden class relations at the heart of the novel and, simultaneously, a dialectical reversal of its title: Horkai is not immobile; he is precisely the most mobile character in the novel and as such is able to witness and engage in the most situations and offer the fullest account of what is happening in the world. Horkai marks the novel’s collective sub-text as a deeply classed, often masculine, and (hetero)normative desire for the future to resemble the present along either the lines of the reproduction of the community.

Thinking of post-apocalyptic fiction as a genre distinct from science fiction does offer an additional moment of clarity with which to understand Horkai’s encounter with unassimilable difference.Immobility treats the present as history caught in stasis, marking a reversal of the narrative intent framed by apocalyptic revelation – from the break and rupture issues not a new situation, but a return of what came before. Unlike science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction doesn’t map possible alternatives; it only seems to hold open the space for such mapping to take place. This openness is especially clear in Horkai’s strange encounter: one only knows that there is a path not taken, and not what content would fill that particular future. A generous reading of the novel would see this as the trace of what could be a future outside of stasis – a radically feminist, queer future. Immobility symptomatically suggests that a better future exists and,crucially, that seeing a path to that future, recognizing it, or knowing it, will absolutely not bring it about. This is the central problem of the text – how is it that we can encounter the very limit of our own thought and capacities and miss the chance to act? When Horkai encounters the alien being there is no level of cognitive estrangement present that can frame it reasonably within his or our own understanding, and instead we get an attempt to place the figure within the physical embodied realm of reproduction. Rather than push the limits of thought and action, Horkai returns to the familiar, dramatizing a contemporary epistemic and ontological problem. Post-apocalyptic fiction, in short, replaces science fiction’s tendency for cognitive estrangement with an estrangement of social and sexual reproduction that forms both the ultimate description and limit of its problematic.

Notes
Berger, James. 1999. After the End: Representations of the Post Apocalypse. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Bould, Mark and China Miévill Eds. 2009. Red Planets. Eds. Middletown: Wesleyan UP.
Evenson, Brian. 2012. Immobility. New York: Tor Books.
Freedman, Carl. 2000. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan UP.
Heffernan, Teresa. 2008. Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. Toronto: U of Toronto P.
Jameson, Fredric. 2005. “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopian and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. 281-295.
Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: Poetics of a Genre. New Haven: Yale UP.

Willams, Evan Calder. Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. Zero Books, 2011.

A Working Bibliography: U.S. Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Cultural Production

The most striking thing about looking at the bibliography of U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be also the most banal. What catches the eye is that the number of volumes released during what I’m calling the contemporary (2002 to 2013) phase of post-apocalyptic fiction is greater than those released from 1946-2001. I’d like to briefly suggest that this detail doesn’t tell us as much about the changing nature of our fears or our dreams as one might expect from a spike in the production of stories about surviving the end of the world; instead, I think this intensification reveals something about how cultural production remains underpinned by the a logic of growth and can be explained, in part, through what Chris Anderson has dubbed the long tail.[i] 

That U.S. post-apocalyptic titles more than doubled in the last decade is surely a sign that niche publishing has continued the growth of markets for the book industry, even if those measures of growth (1% in revenues) don’t match standards in other industries. The long tail, a term discussed heavily in conversations about Amazon.com around marketing smaller items to specialist audiences, proposes that it is better to have many smaller scale products that interest a variety of different consumers than have one or two mega commodities that everyone would buy. A prime example of this are publishers like Permuted Press, which published post-apocalyptic and zombie fiction, especially successful fan fiction, and whose slogan is “Enjoy the Apocalypse.”[ii]

A broader cultural explanation for the proliferation of post-apocalyptic fiction hinges on the increasing demand from niche markets, on the one hand, and their correspondence with the direction of marketing and publishing towards user-generated content, on the other. None of this is meant to imply that there aren’t ideological explanations for the spike in production of end of the world scenarios. Indeed, what I am trying to point to here is that conditions seem perfect for precisely this type of writing. Put another way, cultural production, rather than something like a collective apocalyptic imagination, it seems, is a powerful place to start addressing the questions: “why post-apocalyptic fiction” and “why now”?

