Post-apocalyptic Fiction Research Articles

HOPE AND SURVIVAL IN ZOMBIE POST-APOCALYPSE ENVIRONMENTS: WORLD WAR Z AND ZONE ONE

The recent popularity of zombie apocalypse narratives across various media highlights their deep engagement with social, cultural, political, and environmental issues. These narratives often use zombies as allegorical figures to explore contemporary problems, such as ecological neglect and societal collapse. The emergence of a zombie-creating virus in contemporary fiction mirrors fears of biological and ecological disasters, framing zombie culture as a reflection on environmental degradation in industrial-capitalist societies. By highlighting the potential consequences of ecological destruction, zombie post-apocalyptic fiction underscores how the collapse of social order exposes internal conflicts—such as fear, mistrust, and selfishness—that obstruct collective survival efforts. This narrative device suggests that while environmental and biological threats are significant, moral and social cohesion are equally crucial for overcoming crises and ensuring survival. Despite the grim scenarios presented, zombie narratives also offer hope by showcasing the importance of collective action, adaptability, and the rebuilding of social units. Thus, this paper argues that the portrayal of hope and survival goes beyond simple thematic analysis in both Max Brooks’ World War Z (2006) and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) since human ingenuity and resilience are innate qualities, as demonstrated by how societies recover and rebuild following a zombie apocalypse. This claim challenges the conventional view of post-apocalyptic societies as inevitably doomed, instead emphasizing their potential for progress and renewal, not only for the betterment of humanity but also for the preservation of planet Earth.

Hope and Crisis in McCarthy's The Road and Mandel's Station Eleven

Presentation of the duality of hope and crisis for eco-conscious is the main feature of post-apocalyptic fictions. This research work comparatively analyzes the revelation of hope and crisis in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven from ecocritical perspective. These fictional works expose extreme destruction of life, property and even the natural world.Human beings interfere in the course of nature, by violating the web of interdependence between plants and animals and neglecting its autonomous existence. These novels reveal the germination of the different types of apocalypses because of such invasion, which ultimately push our ecosphere in danger.Such displays of the dystopian worlds are purposeful. They aim to strike the thoughts of people and make them serious towards ecological issues. They give the sense of imminent environmental peril to correct their misdeeds. At the same time, such fictional works also include events and situations that signal optimism in the readers. The comparative study reveals that the key point of the post-apocalyptic fictions is to present the dialectics of hope and hopelessness for the eco-conscious in readers and make them ecofriendly.This paper follows qualitative research design focusing on the textual analysis method for the analysis of the primary texts to justify the claim. Critical ideas of Lawrence Buell in relation to the environmental apocalypse are used as analytical tools for critical analysis.

Utopia in Dystopia: Presentation of the Landscape in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

This paper explores the presentation of the utopian landscape in a dystopian world to impart the message of optimism in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road employing the theoretical ideas of ecocriticism focusing on the environmental apocalypse trend. The text as post-apocalyptic fiction presents the earth near destruction in relation to humans, animals and plants world after a frightening apocalypse. The two unnamed characters journey through the desolate landscape in search of safety. The landscape is full of silence and lifelessness, frightening and unfriendly for survival that tells a terrifying tale indeed. At the same time, the landscape is presented as a major component of the theme. More than that landscape itself is a text that needs interpretation as it has multiple possibilities. The world of the novel is dominated by a dystopian landscape. However, within that deadly world, the world of dream and memory is full of utopian landscape. This contrastive presentation seems purposeful. It is to keep the strand of hope and aware readers about the negative consequences, which the anthropocentric invasion to the natural system invites. Following qualitative research design, this paper uses textual analysis method to interpret the text with the critical ideas of Lawrence Buell related to the environmental apocalypse trend.

Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Problem of Cultural Anxiety

Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Problem of Cultural Anxiety

The Mechanism of Survival in Post-Apocalyptic Pandemic Narratives: A Comparative Study

Post-Apocalyptic Fiction is a subgenre of science fiction in which a global crisis takes its toll on the human population, leaving only a few with the luck of surviving the scene. However, survival slowly develops into a determining power as the remaining people try to reconstruct a new civilization with the use of different strategies and mechanisms of survival. This study is then based on post-apocalyptic texts, particularly ones that are concerned with pandemics, and carefully examines and compares two ground-breaking narratives of post-apocalyptic fiction: Stephen King’s The Stand (1978) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). It attempts to explore the two narratives in terms of the strategies and mechanisms of survival as the two novelists recapture the survivors’ experiences and their struggle to survive the ongoing post-apocalyptic setting.

