Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction – eBook

Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction (PDF) evaluates 21st-century realistic speculations of human extinction: fictions that imagine future worlds without interferences of interplanetary travel, as-yet uninvented technology, or other science fiction elements that offer hope for rescue or long-term survival. Climate change fiction as a type of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing usually opposes facing the potentiality of human species extinction, following instead traditional generic conventions that envision primitivist communities of human survivors with the methods of escaping the consequences of global climate change. Yet among the ongoing sixth great extinction, works that problematize survival, offer no opportunities for social rebirth, and consider humanity’s final end may address the problem of how to decline the impulse of human exceptionalism that suffuses climate change discourse and post-apocalyptic fiction.

Instead of following the preferences of the genre, the eco collapse fictions examined here manifest apocalypse where the channels for a happy ending no longer exist. In these texts, specters of cannibalism diminished ecosystems, and disintegrations of difference and othering render human self-identity as fundamentally malleable within their confrontations with the glaring materiality of all life. This ebook is the first detailed exploration of contemporary fiction that imagines the imbrication of humans and nonhumans within global species extinctions. It thoroughly interrogates novels from authors like Cormac McCarthy, Peter Heller,  and Yann Martel that reject the impulse of human exceptionalism to show what it might be like to go extinct.

Review

“Sarah McFarland’s Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Extinction is another captivating addition to [its] field. What marks this ebook as special is how McFarland pays close attention to the most miserable and excruciating aspects of such fiction… McFarland’s skill in guiding us through the limits of the liveable and the readable allows a reckoning with what she identifies as the undoing of “human exceptionalism” (p. 3).” ― English Studies

978-1350177642, 978-1350177659, 978-1350177666

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