I have separated this bibliography into discrete periods based on perceptible shifts in form or style and historical changes. For instance the long fifties 1946-1964 is the age of the bomb, with many titles bearing the impact and anxieties of the nuclear age, while the rise of feminist and new wave sf 1965-1978 responds to generic shifts in science fiction and suggests a correlation between post-apocalyptic fiction and other genres. That the contemporary moment contains the greatest number of titles and widest range of concerns is undeniable. I hope that readers of Deletion find this bibliography useful, and I welcome feedback and comments.

the pre-fifties texts
Balmer, Edwin and Phillip Whylie. After Worlds Collide. New York: Paperback Library, (1934) 1963.
—. When Worlds Collide. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, (1933) 1999.
Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column. LaVergne: BiblioBazaar, 2010.
England, George Allan. Darkness and Dawn. Auckland: Floating Press, (1914) 2009.
London, Jack. The Scarlet Plague. New York: The Macmillan Company, (1912) 1915.
—. The Iron Heel. London: Journeyman Press, (1908) 1974.
Serviss, Garrett P. The Second Deluge. Berkshire: HardPress Publishing, (1912) 2010.
the long fifties 1946-1964[iii]
Brackett, Leigh. The Long Tomorrow. New York: Ballantine, (1955) 1986.
Burroughs, William. Nova Express. NY: Grove P, 1964.
Dick, Phillip K. Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. New York: Ace Books, 1965.
—. The Penultimate Truth. New York: Bluejay Books, (1964) 1984.
—. Vulcan’s Hammer. New York: Ace Double, 1960.
—. The Man Who Japed. New York: Ace Books, 1956.
—. The World Jones Made. New York: Ace Book, 1956.
Gayoule, Daniel F. Lords of the Psychon. New York: Bantam Books, 1963.
Heinlein, Robert A. Farnham’s Freehold. New York: Signet, 1964.
Matheson, Richard. I Am Legend. Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, 1954.
Merril, Judith. Shadows on the Hearth. Garden City: Doubleday, 1950.
Miller Jr., Walter. A Canticle for Leibowitz. New York: Bantam Books, [1960] 1997.
Norton, Andre. Starman’s Son or Daybreak 2250 AD. Del Rey, (1952) 1985.
Sheckley, Robert. Journey Beyond Tomorrow.  London: Gollancz, (1962) 1985.
Stewart, George R. Earth Abides. New York: Random House, 1949.
Tucker, Wilson A. The Long Loud Silence. New York: Rinehart, 1952.
the rise of feminist and new wave sf 1965-1978
Charnas, Suzy McKee. Walk to the End of the World. New York: Berkeley, (1974) 1978.
Chilson, Rob. The Star-Crowned Kings. New York: DAW-Books, 1975.
Disch, Thomas M. The Genocides. New York: Books, 1965.
Harrison, Harry. Make Room! Make Room! New York: Ace, (1966) 1979.
Kane, Gil. Blackmark. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.
King, Stephen. The Stand. New York: Signet, (1978) 1991.
Spinrad, Norman. The Iron Dream. New York: Avon, 1972.
Wilhelm, Kate. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. NY: Harper & Row, 1976. 
the late cold war 1979-1989
Auster, Paul. In the Country of Last Things. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: Arbor Press, 1985.
Berman, Mitch. Time Capsule. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Boyett, Steven R. Ariel. New York: Ace Books, 1983.
Brin, David. The Postman. New York: Bantam Books, 1985.
Brinkley, William. The Last Ship. New York: Viking, 1988.
Butler, Octavia. Clay’s Arc. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1984.
Crowley, John. Engine Summer. New York: Doubleday, 1979.
Elgin, Suzette Haden. Native Tongue. NY: Daw Books, 1984.
Forman, James D. Doomsday Plus Twelve. New York: Scribner, 1984.
