The End of the World

All texts discussed in this book express concerns about the damage done to the planet, and some even display a certain awareness of the fact that extractive, militarized capitalism has produced this damage. Even so, as I have argued, the plot that drives the American Climate Emergency Narrative is typically geared towards preserving or restoring capitalism and the (racialized and gendered) society that it has produced and operates through. The monocultural or capitalist realist storyworlds in which these texts play out typically make any other outcome except restoration or preservation literally unthinkable. Even in the few texts that envision futures where the US has been ousted as global hegemon, capitalism and the capitalist world-system are still never in doubt. In this way, narratives from the core typically insist that militarized capitalist modernity will be able to (violently) resolve the various ecological and human challenges that it has helped produce, or at least provide some kind of shelter for those entitled to it, even if the US loses its privileged control of the world-system.

This chapter turns to a final type of American Climate Emergency Narrative that is less optimistic in its view of capitalism’s prospects, that envisions futures where capitalism is failing, or that takes the reader into the seemingly unimaginable territory where capitalist modernity is truly over. Like most of the fiction studied so far, these texts centre on white and formerly middle-class protagonists, but the stories they tell play out in futures where capitalism has not survived the ecological and economic crisis it has caused. In these futures, the economic, military, and social infrastructure capable of extracting Cheap Nature has collapsed entirely. There are no commodity frontiers left that can re-energize the world-system and the epochal crisis that capitalism and the planet are facing in the present moment has run its course. The narratives that tell these stories are not just post-apocalyptic, but formally post-capitalist in the sense that the only things that remain are the ruins of capitalist society: architecture in the form of drowned skyscrapers, stranded ships, empty shopping malls, the rusted bodies of cars, and huge floating islands of debris. Thus, and as this chapter demonstrates, these texts do not retell the familiar saga where white and proficient men from the settler community adapt to the climate emergency to revitalize a militarized yet somehow still benevolent capitalism. Rather, they tell much darker stories of the impossibility of life after capitalism; of the impossibility of life worlds not premised on capitalist relationality.

There are a great number of American climate narratives that evoke such dark futures, and they thus make up an important segment of what has been termed ‘climate fiction’. Studied as ‘climate fiction’ they have been described as texts that introduce the reader to the darkest possible ecological futures and that, through this bleak imagery, demand that readers consider the ecocidal violence ‘humans’ have performed on the land. However, as the chapter demonstrates, many such post-apocalyptic narratives actually pay homage to the violent settler capitalist system that produced the now crumpled architecture as well as the ruination in which the protagonists find themselves. As the chapter shows, the characters who inhabit these ruined worlds in the texts discussed do not abandon the violent paradigm that informs militarized capitalism. Instead, they keep rehearsing the violent practices that once elevated the US to the position of hegemon within this world-system, and that, as Jairus Grove (2019) and Catherine Besteman (2020) argue, maintain the world-system in the neoliberal present. The violence characters perform in these texts is partly described as a natural response to an ecology that is perceived to have reverted to its endemically hostile, pre-capitalist state. In other words, this future, ruined, and post-capitalist territory is similar to the pre-capitalist geographies that Underhill once securitized through the killing of Indigenous people and the symbolic burning and spoiling of the land, as discussed in Chapter 2. Thus, characters in the narratives studied in this chapter find themselves thrust back into worlds that Thomas Hobbes (1651) once theorized were guided by a ‘state of nature’ (p. 140) where all beings were involved in a ‘warre of every one against every one’ (p. 91). In such Hobbesian futures, humans must be violent or they will become victims of violence and thus succumb to post-apocalyptic darkness. At the same time, as this chapter shows, indiscriminate violence is enacted in these narratives also as a kind of capitalist ritual; a celebration of borders and the privatization of property rather than an actual response to the emergency that riotous and untamed nature is described to constitute.

As I have already touched upon, the rehearsal of capitalist tenets in the American Climate Emergency Narrative exemplifies the pervasiveness of what Mark Fisher (2009) has termed ‘capitalist realism’. As Fisher makes clear, capitalist realism is premised on the notion that capitalism is the only conceivable social order so that the idea that the capitalist world-system would break down is essentially unimaginable and unreal. If the American Climate Emergency Narrative is premised on such realism, it should be unable to move the action of any story into futures where capitalism is void. However, if the profoundly violent geopolitics through which the capitalist world-system has been realized, and is maintained in the present, is not only a type of global ecological, economic, and social organization but, as Grove has proposed, a ‘form of life’ (p. 3), capitalist life-making can be imagined to have survived the demise of the system, and to linger as an ontological paradigm, even when it does not remain as a formal social order. In other words, it is possible to imagine futures where capitalism and the capitalist world-system are in ruins, but where the logic, relationships, and ways of being once established by extractive capitalism still structure the storyworld.