An exit out of the 'hive': post-apocalyptic fictions of data capitalism and technological acceleration

Digital technologies have come to frame the everyday interactions of our world, meshing together public and private spaces into seamless singular platforms for work, socialisation and leisure. At the centre of these transformations are the market imperatives of companies who trade in predictions based upon behavioural data, utilising a range of surveillance strategies to capture information that shapes the most effective corporate interventions into our lives. Shoshana Zuboff's 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power provides a thorough overview of these issues, constructing a new vocabulary with which to identify the forces that shape political, financial, and social processes on a global scale. However, the book maintains a liberal political alignment which reaffirms the powers of the right, advocating for a partial technological deceleration which preserves the violent political-economic foundations underpinning surveillance and digital control. This article examines Margaret Atwood's The Testaments and Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, two contemporary novels which test out the predictions of technodeterminist logic in unequivocal ways, in order to interrogate the imaginative limitations prevalent in responses to data capitalism.

Disruptionen: Sprachliche und seelische Brüche in »Sam va mieux« von Alain Damasio

The writer Alain Damasio (1969– ) is one of the best-known SF authors in France. Recently, Damasio has made a name for himself in the English-speaking world through various projects such as translations, blogs, animated films, video games and fan art based on his novels. In Damasio’s fiction, disruptive elements interact on a structural and narrative level. The short story »Sam va mieux« (»Sam is doing better«, first published in 2010, republished in 2021) represents a particularly complex case in terms of use and functioning of disruption. The lonely protagonist imagines a counterpart – in this case a samovar – as his son Sam. This article deals with the concept of post-apocalypse, which is evoked by linguistic means. The short story’s creative linguistic treatment of resistance to (uncomfortable) reality is intended to show that the hero’s psychological defense mechanisms are based on disruption. The treatment of disruptive conditions in »Sam va mieux« points to Damasio’s specific conception of the post-apocalyptic narrative. Sam and all the protagonist’s other imaginary children serve functions that are central to post-apocalyptic fiction as a whole: a cathartic function (providing comfort), a critical and educational function (disillusionment and warning), and and an empowering and emancipatory function (maintaining agency). »Sam va mieux« explores the question of how agency unfolds despite the catastrophe and what effects can possibly be generated as a result. One possibility is the will to deal creatively with a changing world. Human beings have the potential and the duty not to suffer the world passively. 

Monika Kaup, New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory

Monika Kaup, New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory

A Postmodern Psychoanalytic Critique of Narrative Disruptions and Subversions in Dalit and Post-apocalyptic Narratives: A Comparative Study

This research study investigates narrative disruptions and subversions in Dalit and post-apocalyptic literature using a postmodern psychoanalytic methodology. Drawing on the concepts of Jacques Lacan and Homi K. Bhabha, the research argues that these literary genres use language and plot to subvert and disrupt dominant power structures, social hierarchies and hegemonic discourses. The study examines a few works of Dalit and post-apocalyptic fiction to show how both genres use narrative methods such as fragmentation, irony, parody and subversion to question established standards of representation and disclose the traumas and disjunctions of the oppressed. The voice of the oppressed is explicit through the analysis of the selected texts.

