Monika Kaup’s encyclopedic new study promises to be invaluable inasmuch as it organizes and reframes an impressive amount of scholarship from the past three decades of ecological thinking. Pulling together Bruno Latour’s theory of the “factish,” Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s autopoietic systems theory, Markus Gabriel’s ontological thought, and the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion and Alphonso Lingis is no small task—and is made no simpler by its application here to the ever-expanding genre known as “post-apocalyptic fiction.” The coherency of the study is a testament to Kaup’s often rewarding and always careful parsing of the theoretical terrain. What is more, New Ecological Realisms is ambitious in fully reimagining post-apocalyptic fiction within environmental theory while aspiring to map out the new mode of analysis its title names. Despite shared commitments with new materialism, ecocriticism, and related fields, Kaup intends to outline novel “context-based realist ontologies” viewed through the lens of literary criticism (23).New Ecological Realisms entertains close readings centered on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, José Saramago’s Blindness, Octavia Butler’s Parable series, and Cormac McCarthy’s Road. Kaup’s prose shines when she brings theory to bear on the literary examples in question, particularly in her discussion of Saramago’s novel. Kaup makes the inspired choice to connect systems theory—a discourse structured around questions of “observation” and “blind spots”—to Blindness, which details an epidemic vision-loss event in an unnamed city: “The newly white-blind protagonists in Saramago’s Blindness learn that to be blind means to be post-individual. Unlike the sighted, the blind cannot survive as autonomous individuals. . . . Survival is dependent on what Maturana and Varela call social coupling within self-organising collectives” (151). The collective “coupling” described in Blindness is indeed a singular social vision of survival after the ability to “see” is universally upended, a parable for the novel’s time as well as our own. Kaup argues that Blindness systemically addresses the failure of a certain kind of humanist, Cartesian project built on anthropological confidence in vision as the key metaphor for understanding. As Kaup puts it, the novel “literalises its critique of the Cartesian fiction of the disembodied observer by eliminating vision itself” (149). This observation is a prototypical example of how literary analysis functions in New Ecological Realisms: these texts almost always offer a fictional “literalization” of why a robust “new realism” is necessary to make sense of our age of ecological crisis.Ultimately, New Ecological Realisms plants its flag on the claim that post-apocalyptic fiction should be regarded as ontological rather than epistemological. “While postmodernism is an epistemology,” Kaup contends, “new realisms are ontologies” (213). The study thus aspires not just to advance ecological thinking but to clear the way for a new, holistic theory of literature after postmodernism. “Instead of determining whether things are real or constructed,” Kaup writes, “new realism asks: Where are things real? How do things become real that might initially have been constructed or unconstructed?” (19). With such questions the book discloses its indebtedness to object-oriented ontology and speculative realism and places itself firmly in the ambit of Edinburgh University Press’s Speculative Realism series, which offers some of the most interesting interventions in the widening scope of ecological studies.Kaup’s tone is at times inflated in its dismissal of competing or related theories—so much so, in fact, that many of the book’s polemics will surely polarize those trained in the more established traditions of the humanities. Kaup loses little time dispatching several decades’ worth of “constructivist” scholarship by calling that body of work a “failure.” New realism, in contrast, “searches for alternatives to both constructivism and materialist reductionism. Exposing constructivism’s hidden handicap, new realists note that it is predicated on the acceptance of the naturalist concept of the real” (26). The ableist metaphor notwithstanding, Kaup never makes plain why the “handicap” of constructivist thinking is “hidden,” or how a “naturalist concept of the real” offers the correction this area of scholarship so desperately needs. Yet on the need for a new direction, many would be keen to follow Kaup’s work—and will no doubt find a wide range of possibilities detailing how one might reshape reading practices and ontological thinking.A quintessential example of the study’s surprising antagonism toward other philosophical schools is revealed in its twofold rejection of posthumanism and new materialism. Describing one moment in Jane Bennett’s writing as “a series of rhetorical sleights-of-hands” (41) or arguing that “[Katherine] Hayles misconstrues autopoietic theory as a refurbished version of liberal humanism” (157) indicates the book’s sometimes inimical, jarring tone. Likewise, the monolithic “postmodern critic” is frequently deployed as a straw man for a head-in-the-sand scholar who behaves as if “reality,” as such, were an utter fabrication. In one anecdotal section of the introduction, Kaup paints this picture: Like the scientist in the lab, the postmodern critic in the lecture hall produces knowledge by identifying problems, invoking principles, giving reasons. But in order to get to their academic workplaces, the scientist and the scholar must move through the world, leave home, make their way to campus and walk to class. Their grasp of reality during these activities is pre-reflective, unquestioned, taken for granted. To demand justification that we are in contact with reality during these everyday transactions—as we do in the lecture hall—would be absurd: we just know because we are there. (29–30)The passage is laced with assumptions, including unchecked beliefs that “postmodern critics” question their contact with reality or deny commonsense observations about engagement with the material world. Furthermore, “we just know because we are there” is a strangely uncritical phrase with which to anchor such a position, even when it is viewed beyond the language of constructivism. One may justifiably applaud the project of “new ecological realism” in reclaiming so unassailable a stance, but what this claim means for our reading of post-apocalyptic fiction is less clear.Given how divorced these critiques of the so-called postmodern scholar seem from the arguments proper, such moments feel like later additions, perhaps an attempt to amplify the stakes of the study’s proposed new reading practice. Yet New Ecological Realisms excels not when it takes up arms in the debate about the future of the humanities but when it unites disparate theories into a coherent narrative of new realism. One great example comes in the book’s fourth chapter, where Kaup connects Latour to Gabriel: Gabriel’s rejection of a higher-order real corresponds to Latour’s principle of irreduction. . . . Just as, for Latour, no actor-networks are reducible to other actor-networks, for Gabriel, no field is reducible to another. . . . The rejection of the notion of a fundamental reality in turn has implications for the distinction between (surface) appearance and (hidden higher) reality posited by old realism. Gabriel’s new realism demolishes this dichotomy. There is no opposition between appearance and reality: insofar as existence is defined by the appearance of objects in fields of sense, appearance is reality. (210)Post-apocalyptic fiction, to put it simply, details the disruption felt when one realizes that appearance is reality. In an ecological frame, such disruption might arrive the moment that ignored warnings about ecological or toxic disaster breaks through the realm of imagined or theoretical risk. In this way, understanding the work of Latour, Gabriel, and others is indeed vital to the project of “rehabilitating the real after postmodernism” (197). We would do well to adapt our reading practices to know how to better identify and speak coherently about “reality.”The novels Kaup addresses all, in their own ways, demolish the dichotomy of appearance and reality, revealing the extent to which historical collapse engenders a newfound awareness of the “real.” For instance, The Road is a post-apocalyptic work of fiction not only because its plot engages with familiar tropes of the genre but also because, in its stripped-away landscape, it opens up new avenues for speaking about things that are “real.” In her reading of The Road, Kaup observes, “The paradox of the apocalyptic temporality of finitude is that by destroying history and world, it clears the space for remaking time and world. Both destructive and generative, apocalypse initiates a transition from one epoch to another” (263–64). Perhaps, in the end, that is what New Ecological Realisms is after: a remaking of history and world in the aftermath of those traditions that have left us no closer to salvation. It is an admirable project, to be sure, but one that could still benefit from making allies in different schools of thought who share a commitment to comprehending the “real” world—including those many mental and psychic worlds within it.