This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

The author attends a conference on gene editing in Paris and muses on the varied scientific, professional, religious, governmental, military, corporate, and advocacy-based participants invited to formulate public policy recommendations. Where, he wonders, are the cultural perspectives that could illuminate ethical issues in all their depth and complexity?

This chapter defines a new genre of biodystopian fiction characterized by the internalization of dystopia in every cell of the subject’s body. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy are only a few of the recent novels that construct nightmare societies shaped by the consequences of unethical uses of genetics. These fictions portray the consequences of illegal experimentation on human subjects, designer babies, monocrop agriculture, direct-to-consumer gene editing, bioterrorism, genetically engineered pandemics, posthuman clones, and a world overrun with transgenic animals. Extrapolating from current developments in genetics, these novels contrast starkly with the optimistic prophecies of prominent scientists who suggest that advances in behavioral genetics will reduce racism, the stigmatization of people with undesirable characteristics, and other forms of discrimination.

In the Postscript, I turn to Anne Washburn’s 2012 Mr. Burns: A Post Electric Play. Set in a postapocalyptic near-future after the electrical grid has collapsed, Mr. Burns offers a meditation on the persistence of storytelling in a postdigital age. Although the premise is simple, even comical -- a band of survivors try to recall and restage episodes of the The Simpsons -- the play’s remix of the detritus of contemporary popular culture offers a more serious appraisal of the digital era and the nature of art. However, my own reading reveals surprising ironies about even the most digitally resistant genre (theatre) and the embeddedness of sound recording in present-day writing practices. The questions posited about the relationships between new and old media, and between sound recording, writing, and performance, are ones that reverberate across this book.

The apocalyptic and postapocalyptic are staples of young adult fiction. While sometimes conflated with the dystopian genre, young adult postapocalyptic fiction (YAPA) is neither simply dystopian nor a watered-down version of adult postapocalyptic fiction. Young adult postapocalyptic fiction provides a stage on which young protagonists question the meaning and purpose of community and develop innovative responses to issues of identity and agency under challenging conditions (whether those come from zombies, pandemic disease, nuclear war, environmental degradation, etc.). YAPA novels include some classic postapocalyptic accounts of survival after nuclear war, as in Robert O’Brien’s Zfor Zachariah (1974) and the more recent popular series starting with Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) and including James Dashner’s Maze Runner (2009), Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies (2005), and Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011). These novels are to be contrasted with other YAPA novels, such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker or Octavia Butler’s Parable series. In each of those novels, the fact of living after a devastating event (or series of events) is not simply the setting of the novel but also a feature of the reader’s experience with the novel.

This chapter examines a number of postapocalyptic Irish films produced and released in the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland. It considers the ways in which three of these films in particular, Conor Horgan’s One Hundred Mornings (2009), Stephen Fingleton’s The Survivalist (2015), and David Freyne’s The Cured (2017), represent both the state of the nation in the wake of fiscal catastrophe and its future self-projections: the “post” of “postapocalypse.” The films depict bleak presents, clearly reflecting the socioeconomic context of recession and austerity in which they were made. Yet they also offer bleak futures, with limited potential for transformation or growth. The sites of resistance to neoliberal dystopia that emerge within the films, especially those based on reconstruction of a premodern, pastoral community as an ethical alternative to capitalist subjectivities (a key signifier of the postapocalyptic genre), are profoundly ambivalent and contingent. Thus, the chapter argues, the postapocalyptic cycle of Irish cinema represents a key cultural engagement with the economic discourses of recovery and restoration that emerged almost simultaneously with discourses of crisis in Ireland.