“Apocalypse Blindness,” Climate Trauma and the Politics of Future-Oriented Affect

In the Anglo-American cultural sphere, the growing awareness of global warming and ecocide has coincided with the proliferation of a much discussed, post-apocalyptic imaginary that transports us to uninhabitable planetary futures. These “fictions,” as E. Ann Kaplan notes in a discussion of their mobilising potential, act as “memories for the future” which make us “identify with future selves struggling to survive.” This article turns to Günther Anders’s notion of “apocalypse-blindness” (1956) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to set out an alternative way of understanding the powerfully sentimental force such images of doom convey. While seemingly turning our gaze to the future and onto the devastating impact of consumerist lifestyles, I argue that this doom-ridden imaginary also entails a sentimentalisation of our own “inability to feel” and be sufficiently affected by the reality we know ourselves to be contributing to. As such, it bears witness to the trauma of “not being able to adequately feel” what one already knows. By revisiting The Road, a text that occupies a central role in discussions of the potentials and cathartic pitfalls of post-apocalyptic fiction, I suggest that its political potential lies in this confrontation with the limits of feeling. And the politics it opens onto does not hinge on images on ruin, but on a yearning for a socially sanctioned right to feel and express the fear representations only seem able to convey in an inadequate, anaesthetic manner.

ULRICH BECK’S RISK SOCIETY AND THE SELECTED PANDEMIC LITERATURE: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS

The present study deals with Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society in relation to the selected pandemic literature. It aims at exploring the dangers of modern world exhibited in post-apocalyptic fiction in English. The study employed Beck’s notion of risk society which demonstrates scientific and technological advancement resulting in terrors in today world. The study is qualitative one and analyzed through content analysis technique. It concluded that there are some terrible consequences often neglected during the blind run after progress and advancement and they happen later on as uncontrollable phenomenon. Keywords: Pandemic, Risk Society, Literature, Modern World.

The Anthropocene and the Apocalypse

Abstract This essay reviews recent scholarly work on EcoHorror and Post-Apocalyptic science fiction. It pays particular attention to the influence of Stacey Alaimo’s call for attention to the ethics of “transcorporeality” when it comes to reading horror, a need to imagine the human and nonhuman not as a binary but as intermeshed and mutually dependent. Hybridity in horror might thus present something not monstrous but politically desirable. Similarly, the essay explores the ways in which scholarship and public intellectuals have tended to see the recent boom in post-apocalyptic writing as either indicating the durability of late capitalism or the moment of its collapse and reshaping into something new.The books under review examine the outpouring of ecological horror and postapocalyptic fiction in the second half of the twentieth century and into the present. Why have such stories come so forcefully into the literary and filmic marketplace over the last 50 years or so?

The End of the World as We Know It

The End of the World as We Know It

미래는 끝나지 않았다: 마가렛 애트우드와 김초엽 소설에 나타난 지구 종말이후의 이야기들

Recent years have witnessed an eruption of fiction depicting the end of the world and the survival of a remnant of humanity. Contemporary women writers are participating in this apocalyptic trend, but their works differ from the traditional apocalyptic novels written by males. While traditional apocalypse fictions concentrate on the restoration of what has been lost and mourn for the past, contemporary women writers transform the apocalyptic genre to imagine possible stories of the humanity after the apocalyptic event. MaddAddam trilogy of Margaret Atwood and Greenhouse at the End of the Earth by Kim Cho Yeop share a number of themes, discourses, and narrative techniques as follows: a multi-layered narrative, a cast of post-human, cyborg and multi-species characters, an alternative community of new humankind, and the possibility of eco-utopia. Cobb-house of God’s Gardener in MaddAddam trilogy and the greenhouse in Kim Cho Yeop’s novel were a type of eco-utopia constructed in the post-apocalyptic Earth in order to establish a new community to co-exist with other species. As Donna Haraway’s new term, Chthulucene implies, all living things and all matters are interconnected and human beings should interact with other species in order to “stay with the trouble” in their novels. And post-apocalyptic fictions serve as meta-narratives that illustrate the storytelling process. By imagining future worlds and disclosing their narrative construction, a novel forces readers reevaluate the imminent problems of humanity and gives them the opportunity to change the present for a better post-human world. Symbiotic co-existence with animals, multi-species, cyborgs and non-human beings is feasible through interactive relationships with other earthly beings. In the post-apocalyptic novels of Margaret Atwood and Kim Cho Yeop, post-human narratives are not concluded, and there is hope even after the end of the world.

New Ecological Realisms: Post-apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory

New Ecological Realisms: Post-apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory

Postapokaliptyczne role ludzi i roślin w grze Cloud Gardens. Czym jest ogród?


