Authors

Discussion

While eco activists and environmental scientists are organizing universal campaigns to raise awareness of the consequences of global warming, flora and fauna extinction because of natural calamities, human caused catastrophes and disasters of the recent decades are relentlessly growing in number and the scope, endangering the mere possibility of the future and questioning the very existence of the organic species. Brutal destruction of the important life infrastructure of Ukraine, i.e. the blowing up of the Kachovka Water Reserve by Russian military in 2023, which turned once densely inhabited areas into a desert, seemed the highest degree of human monstrosity, so unbelievably appalling yet realistic. Today, almost two years afterwards, exaggerated use of nuclear threats and war rhetoric generate the constant non-veridical pre-trauma anxiety for the use of nuclear weapons and the consecutive future of the humans in a post-nuclear world, bringing to life the idea of “futureless future” (Klein, 2000). Though the ontological problem of nuclear narratives deals with impossibility of describing “an unwitnessable fact of nuclear ending” (Grausam, 2011). “The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe” by Rebekah Sheldon resonates with the modern discourses of war, raising the question of how life might be and what kind of ecology we will leave to future generations.

References

Klein, Richard. “The Future of Nuclear Criticism.” Yale French Studies, no. 97, 2000, pp. 78–102. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2903216. Accessed 30 Oct. 2024.

Grausam, Daniel. On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War. U of Virginia P, 2011.