Herbert, Frank. The White Plague. New York: Putnam, 1982.
Kunetka, James and Whitley Strieber. Warday. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984.
Lanier, Sterling, E. Hiero’s Journey. Radnor: Chilton Book Co., 1983.
La Tourette, Aileen. Cry Wolf.  New York: Random House, 1986.
Lawrence, Louise. Children of the Dust. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Malamud, Bernard. God’s Grace. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. 
Martin, Graham Dunstan. Time-Slip. New York: Harper Collins, 1986.
McCammon, Robert R. Swan Song. New York: Pocket Books, 1987.
Morrow, James. This is the Way the World Ends. New York: Henry Holt, 1985.
Niven, Larry and Jerry Pournelle. Lucifer’s Hammer. New York; Del Rey, 1985.
Palmer, David R. Emergence. Toronto: Bantam, 1984.
Paulson, Gary. The Transall Saga. New York: Delacorte P, 1988.
Pohl, Fredrik and Jack Williamson. Land’s End.  New York: Tom Doherty and Associates, 1988.
Prochnau, William. Trinity’s Child. New York: Putnam, 1983.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Wild Shore. New York: Orb, (1984) 1995.
Silverberg, Robert. At Winter’s End. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.
Tepper, Sheri S. The Gate to Women’s Country. New York: Foundation Books, 1988.
Le Guin, Ursula. Always Coming HomeBerkeley: U of California P, (1985) 2001.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Galápagos. NY: Delacorte P, 1985.
Williams, Paul O. The Fall of the Shell. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982.
Wolf, Gene. The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. New York: Orb Books, (1980) 1997.
the long nineties 1989-2001[iv]
Anderson, Kevin J. and Doug Beason. Ill Wind. New York: Forge, 1995.
Baker, Will. Shadow Hunter. New York: Pocket Books, 1993.
—. Star Beast. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.
Burton, LeVar. Aftermath. New York: Aspect, 1997.
Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. New York: Aspect, 1995.
—. Parable of the Talents. New York : Aspect, 2001.
Dickson, Gordon R. Wolf and Iron. New York: T. Doherty Associates, 1990.
Harry, Eric L. Arc Light. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Kadohata, Cynthia. In the Heart of the Valley of Love. NY: Viking, 1992.
Kaye, Marilyn. The Return. New York: Avon Books, 1999.
—. The Convergence. New York: Avon Books, 1998.
—. The Vanishing. New York: Avon Books, 1998.
LaHaye, Tim & Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Carol
Stream: Tyndale House, 1995.
Lethem, Jonathan. Amnesia Moon. San Diego: Harcourt and Brace, 1995.
McDevitt, Jack. Eternity Road. Norwalk: Easton Press, 1997.
Miller Jr., Walter. Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. New York: Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 1997.
Piercy, Marge. He, She, and It. NY: Fawcett Crest, 1991.
Starhawk. The Fifth Sacred Thing. New York: Bantam, 1993.
Williams, Walter John. The Rift. New York: Harper Collins, 1999.
Wren, M. K. A Gift Upon the Shore. New York, Ballantine Books, 1990.
the contemporary 2002-2013
Adrian, Chris. The Children’s Hospital. San Fransisco: McSweeney’s, 2006.
Alexander, Marcus. The Oblivion Society. Permuted P, 2007.
Amsterdam, Steven. Things We Didn’t See Coming. New York: Pantheon, 2010.
Bacigalupi, Paolo. Ship Breaker. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2010.
—. The Windup Girl. San Francisco: Nightshade Books, 2009.
Barnes, John. Directive 51. New York: Ace Books, 2010.
Boyett, Steven R. Mortality Bridge. New York; Subterranean Press, 2011.
—. Elegy Beach: A Book of the Change. New York: Ace Books, 2009.
