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What is Survival of the Bookish?
A note from KJP, founder of Survival Of The Bookish:
Aren’t books about the apocalypse fascinating? There’s a reason people have been writing about the topic since the dawn of writing. It digs into the part of us that is questioning what it is to be human, to be a part of a civilisation.
The word apocalypse means “unveiling”. In other words, we see what happens to society when the thinnest veneer of what makes it all hang together dissolves. These books provide us a sandbox to explore the moral and political impacts of events we dare not imagine really happening, and we need that today more than ever.
As J G Ballard puts it: “almost all science fiction, however far removed in time and space, is really about the present day.”
So let’s jump in the sandbox and pull apart everything we know.
The genre contains a good amount of sub-genres including post-collapse, dystopia, disaster fiction, speculative fiction but all have a similar thread - survival through some stage of terminal catastrophe.
The objective for “Survival of the Bookish” is to collect a list of all the narratives that are preoccupied or solely focused on the end of the world or dystopias and to discuss themes, classics, new texts that all concern themselves with those end of days.
This entire site is written with tongue lodged firmly in an eschatological cheek. The pompousness of it all doesn’t evade me. As John Green says in a brilliant series of essays in podcast form The Anthropocene Reviewed, “In linear eschatology the end times for humanity is often referred to as “the end of the world”, even though our departure from earth will very probably not be the end of the world. Or the end of life in the world. We’re just not that important. When the earth is done with us, it will be like ‘well, that was weird.'“
So ignoring all the grandeur, I have a few ground-rules for my definition of the topic and therefore the site.
No zombies. I can’t do it. They give me nightmares and deserve a place in a different kind of cannon and the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association agrees with me writing about their recent conference: “Please note that this area is specifically for those papers related to the apocalypse, dystopia, and/or disaster.” Yes, SWPACA, I stan!
The world doesn’t have to end end. Just as we know it. So social science fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale absolutely counts.
Books where a supernatural force triggers the apocalyptic event in question are out, but I make exceptions for Day of The Triffids and others. This is pretty arbitrary of me.
As the title Survival Of The Bookish suggests, we’re only looking at books. Some will have been made into films and I’d love to give critique and commentary on manga pieces that deal with apocalyptic themes but I am not qualified. With my obsession since childhood plus my master’s degree in critical theory (reading books and writing about them), I am somewhat qualified to talk about the books.
It’s good to have you here.
