Post-apocalyptic World Research Articles

Post-apocalyptic environment and its reinterpretation in Death Stranding

Before becoming a reality, the technological environment exists in the projects and intentions of people. Sociologist S.Jasanoff offers the concept “sociotechnical imaginary”, which means ideas about the value of technologies and their future contribution to social development. The authors analyze some futuristic environment elements in the computer game Death Stranding based on this concept. The game embodies avant-garde solutions for establishing social communication infrastructure in a post-apocalyptic world. Death Stranding’s semantic emphasis, which was released before the pandemic, anticipated many of the risks and sentiments from the physical and social barriers of the COVID-19 period. The authors use Russian-language streams dedicated to Death Stranding as empirical material for the case analysis. The authors review the academic experience of those who have already studied the post-apocalypse presented in various popular texts (movies, novels, computer games). In mass culture stand out the narrative and visual templates of the post-apocalypse: division of spaces and characters into “spoiled/infected” and “pure”; wandering; attention to unusual details of everyday life and world order, aestheticization of ruins. When discussing habitat in Death Stranding, there are clear solidarizing and eco-friendly landmarks in the game narrative and mechanics: minimalistic consumption and the importance of recycling, discovery of new renewable resources, cooperative usage of infrastructure, the ineffectiveness of violence. According to the authors, the game’s habitat model brings new insights into contemporary sociotechnical imaginary.

Of Pandemics and Pilgrims: Reconciling Grief and Death in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Of Pandemics and Pilgrims:Reconciling Grief and Death in Cormac McCarthy's The Road Shreya Rastogi (bio) and Srirupa Chatterjee (bio) Cormac McCarthy's The Road resonates with a world ravaged by an unprecedented pandemic in more ways than one. Published in a post 9/11 world and attesting to the zeitgeist of failed exceptionalism, McCarthy's novel with its hauntingly dry and desolate landscape characteristically draws our attention to post-apocalyptic times. The novel's setting, variously described as a "spectacle" of the "dying of life on the planet,"1 a "nuclear grey winter,"2 and "ecodystopic,"3 has become particularly and disturbingly relatable over the past year-and-a-half. Since in addition to the raging global pandemic, we have been witnessing visuals of incinerated sylvan terrains from California to the Amazon along with marooned centers of commerce, tourism, and conviviality under lockdowns, and above all the normalization of masks and bio-hazard suits which accompany panic to hoard and hustle commodities, The Road's apocalyptic theme for eerily mirroring ruin and extinction appears especially relevant now. Most of all, the constant spectre of death reiterated in the cadaver strewn landscape of the novel captures the embracive fear and grief of the pandemic. In revisiting the text now, we therefore not only experience solidarity with the plodding father-son duo, but also perceive respite in the novel's elevation of the victims and survivors to the status of 'pilgrims.' While re-reading The Road through the pandemic, we claim that grief and loss in McCarthy's text are cathartic and enable us to find similitude with the tenacious 'pilgrims' of the narrative. What humanity is currently experiencing cannot be reduced to one emotion. Grief of losing the loved, sustained uncertainty, fear, and helplessness have coalesced into an enduring melancholy which psychologists have termed 'pandemic grief.'4 Lockdown limitations and government deflation of the tragedy, however, have prevented most nations from public mourning or finding a sense of closure. In America such collective loss and grief was last experienced after the 9/11 attacks. Sadly, unlike the previous tragedy the nation this time is denied rituals of communal grieving. Few platforms that have articulated this overwhelming and unaddressed public grief include The New York Times which in spring last year resumed its 9/11 obituary column, "Portraits of Grief," under [End Page 126] the title "Those We've Lost" to mourn and commemorate the victims of COVID-19. Yet the swelling death tolls are only part of the current dystopia, and to the surviving, the protracted nature of the pandemic amidst social isolation and loneliness feels poignantly like the "onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world."5 In such a scenario, then, McCarthy's empathetic rendering of the text's deathscape "proffers an affirmation of the individual's ability to experience a transcendent, and perhaps ultimately redemptive, empathic connection with others."6 To highlight this 'affirmation,' we focus on the four occurrences of the mythic 'pilgrims' in The Road each of which, we argue, holds a redemptive message for the contemporary reader. We encounter the elusive 'pilgrim' on the very first page of the text. The man, we are told, wakes up from a dream in which "he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand […] [and] [l]ike pilgrims in a fable [they were] swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast."7 By explicitly conjuring the image of Jonah caged within the whale as punishment for his disobedience, this scene suggests the possibilities of redemption even within a post-apocalyptic world. Significantly, in the Old Testament parable Jonah is charged with announcing the impending apocalypse on the city of Nineveh, thereby giving the Ninevites a chance at redressal. In the New Testament, however, when the scribes of the Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign of their redemption, the savior rebukes: The evil and adventurous generation seeketh a sign, but there shall be no sign given to them, save the sign of the prophet Jonas. For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall...