Bradley, Darin. Noise. New York: Spectra Ballantine Books, 2010.
Braziel, James. Snakeskin Road. New York: Bantam Books, 2009.
—. Birmingham, 35 Miles. New York: Bantam Books, 2008.
Brooks, Max. World War Z. New York: Crown, 2006.
Brown, Eric. Guardians of the Phoenix. Oxford: Solaris, 2010.
Budz, Mark. Clade. New York: Bantam Books, 2003.
Carlson, Jeff. Plague Year. New York: Ace Books, 2007.
—. Plague War. New York: Ace Books, 2008.
—. Plague Zone. New York: Ace Books, 2009.
Collins, Paul. The Skyborn. New York: Starscape, 2005.
Cronin, Justin. The Passage. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010.
—. The Twelve. New York: Ballantine Books, 2012.
DeNiro, Alan. Total Oblivion, More or Less. Spectra: 2009.
DuPrau, Jeanne. The City of Ember. New York: Random House, 2003.
—. The People of Sparks. New York: Random House, 2004.
—. The Diamond of Darkhold. New York: Random House, 2008.
Endo, Hiroki. Eden. Vol. 1, It’s an Endless World. Milwaukie: Dark Horse, 2005.
Evenson, Brian. Immobility. New York: Tor Books, 2012.
Forstchen, William R. One Second After. New York: Forge, 2009.
Gischler, Victor. Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse. NY: Touchstone Books2008.
Harrison, Mark. The Afterblight Chronicles: America. Oxford: Abaddon, 2011.
Hart, Marcus Alexander. The Oblivion Society Edition 2.0. Permuted Press, 2007.
Hauge, Lesley. Nomansland. New York: Henry Holt, 2012.
Heller, Peter. The Dog Stars. New York: Knopf, 2012.
Howey, Hugh. Wool. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013.
Judson, Theodore. Fitzpatrick’s War. New York: DAW Books, 2004.
Kane, Paul. Arrowhead. Oxford: Abaddon, 2008.
Knight, Christopher and Johnathan Rand. Pandemia. Topinabee Island: AudioCraft, 2006.
Kollin Dani & Eytan Kollin. The Unincorporated Man.Tom Doherty, 2009.
Kunstler, James. The Witch of Hebron. New York: Grove Press, 2011.
—. World Made by Hand. New York: Atlantic Monthly P, 2008.
Mayhar, Ardath. The World Ends in Hickory Hollow. Garden City: Doubleday, 2007.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006.
McIntosh, Will. Soft Apocalypse. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2011.
Ochse, Weston. Blood Ocean. Oxford: Abaddon Books, 2012.
Pfeffer, Susan Beth. Life as We Knew It. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006.
—. The Dead and the Gone. New York: Random House, 2008.
Ringo, John. The Last Centurion. Baen Books, 2008.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. Sixty Days and Counting. London: Harper Collins, 2007.
—. Fifty Degrees Below. London: Harper Collins, 2006.
—. Forty Signs of Rain. London: Harper Collins, 2004.
—. Years of Rice and Salt. New York: Bantman Books, 2002.
Sagan, Nick. Idlewild. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003.
—. Edenborn. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004.
—. Everfree. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006.
Sharpe, Matthew. Jamestown. Orlando: A Harvest Book, 2007.
Slatery, Brian Francis. Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse
of the United States of America. New York: Tor, 2008.
Wesley, Rawles, James. FoundersA Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse. Berkeley:
Ulysses P., 2012.
—. Survivors: A novel of the Coming Collapse. New York: Pocket Books, 2011.
—. Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse. Berkeley: Ulysses P., 2009.
Wilson, Robert Charles. Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America. New York: Tor,
2009.
Winters, Ben. The Last Policeman. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2013.
Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. New York: Doubleday, 2011.


