Literature and Theatre
This chapter is concerned with practices of projecting and exploring ruined futures in the videogame format. My argument here is that the participatory mechanics and effort involved in playing such games encourages a reflection between the simulated future and the present of play, challenging the despair that end-narratives can otherwise provoke. The games discussed involve a fox mother parenting her cubs whilst the forest burns around her, Naughty Dog’s fungal-horror sequel The Last of Us: Part Two and FromSoftware’s dark fantasy Elden Ring, in which the player sifts through a tangle of broken biomes in the wake of a world-destroying civil war. Ultimately, the chapter returns to questions of life- and death cycles, arguing that videogames are an ideal format for dramatising the insanity of extinction; allowing players to wade out into the mire of planetary devastation; and showing them how such a future can play out, if it is not averted.
In the Epilogue I combine personal experiences of KlangHaus Arts Collective’s sound-installation Dark Room and a subsequent conversation with members of the company around the subject and rationale of their piece. The recollections return to my opening gambit that to have any hope of survival, humanity needs to find ways of accepting and facing the likelihood of extinction – and that art is an invaluable tool for helping us to have this conversation.
This chapter examines the role of fungus in contemporary end-of-the-world fiction. Drawing on recent understandings that our bodies house bacterial, viral and fungal cells that outweigh their ‘human’ counterparts, fungal fictions challenge myths of planetary dominance by pointing out that we are not even the dominant life forms in our bodies. Across television, literature and videogames, I show how these fears are energising visions of the end in which humanity suffers a biological breakdown. These include recent videogames and television series that pit human survivors against ‘infected’ fungal hosts, body-horror cinema and literature that revels in human destruction, and a curious trend in recent young-adult fiction that explores the possibility of human/fungal ‘hybrids’. As this book repeatedly argues, challenging the belief that it is within human capacity (or indeed interest) to subjugate non-human life often seems to be easier in fictions written for children.
This chapter looks at children’s literature that introduces young readers to the existential threats faced by our species and multiple others, whilst navigating the traps of denialism and despair. In contrast to much children’s eco-fiction, which asserts sustainable living as a way of saving the world from ruin, I am specifically interested here in stories of our world as it is ending, or has already ended. These include dystopian tales of sterilised cities, post-human fables of robots who replace our species, and stories of alien abduction and of a humanity that abandons reality in favour of virtual lies. A common theme that unites them all is grief – not the grief of the young for their ruined inheritance, but an adult grief for a future we have ruined and younger generations who may abandon us in their efforts to survive it.
This chapter takes a broad view of gender politics as they have manifested in a set of recent end-of-the-world novels. My interest here is the ways in which environmental threats such as industrial fossil fuel consumption, resource depletion and deforestation are linked to heteropatriarchal capitalism and the oppressive division of gender upon which it is built. Certain recent novels show matriarchal societies resurgent after our world’s end, committing the same sins and headed for the same disaster by turning our species against itself. These include speculative tales of women with superhuman powers, plagues that kill off or mutate everyone with testosterone above a certain level and blood-splattered space-operas of betentacled eldritch gods. Ultimately, the chapter builds to an argument that the binary codification of gender is a contributing factor to humanity’s deluded belief in its entitlement to burn through our world’s resources. All stories discussed in this chapter use the metaphor of plague in their discussion of gender politics – a literary tradition that I trace back to the stasis of Ancient Greece.
This chapter is interested in the relationship between humans and the technical systems that we build and maintain in order to function – systems such as language, culture, family construction, ethics and so on. In end-of-the-world fictions, some of these systems are always reconstructed after an extinction event by the survivors. This grants such fictions the ability to isolate and explore our species behaviour away, as it were, from our natural habitat. One story I analyse here shows humans extinct but our behaviour carrying on in the lives of our pets; another is told by a child from beyond the hope of our species’s salvation, but finds joy in the endurance of non-human life. There is also a lengthy discussion of suicide, an act shorn of its taboo in the face of extinction and offering a valuable opportunity to question what makes a meaningful life. The chapter – and the book – ends in the archive, that most humancentric of places, reflecting on the strange collective propensity of the stories discussed here to create archives of future destruction.
This chapter thinks about the figure of the parent and the agonies presented to them by the degenerating biomes of the twenty-first century. It argues that while the ethical demands of child-rearing amidst the climate apocalypse remain fundamentally unchanged, parents are also charged with educating their children about the severity of our situation whilst not giving in to despair. The stories it analyses discuss parenting amidst world-ending floods, chemical experiments on human subjects and trying to contextualise our situation amongst the vast reaches of outer space. In distinct ways, these stories all challenge myths of linear human ‘progress’ by attending to cycles of life and death. The idea, which becomes a core argument of this book, is that for as long as humans remain convinced that we are ‘going somewhere’ and use this goal to fuel our destruction of this planet, any hope of endurance is fatally compromised.
The Prologue to this book introduces and outlines the subject of the climate apocalypse as a driving force behind modern storytelling. It reviews some key literary analyses and asserts the argument of the book proper, which is that humanity needs to face the prospect of extinction in order to galvanise collective response to the climate apocalypse and that stories are a key tool in helping us to imagine this possibility.
This chapter considers the dangers of humanity’s division of worth across different species, hubristically declaring ourselves master and arbiter of the floral and faunal life upon which we rely for survival. I use Timothy Morton’s theory of agrilogistics, our millennia-old and self-defeating subjugation of vegetal and animal species, to show the ways in which end-of-the-world fiction tests our philosophies of food production to destruction. The bulk of the chapter discusses film, first offering agrilogistic readings of films that are not explicitly climate-focused, then comparing two ‘survivalist’ narratives with wildly differing attitudes to both vegetal life and the human politics of gender. It finishes with a discussion of the emergent genre of ‘plant horror’, tracking deep-rooted fears of the Other in humanity’s current outlook. We are realising, perhaps too late, that while we need plants and animals to survive, they do not need us.
As the ravages of climate change throw our future into question, many of our stories have turned to the subject of extinction. This book is about what they are saying and why it demands our attention. Humanity has always imagined what lies beyond the world’s unknown frontiers – dark forests, deep caves, open oceans, night skies. Today, amidst the sixth mass extinction event, our most foreboding terra incognita is the time directly ahead. So, for decades, we have been filling this place with zombie videogames, post-apocalyptic quest narratives, political dystopias, ecological horrors, to the point that our future is saturated with competing narratives of disintegration. In charting a course through such stories across literature, children’s fiction, videogames, theatre and film, We all die at the end shows a species trying to come to terms with the unthinkable. But this is not a book about giving up. Rather, it argues that hope for survival means accepting that everything is at stake. Our stories can help us to do this if we will only listen.