Trauma, empathy and complicity in The Last of Us Part II: playing as enemy characters

The Last of Us Part II continues Ellie’s story and introduces the new playable character Abby as they inhabit a post-apocalyptic world. This article aims to analyze how the game portrays trauma, which is a central component of the narrative. Considering the existence of two different diegetic agents, the article also discusses the concepts of empathy and complicity. The results indicate that through the experience of playing as enemy characters, the game successfully builds empathy for people with distinct motivations while also making the player feel complicit with the violence committed by the characters. The article also concludes that video games and their capacity for making the player feel empathic and complicit with the on-screen events present a very interesting possibility for a readerly engagement with trauma.

Pathology persists and stigma stays: representations of (autistic) Stephen Greaves in the post-apocalyptic world

This paper is an analysis of the depiction of autism in The Boy on the Bridge, a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, horror, fiction novel to critically deconstruct the representation of autism specifically related to 15-year-old science prodigy Stephen Greaves. Using a critical content analysis approach, three relevant constructs were identified with depictions including savant/super-crip, non-human othering, and psycho-emotional disablism. Each of these areas is discussed related to the current literature on disability, generally, and autism, more specifically. This analysis demonstrates that cultural understandings of disability are dominated by the medical model, and continue to stigmatize and pathologize while excluding positive social identities. Consideration of the potential damaging aspects of literature portrayals of autism in fictional works is needed to move the autism genre forward in a humanizing and inclusive manner. Points of interest This study brings awareness to some assumptions around disability by pulling apart one way that autism is presented for public understanding. Even fictional stories can play a role in awareness and understanding of disability such as knowing that autistic people can also be gifted. Notions such as savantism are presented and discussed to help readers understand the various layers in disability. Disability can be presented positively and/or negatively in popular media in both obvious and subtle ways. It is up to readers and viewers to carefully consider how information on disability from popular media might be biased.

Cryptic or Silent? The Known Unknowns, Unknown Knowns, and Unknown Unknowns of Secondary Metabolism.

Microbial natural products, particularly those produced by filamentous Actinobacteria, underpin the majority of clinically used antibiotics. Unfortunately, only a few new antibiotic classes have been discovered since the 1970s, which has exacerbated fears of a postapocalyptic world in which antibiotics have lost their utility. Excitingly, the genome sequencing revolution painted an entirely new picture, one in which an average strain of filamentous Actinobacteria harbors 20 to 50 natural product biosynthetic pathways but expresses very few of these under laboratory conditions. Development of methodology to access this "hidden" biochemical diversity has the potential to usher in a second Golden Era of antibiotic discovery. The proliferation of genomic data has led to inconsistent use of "cryptic" and "silent" when referring to biosynthetic gene clusters identified by bioinformatic analysis. In this Perspective, we discuss this issue and propose to formalize the use of this terminology.

