Lucrative art of disaster: fetishized apocalypse, culture of fear and hurricane 'Tammy' in Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow

Abstract

With an eye to the visibly growing predilection for imagining humanity under siege in a rather disquietingly vulnerable state since Hiroshima’s trauma up until the contemporary times, the present paper attempts to examine Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) through an ecological lens that takes fear as its central thematic concern with connection to the perception of (eco-)apocalypse. Ecological thinking, whether fictional or factual, seems to have been closely linked to the narratives of the future with an underlying Cassandran foreboding spirit. The narrativization of proleptically apocalyptic visions of human civilization, though drenched in fear and anxiety, essentially serves a survival-enhancing purpose. However, the over-zealous embrace of the catastrophic end-of-times prophecies seems paradoxically to have an adverse effect trapping us in a web of fear-induced paralysis, desensitization through repetitive exposure, and vulnerable susceptibility towards opportunistic maneuverings. Odds Against Tomorrow, dealing with the most common apocalyptic fears of the contemporary age, grapples profoundly with the wisdom (or lack thereof) of a culture alarmingly drenched in fear and acutely obsessed with risk-aversion.