The chapter first turns to Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Hell Divers (2016), the first novel of a substantial series that describes how an abused and enormously disrupted and disruptive planet has forced what few people that remain to live in a constant state of exception, and where the remnant of a doomed authoritarian, militarized, capitalist state is the only thing keeping humanity from extinction. Hell Divers thus illustrates how the American Climate Emergency Narrative invests in the notion of crisis and how it naturalizes the extractive and authoritarian state of emergency as a form of life and the only way of being in the world at a time of full-blown epochal capitalist and ecological crisis. Hell Divers sets the stage for the other texts discussed in this chapter: Cormac McCarthy’s widely studied The Road (2006) and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012). These novels take place in the world that Hell Divers hints at on every page, but that its plucky soldier heroes constantly postpone. In other words, The Road and The Dog Stars exemplify the type of story where capitalist society has utterly collapsed, leaving the progeny of white settlers isolated and without the comforts and (in)securities that capitalism furnishes, but where the social forces that made capitalism are still operational.

Hell Divers: Capitalism at the Abyss

In subaltern writing, the concept of hell is sometimes used as a denominator for the ravaged life worlds created by colonial capitalism. As Andreas Malm (2017) notes, Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun (1962/1999) employs the concept to describe the life of Palestinian refugees escaping the slow violence of the colonial petro-economy. In climate narratives from the core or privileged semiperiphery, where the refugee is a white middle-class subject previously embraced by the comforts of capitalist modernity, the sudden loss of these comforts has also been described as an entry into hell. The German climate breakdown film that narrates a road trip through an impossibly hot and desiccated Germany, where cannibalism is rife and where the final destination of the protagonists provides no relief, is thus succinctly named Hell (Fehlbaum 2011).Footnote 1 In these different contexts, hell is obviously not the metaphysical, punitive location of Christian, Islamic, or Judean religious texts, but rather an extremely hot (or cold) and permanently insecure space where nationality, gender, race, and class mean little and offer no protection.

In the American Climate Emergency Narrative, author Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Hell Divers series, totalling 11 books at the time of writing, employs the concept to name a planet that has collapsed utterly after a third world war. In the series, the land is so polluted by radioactivity and toxic substances, and so ravaged by constant electrical storms, that it has become impossible to live on the surface of the planet. If the electrical storms and lethal radioactivity were not enough, incredibly aggressive life forms are now dominant on the planet’s surface. This is a new, resilient, aggressive mutant being intent on killing and consuming its human ancestors wherever they are found. To survive, what remains of humanity has been forced to escape in enormous airships that sail above the storms and the fallout that have contaminated the biosphere. To keep the ships from falling back to the planet, and to keep the struggling few hundred on board each ship alive, a cadre known as Hell Divers parachutes through the storms to retrieve fuel cells, pharmaceuticals, and ammunition vital to survival. These soldiers, at constant war with a destroyed and raging planet, are what keeps the remnant of humanity airborne: they ‘dive so humanity survives’ (p. 7). As in the fiction discussed in Chapter 4, the novel thus externalizes the planet into an essentially hostile and vengeful entity that needs to be constantly fought by what remains of the military tasked with protecting capitalist modernity. This militia is doing the best it can, but things are not going very well. By the time the first novel of the series plays out, only two of the airships remain: the Hive and Ares. Of these, the Hive is dying and Ares, in even worse shape, burns and crashes only 100 pages into the text. Humanity is effectively reduced to a gathering of hundreds crammed onto a single and failing airship.

Yet, in this hellish future, life is still organized according to the needs of militarized capitalism. The irradiated and chaotic planet may be inhospitable, guarded by a new, mutant, and utterly hostile indigeneity, but the Earth is clearly also a dysfunctional commodity periphery of sorts since the items needed to keep the airship afloat are sourced from its surface. By extension, the Hive is what is left of capitalist society and, like present-day society, life on the airship is clearly stratified. Walking through the ship, Xavier ‘X’ Rodriguez, a seasoned Hell Diver and the protagonist of the novel, considers how the world he inhabits is organized: ‘In some ways, it was even worse now than it had been in the Old World. The caste division of lower-deckers and upper-deckers was painfully apparent everywhere’ (p. 78). The ‘upper’ and ‘lower’-deckers are in fact classes rather than casts. The lower-deckers are the precarious, cheap labour of the ship and their food rations and access to health services are often reduced. The comparatively well-off upper-deckers, the Hell Divers and the militia that keeps order on the ship are the privileged social strata, the first to get medical attention and the only ones to eat their fill. A consequence of this stratification is constant social unrest. Clashes between the militia and the lower-deckers are a regular part of life.

This tension feeds the major plot line of the first novel of the series. A man named Travis Eddie has become tired of the constant lack of food, space, and health care. He has lost his (Hell Diver) father and his brother is in jail. With three companions, Travis takes hostages and occupies the part of the ship where animals are raised for food, in the process accidentally damaging the ship. The rebels’ demands are straightforward: ‘First, you’re going to turn the lights and the heat back on in the so-called noncritical facilities. Then you’ll double food rations for everyone belowdecks. I want equal health care provided to everyone on this ship. And finally, I want my brother released from jail’ (p. 271). These demands may sound mostly reasonable, but the ship’s captain cannot meet them even if she wants to. Due to the damage that the rebels have caused, the ship is sinking, and all available energy is needed to keep it from crashing into the storms and radiated ruins below. Thus, lights and heat in the lower decks cannot be turned on.

