642 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) Fictional Wastelands and a Wasteland of Fictions. Carlen Lavigne. PostApocalyptic Patriarchy: American Television and Gendered Visions of Survival. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018. viii+194 pp. $39.95 pbk. The title of Carlen Lavigne’s book immediately invites the sort of speculation so many of us love, awakening images of struggling heroines, narratives of human resilience, and critiques of a species whose nature can never escape its worst impulses. It seems impossible to escape the zombie-like hordes of postapocalyptic media, a genre of almost unparalleled critical malleability, responsive to nearly any critical lens we might bring to it. Lavigne’s most concerted inquiries, including gender, which the title announces, but also racial and sexual politics, immediately focus on the primary dangers we imagine an apocalypse might threaten, as humans resort to their most utilitarian views of reproductive sexuality (extinction), their fears of the other (zombies, aliens), and the loss of that fragile amulet to which we usually credit our gains in equality, human culture. The introduction announces the shape of the book’s critique, a series of case studies rather than the broad and sweeping genre- or narrative-theory approach one might expect from the title. Reading the first two chapters also makes Lavigne’s approach clear as the text stakes out a readily observable format. Until the closing reflections, each chapter examines an apocalyptic subscenario —nuclear attacks, pandemics, aliens, zombies, etc.—and analyzes several shows. Further, each show-section has sub-divisions on gender, race, and sexuality, usually with one more section specific to the show’s plot concerns. These one-off sections are often the most compelling parts of the chapters, providing texture and diversity to the collection by examining such concerns as surveillance, frontierism, militarism, and hybridity. The uniformity of organization will undergird one of the text’s major strengths, particularly for certain audiences, as I will discuss. Another primary strength, however, is the clarity with which Lavigne has set the limits of the project, forgoing the considerable material in film, fiction, gaming, and even music, for a coherence of form that the television show provides. The post 9/11 chronology to which Lavigne adheres feels anything but arbitrary and haunts the reader with a sense that the date and the world it produced, more than the precise tragedy it memorializes, have yielded a kind of meta-apocalypse to which these shows provide testimony. With the text’s avowed aims firmly established—post-apocalyptic instead of disaster, case studies rather than theory, post 9/11 instead of 1970s classics—the book is most useful to those interested in the particular shows covered. Indeed, despite the meticulous work done to clarify characters, relationships, and events in the shows for context, the nature of the critique, relying primarily on descriptions of power dynamics and dialogue of the characters, means that the observations are less transmissible to texts outside those under scrutiny here. The book’s clarity reinforces its usefulness—scholars examining a particular show will be able to navigate the subsections almost instantly for what they seek while the approachable language deliberately avoids jargon and theory-dropping 643 BOOKS IN REVIEW for intuitive prose accessible to college students and interested general readers. I have already recommended it to a former student writing on The 100 (2014) and can see myself doing so again for students working with any of the numerous shows examined. Nevertheless, two tendencies limit the insights and usefulness of the arguments. The first is the author’s methodology, which is somewhat superficial and generally avoids symbolism, tone, and narratology. Most of the evidence toward the final conclusions comes from the shows’ dialog, occasionally collapsing whatever distance we might imagine between character and text, disregarding who speaks the lines or how we imagine that character’s voice might be positioned in the context of a show. The other major source of evidence is the roles and relative associations those roles carry, cataloguing who are leaders, who gets to be strong, who has screen-time, and of what sort. This was generally more persuasive, as we see that characters of color, women, and other figures of underrepresented groups often have only...