Ecofeminism and Post-Apocalyptic Environments in Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning

This paper examines the significance of post-apocalyptic narratives as a means of expressing deep-seated anxieties about colonialism, capitalism, and cultural erasure in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning. By viewing the novel through an ecofeminist lens, I seek to illuminate and explain the political changes Roanhorse’s post-apocalyptic world, and how this new environment allows for the transformation of social and gender structures of power. The theory of ecofeminism relies upon the belief that both women and nature are equally compromised and exploited by the patriarchy, constrained by the masculine forces of colonialization and capitalism. By situating her novel in a post-apocalyptic environment, Roanhorse implies that just as the earth has asserted its power over the effects of unrestricted capitalism through the consequences of global warming, Indigenous women have similarly taken back their powers of autonomy, liberating themselves from traditional gender roles. This paper shows how the connection between women and nature is most evident in the novel’s female protagonist, Maggie, who has been able to aggressively deviate from traditional gender norms and expectations due to the apocalypse. Through this complete reversal of common gender tropes in post-apocalyptic literature, Roanhorse demonstrates that the apocalypse has proven to be instrumental in freeing women from the constraints of gender roles, advocating the ecofeminist view that cooperation between women and nature is necessary for the liberation of both.

Естетичний досвід як патологічні дискурси відрази та меланхолії у творчості З. Бексінського

This article tackles the issue of aesthetic experience from the pathologized everyday discourse viewpoint in the system of relations between I and symbolic order, where transgressed and close to symbolic death I is predominant. The stage, in which I, crossing the symbolic borders, stay readable, appears to be the process of continuous constituting the aesthetic experience and its transforming into the primordial a priori structure of everyday discourse. The problem lies deeply in the preserving of evanescent borders which are said to exist in the cultural palpability and simultaneously to be exiled from the system. The article exemplifies pathological discourses by referring to the Beksinski' works, namely his numerous ways of articulating the ineffable. However, articulated ineffable, similarly to such culturally conditioned reactions as abjection and melancholia, declares double death of the discursive subject: the first time when the separation from primordial presymbolic world takes place and the second time during problematizing the symbolic borders and paradoxical immortalization concerning postulated frontiers. The aim of this article is to dig out kaleidoscope of images and sub-images from Beksinski' works through the motive of crucifixion resulting in the specific value of Christ's body and chimerical things inside the dehumanized catastrophic space. It is demonstrated how pathological discourse of melancholia could be intertwined with the discourse of abjection in the common point of transgressing the limits, making the symbolic space full of details indicating the risk of Ego being disintegrated, staying inside the transgressed limits as constituting aesthetical experience. Inexplicability of terrible post-apocalyptic world is readable via symbolic coordinates insofar as the main primal object (the body of Christ) occurs to be banished. Appearing of aesthetic experience is paralleled to the stages of psychosexual development in the existence of symbolic being where in opposition to classical freudism maternal authority is accentuated. That's how Kristevan style of psychoanalytic ruminations looks like.

Reencenação e pós-apocalipse na obra fotográfica de Francesca Woodman

A obra fotográfica de Francesca Woodman surge integrada numa geração estadunidense de fotógrafas, ainda imbuídas do espírito da segunda vaga feminista, nos anos setenta, da qual fazem parte Ana Mendieta e Cindy Sherman, entre outras. Para além da evidente qualidade estética, a obra de Woodman é profundamente questionadora dos papéis de género, que tende a inverter e a rasurar nas suas fotografias sempre de modo pertinente. Neste sentido, são particularmente significativos os seus tableaux vivants fotográficos, nos quais recria quadros célebres do cânone artístico mundial e de passagens bíblicas, questionando assim, nas suas recriações, não só as noções de género, mas também a própria validade da historiografia artística oficial, dominada pelo ponto de vista masculino. Simultaneamente, as suas fotografias configuram um mundo pós-apocalíptico e propõem uma utopia de índole feminista como resposta. Pretendo analisar com detalhe os elementos referidos.