In this way, the permanent state of emergency in which the people of the airship exist has been aggravated further. This turns the revolution into a selfish and supremely dangerous grab for (undeserved) privileges. The leader Travis may want to bring relief to his lower-deck friends, but his companions are careless and violent. When the ship begins to lose altitude, slowly sinking into the storms that rage below, a situation is produced where the revolution must fail or everyone will die. On cue, the brave militia and a plucky teenager manage to save the airship and quell the rebellion. The revolutionaries are put down by precision rifle fire or give up. The airship again rises above the storms and the ruins.

Hell Divers thus describes a future where the conditions that keep militarized capitalism functional have essentially disappeared. The world is an irradiated or ultra-cold post-capitalist ruin. Capitalist social order still exists, but in isolated arks that move through, or hover high above, the ruins that capitalism has produced. This is capitalism on unsustainable life support. If the final ark falls to the ground, capitalism will be effectively over along with the brief reign of humanity. Hell Divers is thus premised on the notion that such a descent into the ruins will also be the end of humanity as a species and social form. In other words, the novel builds an imagined future world where the militarized and airborne remnant of capitalist modernity must survive for there to be a social world at all.

The Road: Capitalist Realism in Post-capitalist Futures

As argued, Hell Divers tells a story of how an utterly fraught, militarized, capitalist modernity desperately hangs on in futures where life outside the closely bounded world of the airship has reverted into a hyper-charged Hobbesian war of all against all. Moving beyond this moment of pending collapse, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road takes place in a future where capitalist modernity has disappeared entirely. Thus, McCarthy’s novel can be said to describe the world that awaits people if the airship in Hell Divers were to sink to the surface of the planet.

As described in the previous chapter, the first paragraph of this novel introduces the reader to the ‘man’ and the ‘boy’ who wake up underneath a plastic tarpaulin, surrounded by an arid, dark, and cold forest. The man knows that they will not survive another winter where they are, so he has stored food and begun a trek to the south in the hope of finding warmer and less hostile climes. The world that they travel through is even more dark, ashen, and ruined than that into which the courageous heroes of Hell Divers will descend if the airship fails. All trees are dead or have been burnt to cinders along with most other plant life. There is so much ash and particles in the air that it is necessary to wear (improvised) masks. The odd dog can be heard barking but there are no signs of any other type of animal life. Coming into an abandoned barn, the man realises that cows must now be ‘extinct’ (p. 101). With no way of growing food for humans or animals, the only sources of sustenance left are what can be scavenged from abandoned houses or stolen from other people. Those less picky turn to other human beings as a food source. ‘Bloodcults’ and cannibalistic ‘marauders’ thus haunt the crumbling cities and the road that the man and the boy travel on. So utterly dark are their prospects that the boy’s mother has left her family and committed suicide. ‘Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us’ (p. 48), she told her husband before going to her death. ‘They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us’ (p. 48).

As the journey towards the south continues, people certainly try to kill the decimated family. Starving, the man and the boy move through the dead landscape, often discovering evidence of cannibalistic meals. In the cellar of a house they break into, they find living humans kept like animals and meant to be consumed piecemeal over time: ‘On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous’ (p. 93). In a camp they enter they come across, a ‘charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening’ (p. 167) roasting on a spit. The man and the boy flee this scene as they flee all confrontations in the book. The boy wants the man to help some of the people they encounter, to share their food with strangers even more worn and hungry than they are. He has been told by his father that they are the ‘good guys’ (p. 65), and that they ‘carry the flame’ (p. 26). But the man is set on his own and his son’s survival, on moving on to a never fully realized destination where things will somehow be different. This gives little room for compassion and sharing.

At the end of the story, the man succumbs not to violence or hunger, but to a raking cough that has followed him for most of the journey; the noxious air getting the better of him. In a dreamlike sequence that follows his death and that concludes the novel, the boy is immediately found by a kind and strong man, a ‘veteran of old skirmishes’ (p. 237), who brings the boy to his loving and welcoming wife and their two small children. Closing with an enigmatic image of ‘brook trout’ with ‘maps of the world and its becoming’ (p. 241) on their scaly backs, this final sequence reads more like a weird hallucination or the man’s last dying hope for the boy than an event possible within the universe created by the text.

