Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction

Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction, 1st Edition, examines realistic twenty-first-century speculative narratives that depict future worlds without technological rescues. Author Sarah E. McFarland analyzes how these stories imagine human extinction amid the ongoing sixth great extinction.

The volume investigates climate change writing where catastrophe offers no opportunity for social rebirth or survival through primitivist communities. It considers how depleted ecosystems, specters of cannibalism, and the dissolution of othering challenge human exceptionalism against the materiality of life.

Published in the Environmental Cultures series, the study provides close readings of texts by authors including Yann Martel, Cormac McCarthy, and Peter Heller to explore human and nonhuman entanglement.