Apocalypse in Crisis

Reviewed by: Apocalypse in Crisis: Fiction from The War of the Worlds to Dead Astronauts by Christopher Palmer Connor Pitetti The End of Apocalypse? Christopher Palmer. Apocalypse in Crisis: Fiction from The War of the Worlds to Dead Astronauts. Liverpool UP, Science Fiction Texts and Subtexts, 2021. 352 pp. £95 hc. In Apocalypse in Crisis, Christopher Palmer argues that apocalypse, in its Biblical form a reassuring story in which a new or restored world awaits on the other side of historical disaster, has "become more difficult to think with" in our own moment (4). The narrative "has lost its power" (4); it is in crisis in the sense that it can no longer perform the cultural work of revealing a perspective from which historical events experienced as chaotic or threatening come to be seen as necessary or productive. Palmer connects this breakdown to shifts in the content and form of catastrophe fictions, from straightforward narratives featuring well-defined and comprehensible disasters towards formally experimental stories of disasters that are ubiquitous, ill-defined, and mysterious. Aspects of this argument are familiar: Zbigniew Lewicki's The Bang and the Whimper (1984), for example, argued that fin-de-siècle American fiction is marked by a shift from visions of apocalyptic renewal to what Lewicki described as visions of entropic decay, and in Apocalyptic Transformation (2008), Elizabeth Rosen explored the ways in which postmodern fictions are both invested in apocalyptic narrative and interested in dismantling the teleological underpinnings of apocalyptic optimism. Neither of these studies focused specifically on science fiction, however, and Palmer also expands the arguments by including more recent texts such as China Miéville's Kraken (2010) and Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts (2021). After a rather torturous discussion of traditional and contemporary apocalypses in his introduction, Palmer turns to The War of the Worlds (1897), arguing that H.G. Wells "ponders and assesses traditional apocalypse" (69) by calling its tropes and promises into question. Part 1 of the book then jumps to disaster novels of the 1950s, read as traditionally apocalyptic accounts and featuring New Jerusalems ranging from the neo-primitivism of George Stewart's Earth Abides (1949) to the grand transcendence of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953). In Part 2, Palmer finds in the stylistic experimentation of authors such as J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter not only an aestheticization and psychologization of disaster, but also a basic continuity [End Page 580] with the novels of the fifties: here again catastrophe opens the way for something new, albeit with more focus on the destruction involved and with ambiguous, partial, or purely personal payoffs. Part 3 looks at fiction from the 1980s to the 2010s, identifying strategies used by contemporary novelists to resist or complicate apocalypse, such as comedically deflating its tropes or undermining its claims to universal explanatory power by juxtaposing apocalyptic storylines with competing strands of narrative. The individual readings in the book are often illuminating, particularly in the discussion of points of style, an issue that is often overlooked in discussion of sf texts. But Palmer's overall claim that these readings add up to evidence of a trend away from optimistic apocalypticism is not convincing. His periodization is messy at best, and gets in the way more than it clarifies. Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), discussed in Part 1, and Anna Kavan's Ice (1967), discussed in Part 2, have more in common with one another in terms of their denial of apocalyptic hope then they do with the novels with which Palmer groups them, as, in a different way, do Clarke's Childhood's End and Doris Lessing's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982). More of an issue is the fact that Palmer's corpus is highly idiosyncratic; this is stimulating in the sense that it embraces texts that are little known (such as Arno Schmidt's Nobodaddy's Children, collected 1963, trans. 1995) and authors not commonly associated with sf (such as Don DeLillo), but it does not provide a foundation from which to make claims about the state of apocalyptic storytelling as such. It

Aesthetics · Apocalypticism · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Postmodernism · Power (physics) · Teleology · Theology · Vision · History · Nuclear Issues and Defense · Philosophy · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life