The Road has attracted a considerable amount of scholarship, much of it invested in connecting the novel to McCormac’s previous writing, to the legacy of the English literary canon, and to exploring the mythological motifs that are often perceived to inform the text. Thus, in a widely cited article, Lydia Cooper (2011) reads the ‘sublimely damaged’ world of The Road as allegorical, and as an ‘apocalyptic grail narrative’ (p. 218) similar to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Indeed, as Cooper observes, an early draft of the novel was named ‘The Grail’. As a grail narrative, then, The Road examines, in Cooper’s analysis, ‘pervasive apocalyptic fears in order to explore if and how the human project may be preserved’ (p. 219). Similarly, Carl James Grindley (2008) has argued for understanding the setting of The Road as deeply informed by ‘Judeo-Christian mythology’ (p. 11) and, as such, it is a story about life after the Rapture and the coming of Christ. The enigmatic ending of The Road has also been explored in great detail by McCarthy scholars. To Ashley Kunsa, the trout with maps of the world thus ‘suggest an inherent order and underlying purpose yet undiscovered’ (p. 68).

While McCormac may well have welcomed such analysis of The Road, the novel can also be read against this mythologizing grain. When the attention is turned away from religious and spiritual allegory, The Road reshapes into a story about post-capitalist and post-climate collapse emergency. Perceived in this very different light, the text communicates a profound sense of epochal ecological and capitalist crisis. The Road is littered with artefacts and products that recall capitalism. The man and the boy walk through a blighted America pushing a shopping cart in front of them. They try to replenish this relic of consumer society whenever they can, and it contains everything they possess and all the food they have to consume. They subside almost exclusively on cans scavenged from hidden-away stores: canned meals and, when they can find it, soft drinks. In the book and the 2009 film adaptation directed by John Hillcoat, a can of Coca-Cola is part of a central scene where the boy is briefly transported back to a pre-apocalyptic era of sugar, aluminium, and world-system dominance. In this way, as noted by Matt Rainis, the can of Coke is a ‘piece of the ruins of a fallen empire’ (2022). As such it signifies the comforts and privileges that capitalism generates for a certain stratum of society, but it is equally important as an item once designed to produce accumulable income from all sections of the world-system. Now that the world-system has collapsed along with the transportation routes, the banks, the transactional system, and, indeed, the money that made up this system, the can of Coke exists only as sugary water and a sign of capitalist ruin.

The centrality of capitalist ruination has been the focus of a different set of critical studies of the novel. Simon Schleusener (2017) has argued that The Road registers capitalism via its ‘delineation of a Hobbesian “state of nature” extrapolated from the basis of our own experience of dog-eat-dog capitalism’ (p. 4). In his reading, the novel ‘seems to thoroughly remain within the confines of the neoliberal imagination’ (p. 4). Thus, he argues, The Road is about capitalism in the sense that it narrates the horrific experience of being folded into a brutal neoliberal economy where (even white) middle-class humans are commodities consumed by the system. The journey through the post-apocalyptic world in which the man and the boy exist is in fact a passage through the consumptive hell created by an always hungry, neoliberal capitalism. Read in this way, The Road is fundamentally and aggressively critical of capitalism. It is a novel that, much like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), shows (undead) subjects lost in the ruined architecture of consumer capitalism, literally feeding on each other.

However, The Road is arguably just as usefully read as a story about life in a post-capitalist world. In the novel, there are no commodity frontiers, no class hierarchies, nobody sells their labour and nobody accumulates capital. This is not the class-oriented, primitive capitalist order that reigns on the airship the Hive; it is the world that commences if/when that contained universe collapses. Schleusener is correct in noting that the world that the man and the boy inhabit in The Road is the one that Hobbes proposes pre-dates capitalist modernity, where humans are involved in a ‘war of all against all’, but this world is not identical to the one created through ‘dog-eat-dog’ capitalism, it is the pre-capitalist universe that ‘dog-eat-dog’ colonial capitalism reshaped through the establishment of a world-system that made certain people exempt from the violence supposedly inherent in this universe. Again, in the pre-modern state of nature evoked by Hobbes and McCormac, there is no industry, no ‘Knowledge of the face of the Earth’ and, ‘worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death’, making ‘the life of man solitary, nasty, poore, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes 1651, p. 89). According to Hobbes, the modern, sovereign capitalist state (the Leviathan) arrived into this natural world as an engine of a new social order that introduced civilization and prosperity. It is at this moment that property and borders become possible, things and spaces can be owned (and thus stolen), borders tolerated (or transgressed) and social contracts can be formed that regulate human behaviour and allow people to build society. In this way, Hobbes is one of the pillars of early capitalist thinking and he remains foundational to modern-day prophets of neoliberal enlightenment such as Steven Pinker (2011). Importantly, Hobbes’ (and Pinker’s) claim is not that capitalism/modernity has erased the basic premise by which the brutal natural world functions. On the contrary, the relationality that Hobbes’s writing describes is the basic existential condition of life. The natural inclination of all living things is still to engage in a war of all against all. Capitalism has not altered this fundamental state, it has merely created the foundation of a social contract that postpones participation in this war. Should capitalist modernity fail, humanity (narrowly defined) will again be forced to rejoin the strife that, Hobbes and Pinker suggest, is the basic condition of existence.