 
 
 This article is concerned with the fate of trash and plants which grow on it. As an example of this, the video game Cloud Gardens was chosen, along with installation arts by Elżbieta Rajewska and Diana Lelonek. The paper analyzes the process of creating landscapes known from popular works of post-apocalyptic fiction; what in other titles is only a background to events and human tragedy is of greatest importance here. Later parts of the article discuss human responsibility for the unexpected development of other species, as well as plants’ indifference to the human apocalypse. This text is part of the non-anthropocentric humanism trend and refers to the concept of “plant art” as proposed by Anna Wandzel.
 
 

From Sensationalism to Sensation: Brian Evenson’s Affecting Texts

Brian Evenson’s work forcefully resists literary categorization, playfully mixing then deconstructing genres such as the Gothic, the western, post-apocalyptic fiction, magic realism to name but a few. Yet several short stories and novellas seem to strive towards a common fantasy: achieving sensation. This article intends to analyze the ways in which Evenson’s prose endeavors to probe the limits of literature, reassessing its power to seize the body of the reader by opening the text to a virtually physical reception.

Chris Baker’s Kokopu Dreams: A Prophetic View of a Disrupted Post-Pandemic World

The global pandemic, with its multiple and far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink and rewrite the world we live in. Chris Baker’s novel Kokopu Dreams (2000) sounds somehow prophetic today in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. His work could be labelled as “speculative fiction” and placed among the umbrella categories of magic realism, science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction. Set in Aotearoa New Zealand, the story focuses on the life of the few human survivors of a rapidly-spreading deadly illness caused by the rabbit calicivirus, illegally introduced into the country. The calicivirus has mutated and killed almost all the human population, who is now living in a land controlled by animals and spirits. The novel is also a template of transcultural writing, mixing Māori creation stories, Christian and Celtic mythologies, scientific issues and aspects of everyday life. Having grown up in a contact zone of different cultures―Baker is of Polynesian (Samoan), Anglo-Saxon and Celtic origin, but regards himself as a “Pacific” person―he shares that multiplicity of belonging which is a typical condition in the Pacific region today. Baker deals with a physical and cultural collective trauma, and the process of re-signification of the ethos in a bi-cultural country made of people of mixed ancestry, European and Māori. The re-elaboration of the epidemic experience is therefore based on both a Western rational representation and an indigenous mythical one.

The Legacy of Nineteen Eighty-Four: British Dystopias, from 1984 to the present day

This introductory piece looks back at the “Orwellian moment” that was the year 1984, which prompted a re-examination of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s potential prophecies and witnessed a dystopian resurgence in literature, then asks whether an Orwellian posterity can be traced in the British dystopias produced since then. After locating the dystopian genre on the utopian spectrum, in relation to terms such as “anti-utopia” or “metatopia”, it moves on to the reception of dystopia and to the question of hope. Can dystopias act as cautionary tales or do they just sell dissatisfaction as a commodity? The formal strategies to be found in contemporary dystopias are then examined. The latter’s preference for realism rather than science fiction, their focus on an individual protagonist, and the centrality of themes such as language, individual and collective memory and historiography may be regarded as evidence of an Orwellian posterity. However, new concerns have also emerged in the “post-totalitarian dystopia”, in which late capitalism is a predatory force that devours humans and nature. As such, British dystopias since 1984 display close links with genres such as post-apocalyptic fiction and climate fiction. Recent dystopias however never lose sight of the political, whether in the new forms state authoritarianism may take or in the deadly effects of fragmented plutocracies.

Appositions: The Future in Solarpunk and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

The essay discusses images of the future in solarpunk and post-apocalyptic fiction, focusing on their distinct approach to the narratives of progress, science, and individualism. The dystopian perspective of post-apocalyptic fiction is juxtaposed with the hopeful stance of solarpunk stories in order to outline the attempts to move beyond environmental pessimism and to imagine a liveable future. A reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes’s The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014), and Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) provides an overview of early 21st-century dystopian motifs and visions, while the ideas and development of solarpunk fiction are discussed on the basis of three anthologies of short stories: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Ecospeculation (2017), Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers (2018), and Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures (2021). The aim of the essay is to argue that apocalyptic and solarpunk fiction stand in a relationship of apposition to one another, representing dominant and emergent structures of feeling.