Conclusion

Abstract

As I have discussed in the preceding pages, the books that I have taken up in this study join the long line of post-apocalyptic novels that imagine a mostly sobering—but occasionally tongue-in-cheek—range of global disasters: an engineered plague, global warming, a climate engineering catastrophe, nuclear war, an asteroid strike, a zombie apocalypse, and the collapse of the global oil supply. In every case, these post-postmodern narratives depict a wrenching breakdown of modern life and wrestle with whether modernity should be reconstituted, and if so how.