This is what has occurred in The Road. As Carl F. Miller (2014) has observed, The Road thus ‘articulates a post-capitalist dystopia that offers a mere reversion to pre-capitalism and gives way to general anarchy’ (p. 46). In this way, The Road is not so much an allegory that reveals the violence inherent in neoliberal capitalism, as a story about what waits on the other side of such capitalism for those white bodies that used to be privileged by it. This makes it possible to understand the ‘flame’ that the man tells the boy they are keeping as the social contract made possible by capitalist modernity. To carry the flame is to carry a (vain) desire to reignite the material and social order that predated the abject darkness they now walk through. In a world where the extractive word-ecology that creates privilege in the core has ruptured, this privileging social order has become impossible to uphold. In the next instant, The Road proposes, children are roasted over open fires.

It is in this way that The Road conjures the sense of reality that Fischer has termed capitalist. In this application of capitalist realism, the alternative to capitalism is unthinkable in the sense that the post-capitalist world is narrated as impossibly and absurdly abject and nihilistic: a future reality where there is nothing to eat except ancient preserves and other people so that people have to eat other people. By abandoning the reader in such an unbearably cruel post-apocalyptic dystopia, The Road enacts a very bleak rehearsal of the capitalist realist notion that there is no valid form of life beyond capitalism. This does not mean that McCarthy is a Pinkerian champion of capitalism. McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) is clearly devoted to revealing the ruthless violence that accompanied Western capitalist expansion. Yet, as writing from the core, The Road is arguably constrained by the perspective that the positionality of its main characters affords. Ultimately, this is a novel that, when it imagines the end of capitalism as the end of the world, comes up with little more than perverse and agonized oblivion. It is possible to argue, as some critics (Dominy 2015; Schleusener, 2017) have done, that The Road poses capitalism, or at least humanity, as the reason why the world has collapsed, but even if capitalism is seen to have, in cannibalistic fashion, produced its own demise, The Road still describes a functioning capitalist modernity as a much better social world than what follows this modernity’s termination. Again, the alternative to the relative safety and affluence afforded by capitalism to some people in the core is an insufferable, ashen world where all people risk sexual violation, cannibalism, and death.

The Dog Stars: Performing Capitalist Border-Making in the Ruins

Since its publication, The Road is a text that has haunted the socio-ecological breakdown story in general and the American Climate Emergency Narrative in particular. North American novels such as the aforementioned Far North (2009) by Marcel Theroux, Not a Drop to Drink (2013) by Mindy McGinnis and the German feature Hell (2011), or the more recent, Apple TV+ feature Finch (Sapochnik 2021) are some of the many texts that feature landscapes, vulnerable protagonists on the road, and (cannibalistic) marauders who prey on itinerant survivors. Another striking and well-received example of this type of text is Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, a novel that opens on a small and isolated airfield somewhere in Colorado where two white men, Hig and Bangley, and a dog named Jasper, are surviving. This is a world transformed by climate change and by a related pandemic officially blamed on Asia but in fact genetically engineered, the reader is told at the end of the novel, in a ‘national weapons lab’ (p. 253). As a consequence of ecological collapse and the pandemic’s 99.9 per cent death rate, capitalist society has crumbled and the modern world has become a ruin. Cities have turned into wastelands full of withered corpses and the few survivors that remain have to walk, like the father and son of The Road, through a truly post-apocalyptic, post-capitalist future in search of whatever food and gear that can be sourced from the ruins.

Despite capitalism’s demise, however, the novel’s first-person narrator Hig is still highly mobile. During the day, he will either hunt with his dog Jasper or take to the skies in an old but still functional Cessna propeller aeroplane. He looks for survivors, potential threats to his small community, and for houses and trucks from which he can scavenge supplies. In the process, he gets an opportunity to temporarily escape the ruins of this world and to remember Melissa, the pregnant wife he lost to the pandemic nine years ago. Meanwhile, Bangley will keep an eye on the fields and forests that surround their refuge. While Hig is something of a failed poet with a potential for empathy, Bangley is a prepper, expert shooter, ruthless killer and a ‘Survivor with a capital S’ (p. 71). Bangley arrived at the airfield one day loaded with sniper rifles, automatic guns and even a mortar that he saves for a special occasion: a ‘surprise sometime, kinda like a birthday present’ (p. 135). With the help of this hardware, he keeps the airfield and its occupants safe from intruders.

Bangley does not walk into this novel out of nowhere. In Saving the Security State (2017), Inderpal Grewal argues that during what she terms the ‘advanced’ stage of neoliberalism, citizens have become ‘securitized subjects within the United States’ (p. 1). This process has generated a set of racialized subjectivities that include what Grewal terms ‘exceptional citizens’ (p. 1). While these predominantly white figures are often narrated as ‘struggling, tragic, or violent’ they are also celebrated as ‘normative citizen-subjects of the United States as a neoliberal, imperial, security state’ (p. 6). Grewal explores four such figures: the ‘security mom’, the ‘humanitarian’, the ‘security feminist’ and, most important for the investigation of The Dog Stars, the ‘shooter’. This is a ‘white male exceptional citizen to whom sovereignty is dispersed so that he can use violence in the protection of the American empire’ (p. 6). White, male, and Christian, the shooter ‘polices the nation and embodies the white racial sovereignty that he claims to possess’ (p. 30).

