Combating Human Extinction: Biblical Archetypes and Environmental Apocalypse in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction

This project examines the recreations of Biblical archetypes as well as the causes and effects of environmental apocalypse and potential human extinction in contemporary dystopian fiction novels.  The goal of this thesis is, in part, to argue that contemporary dystopian fiction is speculative, given that the fictional reasons behind the downfalls into dystopia in each of the novels studied in this project are akin to Anthropocenic (that is, pertaining to the age of the Anthropocene) environmental and ecological collapse.  In examining The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood, Parable of the Sower (1994) by Octavia Butler, and The Maze Runner (2009) by James Dashner, this thesis seeks to make conclusions regarding appropriate forms of human ecology and the roles of technology and religion in causing or solving dystopias.  First, I analyze Atwood’s text as a message about the Anthropocenic destruction of nature that, as this author shows, can only be resolved by a Biblical flood.  In my second chapter, I examine Dashner’s text, in which his paralleling and shuffling of Biblical spaces (e.g., heaven, hell, and purgatory) with the physical spaces of his narrative (e.g., experimental reality and the external world) present the idea that humankind will be damned in the future due to climate obliteration and failed human ecology.  Finally, I suggest that Butler’s use of the transcendence of Earth for Mars in her novel is a solution to dystopia that resembles Biblical salvation.  I align the central problems in these texts with current environmental anxieties and reveal that these speculative texts exist as points of reflection for considering contemporary relationships between humans and the environment.  Thus, these novels serve not only as speculations about near-future worlds but also as forms of activism for reconsiderations of human ecology in the age of the Anthropocene.