2024 Wrigley Institute Graduate Fellow Aidan Diamond, a PhD student in USC Dornsife’s Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Program, examines apocalypses narratives and how climate change is depicted in various novels, films, and comics. (Nick Neumann/USC Wrigley Institute)
The Other Side of Apocalypse
My dissertation, “‘For A Better Future’: Narrative and Hope at the End of the World,” examines the ways in which the context of climate change—which we might describe as an apocalyptic process—revises the narrative structure of apocalypse the last two thousand years have accustomed us to. Through this revision, the apocalypse narratives I examine (films, comics, and novels) take on the difficult work of imagining not just what climate apocalypses might look like, but what futures might lie on the other side.
The body of work I study is comprised by nine texts: three novels (Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Ruthanna Emrys’ A Half-Built Garden, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future), three films (Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim, and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road), and three comics (Ann Nocenti/David Aja’s The Seeds, Joe Keatinge/Leila Del Duca’s Shutter, and John Layman/Rob Guillory’s Chew).
Each text approaches apocalypse in a very different way, even though each comments on climate change either through literal representation or metaphorical invocation. The apocalypses represented among them include pandemics, first contact with aliens, imperialist extraction, resource scarcity, and, of course, climate change itself as the principal apocalyptic threat. These apocalypses are rendered in vivid palettes or in monochrome, are satirical or deathly serious, operate on scales both epic and profoundly personal. They gesture to the breadth of possibility in the apocalypse genre: the many ways the world can end, and, more importantly, what it takes to navigate those ends and find a path to a better future.
This is the “apocalyptic plot” in its most basic form: destruction, then renewal. Apocalypse, and then utopia. It’s an alluring plot, because a better world lies on the other side of the apocalyptic present; it’s ALSO a dangerous plot, because it suggests that the only way to that better world is through apocalyptic violence. One can see manifestations of this plot on both ends of the political spectrum—the conservative Christian Rapture that saves the “deserving” and damns the rest, the leftist Revolution that tears down oppressive structures and builds something better from that destruction. In each case, only a few survive. Because a better world (Heaven or a socialist utopia) lies on the other side of apocalypse, believers are motivated to spur on apocalypse, to conjure it if it takes too long to manifest, and they can believe that the apocalyptic violence they cause is justified because it is the only way to the better world. What price is too high to pay for admission to paradise? Nearly any atrocity becomes justifiable if it’s committed in pursuit of utopia. The road to Heaven is paved with corpses.
So, this is the plot that has dominated the apocalypse narrative since the Book of Revelation, the last volume in the New Testament. What’s fascinating to me about climate-inflected apocalypse narratives—like the ones I study—is that these narratives are actively revising the apocalyptic plot in three key ways:
(1) Climate-inflected apocalypse narratives refuse to justify or elide the high cost of apocalyptic violence. If these narratives demonstrate apocalyptic violence—as in the MaddAddam trilogy or Mad Max: Fury Road, to name two examples—they insist upon confronting their audience with that violence. You’re not allowed to look away from the damage, because the characters can’t: MaddAddam’s Jimmy/Snowman, the narrator of the first book, lives with the inescapable horror of being the last human being alive, and of having been an unwitting accomplice in the genocide of humanity. It defines his every thought and every waking moment. Apocalypse, for Jimmy/Snowman, is no escape hatch to a better future, but a hellish nightmare from which he can’t awake. Atwood writes of his existential horror: “He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo” (Oryx and Crake 147).
Mad Max: Fury Road operates on a parallel logic: the protagonists, and especially Furiosa and Max, are seeking not only their “better selves,” as the film’s closing epigraph states, but a better world in which to live. When they discover that there is no Green Place to which they can escape from the horrors of the Wasteland, they resolve to remake the world they live in by reclaiming the verdant Citadel and reshaping its society—a decision that requires spectacular brutality (rendered by director George Miller and editor Margaret Sixel as spectacle) against those who run the Citadel, embodied by Immortan Joe and his fanatical followers.
(2) Typical apocalypse narratives focus on either an individual survivor or a very small group of survivors (playing into the logic of the Rapture that emerges in the progenitor of apocalypse, the Book of Revelation); Mark Payne’s Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction persuasively argues that “postapocalyptic” fiction of the last three hundred years engages in what he terms the “postapocalyptic pastoral,” in which apocalyptic violence clears the path for individual self-actualization. Reductively, the end of the world becomes a stage for a character to become the best possible version of themself. Climate-inflected apocalypse narratives are largely unwilling to valorize the individual survivor, and they are entirely unwilling to justify apocalyptic violence as a necessary act to allow individual betterment. Instead, these narratives are deeply invested in how to get the collective to a better future, because a better future is only possible through collective action.