The fact that the American capitalist empire is effectively dead in The Dog Stars does not keep Bangley from embodying the security subjectivity of the shooter as Grewal describes this character. In other words, Bangley is not simply an armed survivor in the post-apocalypse, but a remnant of an otherwise defunct security society. He cannot use his enormous potential for indiscriminate gun violence to maintain the borders of the American empire any longer, but he is able to secure the airfield as if this is the last vestige of a still function fragment of empire. Because Bangley is a shooter and a prepper, such securitization takes the form of pre-emptive violence. On arriving at the airfield, Bangley erected an absolute if invisible border—a perimeter—around an area he considers his and Hig’s property. Any human body that crosses this border creates an immediate and overwhelming dearth of security—and emergency—that must be violently managed with the help of indiscriminate gun violence.

The opening of the novel describes one such border violation and how Hig and Bangley respond to it. Hiding in the darkness of the night, Hig spots five men:

the biggest closest to the dumpster had a rifle with scope, was twisted back doing the talking, signing with his right hand, touching the watch cap cocked on his head, the one just beside him had some sort of assault rifle probably an AK, the three others: two shotguns and a ranch rifle all clear at ninety feet with the goggled eye. The third from the left with a shotgun wore a cowboy hat a short man in a big hat. (p. 44)

Hig is expecting Bangley to do the dirty work, and he eventually does, but not until Hig has put his finger on the trigger and is preparing to strafe the group with automatic fire. At that precise moment, Hig sees the night ‘[c]racked open […] the group in my sight coming apart entropic, the red dot flying across like a lethal bug throwing their shadows upwards and out to land, to be swallowed by the green ground’ (p. 44). Within seconds, the intruders are dead and Hig and Bangley examine the corpses. Hig has a use for these dead bodies. He is no cannibal, but he turns them into jerky that he feeds his dog. This, the reader is informed, is the dog’s favourite food. Hig thus proceeds to turn these dead people into dog food, but he makes one exception when he discovers that the ‘short man’ he spotted earlier is not a man at all, but ‘a boy. Maybe nine. […] This boy is thin, hair matted and tangled. A hawk feather tied into it. Face hollow, a shadow smirched with dirt and exposure. Would have been born into this. Nine years of this’ (p. 46). Hig buries this boy instead of turning him into jerky. He is sorry the child has died, but he still recognizes the necessity of killing walkers. Indeed, most of the people that Hig encounters are truly horrific. One especially monstrous figure he runs into on the road is wearing a necklace of dried vaginas; trophies, it is clear, from a career of extremely violent rape. This man Hig reflexively tears ‘open’ with his automatic rifle ‘Without thought. Left him sprawled back on the road, guts spilled’ (p. 89).

These opening scenes explain to the reader what living in the ruins of capitalism means. As in The Road, to inhabit this post-capitalist, post-apocalyptic, Hobbesian world is to occupy a space where you must always be ready to kill, or you will yourself be destroyed. As Bangley keeps telling Hig: ‘Old rules are done Hig. Went the way of the woodpecker. Gone with the glaciers and the government. New world now. New world new rules. Never ever negotiate’ (p. 43). The war of all against all is on again and the only way to survive is to embrace it. The only people that Bangley will tolerate is a small Mennonite community 10 miles south of the airfield, where the children are born with a blood disease that keeps the families from expanding. Bangley will have nothing to do with them, but Hig visits them from time to time, out of compassion.

The novel eventually produces a non-lethal encounter with another group of people. Hig’s dog Jasper dies suddenly, depriving Hig of the only companion he truly loves. At the same time, he has intercepted a radio signal from an airfield not too far away. To escape the sense of loneliness brought on by the dog’s death and to investigate the signal, he goes on a long excursion in his plane. On his way, he discovers a secluded valley where a woman and her combative father have hidden from the world along with some surviving farm animals. They practice the same pre-emptive violence as that promoted by Bangley, but the bullets they fire miss Hig and he manages to win their confidence. The woman’s name is Cima and she turns out to be Hig’s age. Predictably, she is also intelligent, inventive, and beautiful. She has been damaged by the pandemic and is fragile, but even so she is the female, heterosexual companion he has been longing for. In addition to this, she is a trained physician and thus another remnant of the now dead security society. Her father is ‘long and lean and looked to be strung together with catgut’ (p. 206). When inspected more closely, he turns out to be a former special forces soldier, ‘Navy SEALs […] Afghanistan. Other places’ (p. 303). In this way, the father is another ‘shooter’ and thus a man made for this future. When he is told of Bangley’s program of indiscriminate long-distance violence, he approves: ‘Kinda trained you up. Set a perimeter didn’t he? He had no problem killing anything that crossed it. Young, old, men, women’ (p. 204).

