Temptations of the End: Embracing the Apocalypse in Contemporary Speculative Fictions

Abstract

Temptations of the End: Embracing the Apocalypse in Contemporary Speculative Fictions, explores how recent speculative works imagine the end of the world not as a catastrophe to be averted, but as a call to reflect on what survival and futurity mean when ecological and sociopolitical crises have become commonplace and interwoven into the fabric of everyday life. Prompted by cultural and scholarly responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which frequently evoked apocalyptic language, I analyze speculative narratives that take seriously the frustration with the human world as it is currently structured—and challenge readers to reckon with the temptation to let it go. Centering marginalized, non-normative protagonists, including queer, racialized, (dis)abled subjects, and often children, these texts reimagine survival and futurity beyond the ideological imperatives of resilience and restoration. Working at the theoretical nexus of queer theory, ecocriticism, and posthumanism, I show how these texts reveal the ways human exceptionalism and reproductive futurism—understood as the assumption that the future must be secured through heteronormative reproduction—sustain structures of exclusion and exploitation under the guise of safeguarding the future. While Lee Edelman’s theory of queer negativity famously frames the refusal of reproduction as a radical act of resistance, I argue that this refusal must be rethought in light of shifting contexts, as environmental injustice, biopolitical governance, and reproductive control have already foreclosed the future for many. Rather than opposing futurity altogether, the texts in my archive chart what I call queer ecological futurity: a speculative vision of survival that resists return to normalcy and normativity, embracing instead disorientation, unpredictable transformation, and interdependence across human and nonhuman boundaries. Temptations of the End comprises four chapters that engage with different forms and scales of endings. The first chapter lays the project’s theoretical foundation through an analysis of Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), where queer apocalyptic impulse and orientation towards the nonhuman become a mode of political resistance to neoliberalism’s racial and heteronormative structures. The second chapter analyzes M. R. Carey’s Hungry Plague duology (2014-2017) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), which reconfigure the zombie apocalypse trope through fungal pandemics to expose how humanity’s obsession with constructing otherness leads to failures in adaptation. Chapter Three turns to Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Benh Zeitlin’s film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), arguing that the apocalyptic force of wildness subverts racialized and sexualized definitions of the human, opening space for new queer ecological relationality and kinship—though one that requires careful ethical navigation to avoid romanticizing precarity. Chapter Four investigates Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-1989), which radicalizes the SF trope of alien intervention in nuclear apocalypse by reimagining evolution as a queer, non-teleological process, which demands the embrace of unpredictable transformation with ecological and biological others as the condition of survival. Taken together, these chapters trace a theoretical progression from queer refusals of prescribed futures to radical models of posthuman becoming, showing how contemporary speculative fiction reimagines the end as a generative threshold—where letting go becomes the condition for imagining life otherwise. Temptations of the End not only reframes how we understand the cultural work of apocalypse, but also advances critical efforts in queer theory and environmental humanities to envision an alternative ethics of survival and futurity beyond ideological frameworks that equate non-reproduction with extinction. In a time when rollbacks in reproductive rights and denials of environmental degradation intensify concurrently, this project reveals how rhetorics of species preservation often mask structural efforts to reinforce hierarchies of race, gender, and ability. It argues instead for a vision of futurity grounded in letting go of normative structures, meeting crisis with openness to entanglement and transformation.