Non-Linear Modes of Narrative in the Disruption of Time and Genre in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s <em>The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf</em>

Non-Linear Modes of Narrative in the Disruption of Time and Genre in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s <em>The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf</em>

Inventing a Vegetal Post-Exotic in the Work of Antoine Volodine

The physical environment plays a key role in the writing of Antoine Volodine, and in that of his “post-exotic” pen name authors. The ruins of human construction and the unwelcoming landscape of the post-apocalyptic world contribute to this literature’s bleak and menacing atmosphere. The ongoing catastrophe portrayed in Volodine’s work is equally environmental, human and political. This article will focus on the environment as agent and as a victim of violence, especially in the novels Terminus radieux [Radiant Terminus] and Herbes et golems [“Herbs and Golems”], and attend to what a specifically literary post-exotic engagement with the environment would look like. In addition to investing the floral with agency, the literary production itself acts as a form of political resistance that is dependent on one’s relationship with that world. Volodine applies his extensive power of invention as a linguist to naming herbs as a reparative and political act. The collective of post-exotic writers takes the side of the wild herbs they name and gives a voice to them by creating a place for them in literature. Questions driving my analysis of the vegetal post-exotic in Volodine’s work include: Can resistance take place without solidarity with the environment, and what would that solidarity look like? What communication can one have with the natural environment in the post-exotic mode that follows the cataclysm? Can one speak in the place of plants or other non-human agents? How must language change both what it is telling and how it tells it in a world in which disaster has already occurred and humans are only one of many agents who must contend with its aftermath?

Writing the Erasure of Emotions in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction: Reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Lauren Oliver’s Delirium

Young Adult (YA) dystopian fiction blends the traditional developmental narrative with a heightened concern with issues regarding the individual against society, often in the context of a post-apocalyptic world. In this article, I examine the way Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and Lauren Oliver’s Delirium (2011) focus on the state’s regulation over or removal of their people’s emotions and decisions in the context of the representation of future societies. If we consider the place of emotions in YA literature in general, with its interest in adolescents’ interaction with their families, each other, their school, or other communities, we can accept the validity of emotions as a prism through which to examine the text’s didactic and social purposes. Specifically, by deploying a discourse that emphasizes the dangerous consequences of unbridled emotions in earlier historical times, dystopian texts ask us to think about the political potential of feelings as catalysts for social change.

Ototheatre

In this article the author defines the term ototheatre to encompass mobile, sound-based works that create individualized theatrical experiences. Ototheatre is a comprehensive category within which we can see fundamental links between different types of mobile audio work. The essay discusses three works that highlight the possibilities of different forms of ototheatre. Zombies, Run, by Six to Start, is an exercise app for smartphones that augments reality for outdoor runners. The second-person narrative allows runners to take on a new role in a post-apocalyptic world, layering fiction over the actual world. Everyday Moments, by Hofesh Shechter, is a dance podcast that guides listeners through a transformative, improvisational dance piece in the seclusion of a dark room. Sights, by Tricksterp, is a walking tour guided by phones in booths. The work draws attention to what it means to experience a place without sight, emphasizing what changes and what remains the same over time. This essay argues that, although each of these works may not be classified primarily as theatre, they summon theatricality through their use of recorded sound. Sound functions theatrically in a different way in each of these works, but each prompts audience members to engage with recorded sound in a way that transforms space and provides multiple ways for them to act as both audiences and performers. Zombies, Run!, Everyday Moments and Sights are important antecedents for the ways that reality augmentation through sound can be used in future theatrical works. The individualized and interactive ways that ototheatre can be experienced and understood makes it an ideal model for other works that could allow users—simultaneously performers and audience members—to customize their experiences based on their own desires, through the use of individual technology.

