Description
Book SynopsisFiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction is one of the first works to focus specifically on fiction’s engagements with human driven extinction. Drawing together a diverse group of scholars and approaches, this volume pairs established voices in the field with emerging scholars and traditionally recognized cli-fi with texts and media typically not associated with Anthropocene fictions. The result is a volume that both engages with and furthers existing work on Anthropocene fiction as well as laying groundwork for the budding subfield of extinction fiction. This volume takes up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies. In various and disparate ways, each chapter engages with the stories we tell about extinction, about the extinction of animal and plant life, and about the extinction of human life itself. Answering the call to action of extinction studies, these chapters explore what kinds of humanity caused this event and what kinds may live through it; what cultural assumptions and values led to this event and which ones could lead out of it; what relationships between human life and this planet allowed the sixth mass extinction and what alternative relationships could be possible.
Trade ReviewAmong the myriad catastrophes facing our world, there is perhaps none more significant, or more difficult to contemplate, than the prospect of a sixth mass extinction wrought by human action. The annihilation of our fellow Earthlings is tragedy of a different order from the related concepts of anthropogenic climate change and the Anthropocene, and their most devastating conclusion. As the essays collected here dramatize, weighing the implications of this rending of the web of life forces us to confront the question of what species are, why they are valuable, and what it means to be human. In thinking about the implications of the sixth extinction for human storytelling, they seek to intervene in this most tragic of narratives, in hopes of forging an alternate ending. -- Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments…………………………………………………
Introduction: The Urgency of Story During the Sixth Mass Extinction
Jonathan Elmore……………………………………………
Chapter 1: Telling Stories about Dying (Out): Thomas Pynchon’s Global Novels and the
Anthropocene Extinction
Michael Fuchs…………………………………………….
Chapter 2: “Life Finds a Way”: Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, and Extinction Anxiety
Christy Tidwell……………………………………………
Chapter 3: "The Integrity of Nature”: A Comparative Analysis of Environmental Anxieties in the
Fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer
Kristen Figgins…………………………………………….
Chapter 4: “My heart slowly cracks”: Making Kin and Living through Extinction in Erdrich’s
Future Home of the Living God
Bridgitte Barclay………………………………………….
Chapter 5: “You are Here”: Extinction as Familial in The Broken Earth
Erin DeYoung……………………………………………
Chapter 6: The Uncanny, the Weird, and the Eerie: Hyperobjects and Anthropocenic Modalities
in China Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion
Allan Rae…………………………………………………
Chapter 7: The Tragi-Comedy of Life: A Posthumanist Reading of Species Extinction in
Éric Chevillard’s Sans-l’orang-outan
Christina Lord…………………………………………….
Chapter 8: Godly Mass Extinction: Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God and Extinction’s
Teleologies
Jenni G. Halpin…………………………………………..
About the Contributors
