Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror ed. by Stefan Rabitsch et al. (review)

of apocalypse, we are becoming more prepared to squarely face the looming disasters of our own time. Palmer closes the book with readings of Dead Astronauts and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth (2015) as two up-to-date alternatives to apocalypse: on the one hand, a story that imagines a ruined world in order to indict our own headlong rush to ruin the world we live in, and on the other a story that imagines our potential to change course and solve large-scale problems. These readings are convincing, and it would be nice to think that in our era of concatenating crises the escapism of apocalypse has been taken off the table of possible cultural responses and replaced by the clear-eyed engagement with historical challenges that Palmer finds in VanderMeer and Robinson. But this is not the case: the escape into apocalyptic obfuscation remains as potent a strategy today as it ever was. To suggest otherwise is to tell yet another story in which history moves through crisis to resolution, through tribulation to redemption: an apocalyptically optimistic account of the end of apocalyptic thinking.—Connor Pitetti, RuhrUniversität Bochum