“The Frailty of Everything”

In Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road, a man and boy roam a desolate, grey landscape. They are witnesses of an unknown catastrophe, forced to inhabit the remnants of a world once known. The man and boy are rooted in different pasts, and the paper examines the differences between the two characters with particular focus on language, memory and meaning in the post-apocalyptic world. The boy and man are significant for understanding the interconnections between past and present, but the novel in its entirety is also a necessary and inevitable component in understanding the paradox of language and memory. The paper argues that The Road, in its encounter with readers, becomes an ironic work, because readers subconsciously induce their own memory, experiences and connotations to make sense of the post-apocalyptic world, although the post-apocalyptic world is foreign and in many ways incompatible with the world that readers know.

Quo Vadis Qubit?

Imagine that in a few years from now a full-scale, practical quantum computer hits the headlines. In this apocalyptic scenario, the world of cryptography would be in a state of shock, since almost everything that forms the foundations of current security would collapse. Indeed, the presence of a quantum computer would render state-of-the-art, public-key cryptography useless. All the underlying assumptions about the intractability of mathematical problems that offer confident levels of security today would no longer apply in the presence of a quantum computer. But are we really doomed? Is cryptography dead? Well, luckily no. This paper examines the technologies that will enable crypto to survive the post-apocalyptic world of quantum computing. There are many things yet to be done to offer an environment as safe as current crypto does, but the tools are there. It is now a game of engineering, pro-active standardization and ingenious mathematics, while following a careful development approach to pave a safe way through the qubits inferno .

“Carry the Gun” and “Carry the Fire”: The Father’s Instilling in His Son Self-Defense Awareness in Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD

Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road (2006) depicts a journey of a nameless father and son traversing south down the road toward the coast in a postapocalyptic world and striving...

‘Hope is a mistake, if you can’t fix what’s broken you go insane’: a reading of gender, (s)heroism and redemption in Mad Max: Fury Road

ABSTRACTAfter a hiatus of 30 years since the first three films, the fourth Mad Max film was released in 2015, called Fury Road. It features the familiar eponymous character of Max, but this time alongside a female character, Imperator Furiosa. The gender dynamics of the fourth film are vastly different from those of the first three films and elicited much praise as well as criticism. It provides a new perspective through which to view the early films and the dystopian post-apocalyptic future world presented in the films. Fury Road introduces a corrective to the earlier films in terms of their reductive depictions of the relations between men and women, while avoiding an equally reductive representation of gendered shame and blame. The message is clearly about collaboration and cooperation as essential for the redemption of a world in which gendered inequities and abuses of power remain deeply disconcerting obstacles. This article considers some of the most salient aspects related to the depiction of women in Fury Road and of the relationship between the two main characters, Max and Furiosa.

"Od morfy po mech" - wariacje na temat człowieczeństwa w prozie Jacka Dukaja

The article tries to present the works of Jacek Dukaj as depictions of the human identity. The language analysis was crucial to show the human being in different timespans including the post - apocalyptic world. Posing some universal questions about the human being's place in the world , his/her role in shaping of reality and his/her cognitive and communication skills, was essential to find out more about the author of such prose works as or aksalota. Alternative historical visions, distant future, post-humanoid beings, transhumanism are only the tools enabling to present the human identity. The article constitutes an attempt to present the works of Jacek Dukaj as depictions of the human identity. The language analysis was crucial to show the human being in different timespans including the post-apocalyptic world. Posing some universal questions about the human being’s place in the world, his/her role in shaping of reality and his/her cognitive and communication skills, was essential to find out more about the author of such prose works as Ice (Polish: Lod ) or The Old Axolotl (Polish: Starośc aksolotla ). Alternative historical visions, the distant future, post-humanoid beings, transhumanism are only the tools enabling to present the human identity.

