The end has always been nigh, as decades of New Yorker cartoons can attest, but judging by the current spate of post-apocalyptic fiction, it seems a great many writers’ internal doomsday clocks are set at one and a half minutes to midnight. And who can blame them?
Three recent novels — one giddily apocalyptic, one an almost too-close-to-home vision of a disturbing future, and one firmly dystopian — can be read as in philosophical conversation with each other on the question of human consciousness, and about whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper. While John Elizabeth Stintzi’s My Volcano and Victoria Hetherington’s Autonomy offer takes on that thing called hope (albeit with bedraggled feathers), The Agents, by the French author Grégoire Courtois and translated by Rhonda Mullins, is unapologetically nihilistic about the endgame of the human experiment.
My...
Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of Better Living through Plastic Explosives and, most recently, The Beguiling.
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