Take, for example, The Ministry for the Future and Pacific Rim: the first examines climate change in meticulous detail, and the second does so by way of metaphorical afterthought. But each text insists, with almost obsessive conviction, that the world can only be saved—from greenhouse gas emissions, from invading alien monsters—by people working together to counter the apocalyptic threat and build something in the aftermath. Stacker Pentecost’s iconic speech just before Pacific Rim’s climactic battle—the one where he declares that “Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse!”—is addressed not only to the Jaeger pilots who will risk their lives on the oceanic front lines, but to every engineer, technician, and other personnel who have devoted themselves to this mission of cancelling the apocalypse, and his choice of collective pronoun in that sentence and throughout his speech encompasses every person and every effort that has sustained their defense for so long. “Today,” he says, “we have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other. Today there’s not a man nor woman in here that shall stand alone.” The work of making a better future possible requires collective hope and, more to the point, collective action for that better future.
The Ministry for the Future similarly insists upon collective effort to make any headway against the climate crisis. Though the book has a main character, most chapters are not written from her point of view, but from the point of view of an Antarctic scientist, a photon, various individuals spearheading efforts to assassinate oil executives or re-wild rural America or engage in regenerative farming in India. But one chapter stands out from the rest in its encapsulation of the book’s belief in collective action’s ability to bring better futures into being: a conference of conservationists from around the world. Not a single quotation mark is used in the three-and-a-half page long chapter; each sentence represents a different country’s delegation describing their work to conserve and care for the land they’re responsible for. The chapter closes with something like an ode to the power of collective action to change the world:
We are all here together to share what we are doing, to see each other, and to tell you our stories. […] You will find us out there already, now, and then you must also realize we are only about one percent of all the projects out there doing good things. And more still are waiting to be born. Come in, talk to us. Listen to our stories. See where you can help. Build your own project. You will love it as we do. There is no other world.
(3) Not only do climate-inflected apocalypse narratives insist upon reckoning with the horror of apocalyptic violence, but they insist that apocalyptic violence is not the way to utopia; if apocalyptic violence is unleashed, it is at once the key to “utopia” and the key to its undoing. Let’s look at two comics, Shutter and Chew. Each comic approaches apocalypse from a fantastical angle, though each comic takes place on a world very geographically (and, in Chew’s case, structurally) similar to ours, but that is where similarities end.
Shutter takes on the shortsighted, extractive logic of the oil industry through its supervillainous and imperialist secret organization Prospero, which is determined to stretch out the life of the dying universe in which it holds power and in so doing prevent a multiverse it cannot control from being born (analogous to the oil industry’s determination to extract as much profit as they can in the short term even if it means exacerbating climate change’s already severe effects in the longterm). The comic’s protagonists, led by Kate Kristopher, endeavor to free the “Celestial Seed,” the agent of apocalypse and the birth of the multiverse to follow because, as Kate says, “New beats nothing. Every time” (Keatinge and Del Duca, Shutter #26). Even though—as Kate herself acknowledges—freeing the Celestial Seed means that “everything we’ve ever known dies in the process,” and even though the fight to free the Seed is brutal and bloody, the actual moment of apocalypse is represented not with violence, but with Kate at peace, watching her universe dissolve into the unmarked white of a blank page, full of creative potential, as the multiverse is born.
Chew’s apocalyptic event—the deliberate and simultaneous murder of everyone on the planet who eats chicken to avert a total annihilation of the human species by humanoid-avian aliens who identify with chickens to an extreme—is presented as profoundly traumatic for protagonist Tony Chu, who makes the choice to kill chicken-eaters and enacts their demise. Both Tony’s best friend and his partner die because of his choice, his partner writing the device that allowed him to kill all chicken-eaters and dying because she did so, his best friend advising him to kill chicken-eaters knowing that it would kill him, too. The world that emerges from this apocalypse is presented as a kind of utopia, one that will be fully realized once the chicken-aliens arrive. But Tony, unable to find peace in the “utopia” he made possible and unwilling to forgive the chicken-aliens for imposing such a high cost for that “utopia,” is ready to enact his revenge the moment the chicken-aliens land, attacking and murdering their leader. This is the scene that closes the comic, a scene that jeopardizes the very “utopia” Tony was coerced into creating.
Through these three revisions to the apocalyptic plot, climate-inflected apocalypse narratives are transforming a reactionary genre into a radical one. I believe this is because climate-inflected apocalypse narratives are being created in the midst of an apocalyptic process that we all can see and feel. In this context, to suggest that apocalyptic violence is the key to utopia is to ignore both the real cost of climate catastrophe—ecocide and genocide—and insist, against all scientific evidence, that things will eventually be fine even as floods, droughts, wildfires, heat domes, sea level rise, and other extreme weather events destroy indiscriminately. To valorize the individual survivor is to shrug off the millions of lives at risk because of climate change; it suggests that as long as billionaires are safe in their bunkers, it doesn’t matter if the rest of us die. And to insist that the only way to save the world is to first burn it down is to condone the destruction of the environment and the possible end of human civilization in the name of an unattainable utopia. In the age of climate change, none of these apocalyptic plots work to help us imagine a better future.
And, so, climate-inflected apocalypse narratives are rejecting these plots and their politics in favor of imagining better futures that don’t require mass death and destruction to get there; better futures accessible to as many as possible. They say, quite clearly, that we don’t need to burn the world down to save it; that the world can be saved, if only we have the courage to work together to build a better future.
Aidan Diamond is supported by the Diane Sonosky Montgomery and Jerol Sonosky Graduate Fellowship for Environmental Sustainability Research.