New Ecological Realisms and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Abstract

This chapter offers a general survey presenting the larger picture of recent developments in new ecological realisms and post-apocalyptic fiction. It establishes the framework for the examination of specific theorists and post-apocalyptic novels and their intersections explored in this study, New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory. It sets off the focus on new context-based realisms from related movements such as speculative realism, new and feminist materialisms, and object-oriented ontology. It explores differences between scientific reductivism and new realism, explaining the significance of new realisms of complex and embedded wholes, actor-networks and ecologies for establishing the irreducibility of humanistic objects of study. It sets out post-apocalyptic fiction as an alternate variety of context-based ontologies that shift away from the old realism of isolated objects: apocalypse is a way the entire world is. Further, post-apocalyptic fiction’s speculative realism is explored as a new futurist variety of narrative verisimilitude, which adapts the novel’s unique standard of realism to the needs of our own time—the challenges of narrating climate change.

Indigenous diasporas in speculative fiction: Writing through estrangement

“…Throughout this article I talk about speculative fiction as a descriptive term that helps navigate the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction specific to Indigenous futurisms. Moreover, all three novels take place in what can be called (post)apocalyptic or dystopic scenarios, which remove the protagonists from a ‘normal’ environment and are suggestive of paradigmatic shifts (Kaup, 2021). As I mentioned above, (post)apocalyptic stories contain not only projections onto the future, but also past and present realities for Indigenous peoples.…”

“…Over time, they would find their way home” (King, 2014, p. 156). In fact, repeated allusions to new beginnings suggest the whole novel points rather to a post‐apocalyptic ethos of renewal and hope after the end (Kaup, 2021), which becomes most apparent when the ecosystem eventually shows signs of recovery, epitomized by the return of the turtles to Samaritan Bay. Interestingly, this last episode constitutes one of the supernatural elements interspersed in the novel.…”