What Apocalyptic Literature Tells Us

Chanda Phelan wrote a rather creative undergraduate thesis at Pomona. Her topic? Analyzing the causes of our demise in apocalyptic fiction. One of her fascinating findings is that that trends seem consistent with the paranoia of the times until you get to the 1990's. She writes:

It's not the idea of Ending itself that has faded – that will be around until we are actually mopped off the face of the Earth. It's the actual moment of disaster, the blood and guts and fire, that has been losing ground in stories of the End. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a 200-year-old trend, and for 170 of those years, the ways writers imagined the end were pretty transparently a reflection of whatever was going on around them – nuclear war, environmental concerns, etc. In the mid-1990s, though, everything just turned into a big muddle. Suddenly, we'd get a post-apocalyptic world whose demise was never explained. It was just a big question mark.

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That's an overly simplistic way of looking at it, though. It's not that the moment of destruction is boring; it's that it doesn't even matter anymore. There are an increasing number of books and films, like The Road and Zombieland, which pick up after the catastrophe and sometimes don't bother to explain what happened at all.

What does this say about the 90's? Is it commentary on the individualist, choose-your-own-adventure mentality that Generation X grew up with during the 80s? Is it a response to lower cohesive idealization of the end? Is it a publishing preference for realism--i.e. your crazy alien/bodysnatcher scenario not getting past an editor's red pen? This is what I'm going to be thinking about for the rest of the day. Thanks, Chanda.