[i] Chris Andersen, “The Long Tail,” (Wired Magazine 12.10 Oct 2004) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html?pg=1&topic=tail&topic_set= (11 Sept 2013).
[ii] I haven’t included many of their titles in this bibliography, but those interested should visit: http://permutedpress.com/.
[iii] The long fifties is a term for a period taken from Keith M Booker’s excellent bookMonsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction in Novel and Film, 1946-1964 (Westport: Greenwood P, 2001)
[iv] The long nineties is a term for a period taken from Phillip Wegner’s excellent book: Life between Two Deaths 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham: Duke UP, 2009).

Post-Apocalyptic Fiction: Comedy or Tragedy

The first answer to the question of whether post-apocalyptic fiction is comedy or tragedy seems all too obvious. The sheer number of horrific events, losses, causalities, and trials faced by the characters after the apocalyptic event insists that we are dealing with a tragic form here. The last dying gasps of our world are meted out by the survivors, each one a sign that things in the present, our present, went terribly, terribly wrong. Perhaps a more suitable way to grasp the question is to return to the birth of the modern form of the comedy, (i.e. the romantic comedy), which happens to arrive on the scene at a crucial moment in the pre-history of post-apocalyptic fiction as well.

The comparison I am asking us to consider is, for all intents and purposes, actually between Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). This is where the question of comedy clarifies its place in my inquiry. But first a word on Shelley’s science fiction novel:  Frankenstein enacts one version of tragedy, when, in the face of a possible resolution to the conflict of the narrative the monster asks Frankenstein to fashion him a wife, Frankenstein refuses, shattering any hope that a resolution can be met. The novel is obviously much more complex than this, but it illustrates the dynamic of the tragic closure, which is made unbearable by the possibility of a complete resolution, if only for an instant, seeming to be so close at hand and then being dashed away.

Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, incorporates many minor tragedies time and again into its narrative form, bringing Elizabeth and Darcy close together and then pulling them apart. But in Austin’s case the bittersweet sting of a nearly fulfilled love is finally overwhelmed by understanding, union, and marriage. Phillip Wegner has commented that the insidious nature of Austin’s text is that, beneath the veneer of love and the hustle and bustle of posturing and relationships, is the work of the bourgeois Cultural Revolution, which at this point in history, was engaged in an occluded struggle to make marriage a natural conclusion and the only direction in which one ought to move.

My argument, then, about post-apocalyptic fiction hinges on its own mode of closure. What is often the case at the end of these novels, rather than marriage or the failed reconciliation of opposing forces, is the overwhelming prescience of the family or an insistence on its importance. To name a few examples Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010), Alan DeNiro’s Total Oblivion, More or Less (2009), Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), and so on. To quote the ending of DeNiro’s novel: “I understand love a little bit more—and what it can cost. But it’s a cost I’m more willing to pay. Mother taught me that. Ciaran taught me that. My living breathing family is still teaching me that. I don’t pretend to be wise anymore, and I don’t try to stop being afraid when I’m afraid, or angry when I’m angry. It sounds so easy but it’s the hardest things in the world” (306). So, in terms of closure, it is safe to say post-apocalyptic fiction is comedic. 

What’s at stake in all of this, besides some musings on literary history and generic form? The stakes for me are simply this, the work of Austin marks a moment when the operations of the novel, in hindsight, did the work of solidifying a class and outlining that class’s role in history. The marriage at the end of Austin’s novels isn’t the deepest moment of cultural warfare, however, I would argue that moment comes after the novel’s close and that its name is the reproduction of daily life under capital. Isn’t then the form of closure we find in much contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction engaged in the same type of warfare? Though we can argue about the role of literature and the death of the novel (about which see more here), I think it’s clear that post-apocalyptic fiction is doing a similar kind of work to Austin’s novels in that it tries to maintain the status quo and is deeply disinterested in the movement of history as such, which isn’t the same as saying it cannot tell us anything about history.

Kunstler’s Petrofiction

James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand(2008) contains a particular conservative logic common to post-apocalyptic fiction and environmentalist writing that can either be taken up as a maintenance of the status quo (i.e. “humanity can survive, if only things could stay a particular way”) or as political signs of warning (i.e. “if we continue along this path, this destruction is what will come”).