Hig knows that this is the creed he must continue to live by if he wants to build a community with this new shooter and his canny and beautiful daughter. This is a price he is already paying, and he invites the small family to join him and Bangley at the airport. They load the Cessna up, take to the air and return to the airfield where, it transpires, Bangley has barely survived an attack by a dozen walkers. Cima nurses Bangley back to health and Bangley and her father form an immediate homosocial bond. As shooters, they are the same, ready to do the dirty work necessary to keep their wards alive in an endemically hostile world. With this new and more resilient community in place, they can get on with their post-apocalyptic lives. This has its dark times, but, when Cima’s and Hig’s love grows and is consummated, also its moments of pleasure.

Sarah E. McFarland has read The Dog Stars as an indictment of the ‘discourse of progressivism’ (p. 3). By imagining a future of extinction where humans have reverted to satisfying basic animal needs, The Dog Stars reveals how the human species is always folded into nature and subjected to the same indifferent evolutionary laws as all other animals. In this reading, the novel is an interrogation of ‘faulty ideas about human exceptionalism and species difference’ (p. 21). Indeed, The Dog Stars, like many other fictions set in futures transformed by socio-ecological breakdown, is on one level a book about the possibility of human extinction and, as such, also a kind of warning: this is what the world will come to if humans do nothing. By launching this warning, it is very much like The Road which takes place in a similar future. In both novels, the lives of the protagonists revolve around the daily grind of survival, almost everyone is out to get you and it makes strange sense to gun children down just to be sure. This is a world without human innocence, where men decorate their necks with the dried vaginas of the women they have raped, murdered, and eaten. In this way, the novel provides no space for thinking that humans are an ordained species, a being set apart from nature and born to dominate it.

However, this reading is premised on an Anthropocene perspective that assumes that humanity, rather than capitalism, has caused the ecological and social collapse the novel describes. When The Dog Stars is approached as an Anthropocene text, all human beings are equally guilty of extinction. Even the young boy that Bangley kills and Hig buries rather than feeding him to his dog is somehow to blame. Bangley, Hig, Cima and her father are not innocent either, but they are different in that they have decided not to be like the nomadic killers who fall to their bullets. They are content hunting animals and protecting the enclosure they have claimed for themselves. This somehow turns them into slightly better humans, and it also makes it possible for the reader to like and identify with them. Like the reader located in the hegemonic core of the world-system, they command property of sorts and they are exercising their right to protect it against all introducers, even if the social contract that states that things can be owned and therefore protected is void. Practising such violence is the key to survival in the unorganized and hostile post-capitalist, post-modern Hobbesian wilderness that has replaced the social order once provided by capitalist modernity.

By posing the post-capitalist world as an abject and hostile wilderness where people released from the constraints imposed by the social contract turn into violent rapists and murders, or into survivors forced to pre-emptively massacre these rapists and murderers, the novel’s criticism of Anthropocentric climate crisis becomes secondary to its promotion of the type of thinking that has always functioned as a rationale for colonial capitalism. In the writing by Captain John Underhill discussed in Chapter 2, the alternative to the colonial order he works to extend into Indigenous lands is a kind of natural chaos where native agency produces constant emergencies and where property and settlers are constantly insecure. Underhill begs the reader to understand that the genocidal violence he and his men have perpetrated was unavoidable; the only way for them to make the settler community safe. If Underhill’s text marks the point in time when capitalism invaded the American continent, Heller’s dystopian novel rises out of its imagined demise, and the world that Heller builds around this cataclysmic moment is strangely similar to the one that Underhill narrates. Like the world that Underhill conjures in his writing, this is a space of constant insecurity, where the gun is the only instrument that can keep people safe. Also, just like Underhill, Hig needs absolution for the (necessary) killing he has done, and just like Underhill, he has no intention to stop. The imaginary of capitalism ending thus looks very much like the imaginary that marks its beginning.

What makes this life possible for Hig is not just the presence of a young female and two ready shooters, but the sense that he is upholding the social contract that capitalist modernity established even at a time when this modernity has ceased to exist. In a direct reference to The Road, we find out that he feels himself to be ‘the keeper of something, not sure what, not the flame, maybe just Jasper’ (p. 197). This is false modesty though, because it is exactly the flame that he keeps, the hope of establishing a community where it is at least possible to pretend that the social contract is still valid and operational. Before the demise of Jasper and the arrival of Cima and her father, Hig and his dog were the only ones who could form such a contract (thus, to keep Jasper and to keep the flame were similar endeavours). Once the community is expanded, and under the protective gazes of Bangley and Cima’s father, Hig can fan the flames of the old rules into something resembling a fire. He may not be able to establish a true colony or a new commodity frontier to revitalize capitalism, the world is too exhausted for that, but he and his small community can continue to live according to the old rules that state that life within the perimeter is sacred and that all other forms of (human) life can/need to be exterminated with extreme prejudice. In this way, Bangley was incorrect when he stated that the old rules are gone with the woodpecker. The new world is like the old world, only smaller, and it is faith in those old rules that legitimates the killing of all trespassers. Indeed, it is this faith that turns itinerant people into trespassers.

