Michael Cameron explores post-apocalyptic/dystopian literature and its parallels with contemporary politics.
“Post-apocalyptic literature acts as a mirror for our political and scientific anxieties. A study of these texts can assist in thinking through our contemporary political impasses.”
And just like that we approach the end of the year, and here I am writing my last blog as an OpenThinker. (I thought about including a joke about reverting back to being a “Closed Thinker” now that it is done, but I won’t subject you to such a groan-inducing attempt at humour…) However, for […]
This month’s blog is the second of a pair, so I suggest you first read last month’s if you haven’t already done so. The previous blog asked a simple question: what can we take from fiction generally, and from dystopian literature specifically, to apply to the problem of ecological destruction and the climate crisis? I […]
Well, it was bound to happen eventually. Commenting on my September blog, a good friend asked if in a future blog I would look at “applying lessons” from literature to the Climate Crisis. Reflecting on his comment, I couldn’t help but acknowledge that many of my blogs thus far, while focusing on dystopia and (post-)apocalypse […]
It is a trope repeated to the point of cliché. Act 1 of the disaster movie, the under-rested and over-caffeinated scientist discovers the first signs of the incoming cataclysm and rushes off to alert the government. As we in the audience have come to expect, the government does not take the threat seriously until the […]
I was reminded this past month of Grant Curtis’ April blog, for I too felt something like “head-splitting cognitive dissonance” as I followed the drama of the billionaire space race. For those living under a rock the past month — well, first let me say I envy you, but secondly let me fill you in. […]
This article discusses the recent discoveries at the sites of the former Indian Residential Schools. In May, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation revealed that it had found the remains of 215 children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Only weeks later, the Cowessess First Nation announced that they had found […]
For video game enthusiasts, 2021 brings an important anniversary: September marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Dark Souls, the cult-classic that spawned not only two sequels but also a new genre of interactive storytelling, the “Souls-like” game. Admittedly, with “only” 27 million copies cumulatively sold over the entire trilogy, the Dark Souls series […]
I think it fair to say that many of us have participated in a conversation like the following: Some weather we’re having today. Yes, it really got warm all of a sudden. Odd seeing everything melt in January… And then there befalls that awkward, knowing pause, where each interlocutor wonders–do I dare speak its name? […]
When watching a dystopian film or reading a post-apocalyptic novel, one might be tempted to interpret these texts as purely speculative endeavors, future scenarios that are, at least presently, objects only of the imagination. Many such texts, however, speak both directly and metaphorically to past or current injustices, and I can think of few that […]
Recently, I was struck by a peculiar thought while I re-read Mary Shelley’s The Last Man—the 1826 novel by the author of Frankenstein that depicts a global plague systematically wiping out humankind until the “last man” is all that remains. Here I am, I thought, almost a year into a global pandemic, once again reading […]