This conservative logic can be detected in James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand (2008), which imagines a post-petrol world in which human beings live peaceably in harmony with nature by regressing to a pre-oil dependent life, effectively Kunstler forecasts the apocalypse as a solution to the ills he attributes to oil dependency and its attendant technologies. In a recent issue of the PMLA, the question of the relationship between oil and literature is further probed by Michel Ziser and Imre Szeman, respectively. Ziser gestures to a number of recent fictions that take on the same problematic addressed by Kunstler: “Later novels, as well as recent documentaries and feature films, have taken up this pessimistic vision of oil-induced apocalypse under the specter of climate change and high-tech imperial warfare… these ask us to acknowledge the connection between the oil age and its problematic surpluses—economic, political, environmental, sexual, aesthetic, and even religious—and to consider the human effects of its eventual passing.”[i]Ziser connects one type of surplus, oil, with a whole variety of others through “oil-induced apocalypse” fiction, thinking of the fiction as a way to measure the effects of such a breakdown. Kunstler’s novel makes the suggestion that in order to save the world oil production and consumption must stop (something most of us would be hard pressed to disagree with). Szeman picks up where Ziser leaves off by strengthening the connection between oil production and cultural production such that he argues for a periodization not based on national or historical periods, but on the dominant mode of resource extraction.[ii]Ziser and Szeman’s way of reading reveals a problem with Kunstler’s reasoning: World Made by Hand posits societal and technological retrogression as a solution to the degradation of the planet, rather than tracing our “petroculture” to its roots in capital’s dependence on and need for limitless expansion.[iii]

From the perspective of either the maintenance of the present or the apocalyptic politics of catastrophism,[iv]the conservative logic of post-apocalyptic fiction functions as a containment strategy. Each such approach to the disaster situation or the catastrophic scenario has a tendency to fall doubly short of a complete solution—both within the world of the text and as a solution to a real world problem. On the level of the plot, though post-apocalyptic fiction sets out to resolve a historical contradiction, it stops short by selecting the wrong problem (e.g. focusing on technological advances rather than the economic force driving them). Rather than imagining a relatively new historical situation, these fictions seem doomed to play out older, residual narratives, like the return to pre-industrial society in Kunstler, which may not be well-suited to engage with the present. Put another way, post-apocalyptic fiction tends to grasp at symptoms.

Ideology in post-apocalyptic fiction manifests itself somewhere between false immediacy and false consciousness, showing up in the return to simpler relations in Kunstler. World Made by Hand politically attempts to change how people behave. The logic of post-apocalyptic fiction resonates with Kunstler’s political bid—that describing and elaborating a different mode of life will give reasons for people to reflect objectively on the current situation and, crucially, change because of it. The problem that arises here is that post-apocalyptic fiction, like so many other cultural forms today, still assumes the link between knowing something and doing something about it. What’s more, presuming this type of connection means that post-apocalyptic fiction actually works to contain unmanageable contradictions rather than resolving them. Kunstler’s attempt may be off track, masking social relations and obscuring, for example, the imperative of growth under capitalism, but that is not to say it cannot teach us something about its point of intervention—post-apocalyptic fiction may hide social relations, for instance, but it also still depicts them. The takeaway is that even as they cover over and contain contradictions World Made by Hand present signs and symptoms of this containment. The question of how to move from knowing that to doing something about it is left wide open.


[i] Michel Ziser, “Oil Spills,” in PMLA 126.2 (March 2011): 323.
[ii] “This special Editor’s Column asks what might happen if we frame cultural and intellectual periods and the literatures they encompass not in terms of movements (e.g., modernism), nations (British modernism), or centuries (eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth . . .) but in relation to dominant forms of energy. A crude, perhaps too literal form of materialism, but a suggestive one nevertheless, and not just in the aha! manner of all thought experiments. A periodization organized around energy draws much needed attention to one of the key conditions of possibility of human social activity: a raw input—energy—whose significance and value are almost always passed over, even by those who insist on the importance of modes and forms of production for thinking about culture and literature.” Imre Szeman, “Literature and Energy Futures,” in PMLA 126.2 (March 2011): 323.
[iii] Petroculture is a periodizing term used most prominently in the research cluster of the same name at the University of Alberta which studies “the socio-cultural aspects of oil and energy in Canada and the world today.” See Petrocultures.com (2012) www.petrocultures.com (accessed on 29 Sept 2012).
[iv] Catastophism is a politics that bases itself around the shock or fear of catastrophe. It can be taken up either by the left or the right, through in CatastophismLiley and others argue that appeals to the threat of disaster always serve a conservative agenda. See especially Eddie Yuen, “The Politics of Failure have Failed,” 15-43.