Existential risk due to ecosystem collapse: Nature strikes back

Epic tales of existential catastrophe have been written down for thousands of years, and in Christian traditions were linked to the punishment of humanity for its sins. We are still imagining new storylines for the end-of-civilization, with a rich genre of Hollywood films depicting either the struggles of remnant humans in a post-apocalyptic world, or some event that threatens the very survival of our species. Instead of a spiritual reckoning imposed by God, Hollywood’s Armageddon is usually the result of technology run amok, or mindless industrialization and population growth causing an environmental collapse. While dramatization of an environmental Armageddon might seem fanciful, existential risk warrants serious consideration even though the probability of an apocalypse is vanishingly small. If we are to avoid the unthinkable and unimaginable, then we need to ask what might be the most plausible pathways to an environmental apocalypse? We review the major environmental concepts pertinent to apocalyptic events, and conclude that positive feedback loops and multiplicative stresses represent the gravest existential risks, and the risks society is least likely to foresee. Zombies created by a misbegotten genetically engineered virus might make for a great movie, but it is the hubris of technical experts who are blind to surprising interaction networks, or who are unaware of positive feedback loops that will be our undoing.

Gunslinger Girl by Lyndsay Ely

Reviewed by: Gunslinger Girl by Lyndsay Ely Elizabeth Bush Ely, Lyndsay Gunslinger Girl. Patterson/Little, 2018 [368p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-316-55510-4 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-316-55530-2 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 9-12 Serendipity is six months shy of the age of majority when her loveless father bargains her away to another commune, since as a fertile young woman she's prized in this post-apocalyptic world. Having none of that, Pity, as she's known, sneaks away with her mother's pistols and her best friend, Finn, heading east toward Columbia, capital of the Confederacy of North America. After Finn is killed by thieves, Pity is rescued and brought to Cessation, a lawless city in the west where citizens are free of the restrictive farming communes and visitors enjoy the hedonism of Casimir, a Las Vegas–style hub with every vice money can buy, and entertainment nonpareil at Halcyon Singh's Theatre Vespertine. Pity's sharpshooter skills earn her a solo act, some friends, and a place to call home, but certainly not the peace and freedom she ran away for. Dirty politics has its grip in this Western-like dystopia, and Pity's guns are called into service to protect Cessation, her new boyfriend, Max, and the people who have given her shelter—if, that is, she can actually shoot for the kill in a clinch and figure out who's the devil here and who's on the side of the tarnished angels. Sex, drugs, and violence infuse Pity's new milieu, but since assault weapons don't seem to have survived CONA's historical cataclysms, pistol and rifle shootouts are relatively genteel affairs, and those with the sharpest eyes and the sense to keep count of their bullets get to live another day. Ely constructs a laudably realized world and leaves the door ajar for Pity's return—and it would be a dang shame if she has ridden permanently off into the sunset. EB Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Living in the end times through popular culture: An ultra-realist analysis of The Walking Dead as popular criminology

This article provides an ultra-realist analysis of AMC’s The Walking Dead as a form of ‘popular criminology’. It is argued here that dystopian fiction such as The Walking Dead offers an opportunity for a popular criminology to address what criminologists have described as our discipline’s aetiological crisis in theorizing harmful and violent subjectivities. The social relations, conditions and subjectivities displayed in dystopian fiction are in fact an exacerbation or extrapolation of our present norms, values and subjectivities, rather than a departure from them, and there are numerous real-world criminological parallels depicted within The Walking Dead’s postapocalyptic world. As such, the show possesses a hard kernel of Truth that is of significant utility in progressing criminological theories of violence and harmful subjectivity. The article therefore explores the ideological function of dystopian fiction as the fetishistic disavowal of the dark underbelly of liberal capitalism; and views the show as an example of the ultra-realist concepts of special liberty, the criminal undertaker and the pseudopacification process in action. In drawing on these cutting-edge criminological theories, it is argued that we can use criminological analyses of popular culture to provide incisive insights into the real-world relationship between violence and capitalism, and its proliferation of harmful subjectivities.