Thus, The Dog Stars is ultimately a text that ignores extinction and that embraces, if with a sad shrug, the extractive and violent relationality that capitalism depends upon. Capitalism lives on as the paradigm that states that territory must be enclosed and privatized, that unenclosed land is profoundly insecure, and that violence is the only way to make it safe again. It is within enclosed and bordered land that the social contract that exorcises the state of nature can be established. For those who have once lived under the rule of this contract, its absence is intolerable. To keep the flame of this contract alive, and to preserve or create the material relationships that make it possible, is foremost on survivors’ minds, whether they are walking through the ruined world with only one bullet left in the gun, or if they are comfortably holed up with mortars and a ‘0.408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform’ (Heller, p. 6). These are the rules and limits that emerge out of the specific register provided by capitalist realism at a time of epochal capitalist crisis.

A Weakness of the Imagination

The American Climate Emergency Narrative is ultimately a body of fiction that gives imaginative shape to the intellectual borders and ontological limits that saturate the core of the capitalist world-system. When read as a world-literature, this narrative can be seen to emerge out of a context where the social injustice that capitalism has produced is not always keenly experienced. Even though the neoliberal gig economy, in its effort to capitalize on increasingly scant Cheap Nature, is producing new anxieties and putting mounting pressure also on the white middle class, capitalism is still typically experienced by this stratum through the comforts it generates: enormous shopping malls, ULED television screens, cars, soft drinks with ice, fast-food hamburgers, online dating services, and so on. The assumption that this is a self-evident material territory, available to all within the world-system who try hard enough, is central to the core culture’s inability to envision futures beyond capitalism. In the American Climate Emergency Narrative, this constitutes what Jameson has called a ‘weakness of the imagination’ (1994, p. xii) that implies that all attempts to preserve capitalism are legitimate and that destroying the planet is preferable to letting it overrun the imaginary borders that separate an externalized and angry nature from a capitalist modernity universalized as human society.Footnote 2

At this particular moment, when what Jason W. Moore (2015) and Giovanni Arrighi (1978, 1994) have described as an epochal capitalist and ecological crisis is unfolding, this weakness of the imagination informs even texts that attempt to tell stories about futures where capitalist modernity has collapsed and where people move through the ruins that remain. Pulp action novel franchises such as Hell Divers as well as critically acclaimed narratives such as The Road and Dog Stars thus display this imaginative weakness. These texts’ predominantly white and male characters, all born before the apocalypse that has ravaged the biosphere took place, remain attached, like the presumed reader from the core, to a pre-apocalyptic, capitalist world-system that centred on their needs and positionality. Now that this system has collapsed, the world appears as a literal wasteland where their white masculinity means nothing except that there was perhaps more meat on their bones the moment when things went to hell. If capitalism is, as American socialist politician Eugene Victor Debs once suggested ‘cannibalism’ (1905, p. 18), everyone is suddenly a cannibal or a meal in these narratives’ depiction of a Hobbesian, pre/post-capitalist future. The militarized agents of capitalist modernity are no longer there to deal with the emergency that such consumption entails. Emergencies must now be managed by the individual rather than by the security state (a process that is, as Grewal [2017] has shown, already on its way). In The Road, the father tries but fails to live up to this role. The Dog Stars, by contrast, is peopled by decisive white men who have been preparing for this dearth of security for a long time. In a post-apocalyptic landscape, the shooter comes into his own.

Because the American Climate Emergency Narrative is invested not simply in describing socio-ecological breakdown as an emergency for capitalism, but in leveraging militarized capitalism as the only way to address this emergency, a post-capitalist world must be a world of constant emergency and of perpetual yet ultimately pointless violence. If capitalism is truly dead, the violence can serve no purpose except that of ritual. In this way, curbed by its positionality and the imaginative weakness it confers, the only thing that the American Climate Emergency Narrative set in truly post-capitalist futures can do is to repeat the same violent scenario where those few who keep the flame fend off the mass of humans that have given in to the imperative produced by the return of Hobbes’ state of nature. Indeed, Hell Divers, The Dog Stars, and The Road are extremely repetitive texts. The same gruesome scenarios keep occurring over and over. The only way this can end is if those who keep the flame alive all die (as presumably happens in The Road). In Hell Divers, the story never ends. Every day is an emergency and every new instalment is a lengthening of the franchise. The sense that something is still happening is part of the ploy that capitalist realism uses, but also an illustration of its limitations. Like a magician who performs a single trick over and over again, it keeps telling us the same thing to distract us from the many other stories that could be told, from the idea that something other than a horrendous and bloody state of nature could emerge out of the demise of capitalism.