J. Jesse Ramírez, Un-American Dreams: Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Disimagined Community, and Bad Hope in the American Century

Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Disimagined Community, and Bad Hope in the American Century launches from the premise that postwar "apocalyptic culture" in the US -embodied by books, lms, and other speculative media that fantasize the end of the world -expresses "the desire called utopia under erasure" (xiii).Apocalyptic fantasies, in other words, desperately seek to imagine be er worlds, yet they often stagger in the face of what Mark Fisher calls "capitalist realism," or the relentless inertia of contemporary life under capitalist modernity.Driven by the pervasive sense that all pathways toward meaningful positive change are out of reach, Ramírez argues that apocalyptic ctions during the postwar era retreat into various forms of "abstract negativity"-a sort of "bad hope" that dreams how the world-as-we-knowit during the height of US global hegemony might be pleasingly annihilated by meteors, zombies, alien invasions, and other fantastic cataclysms (32).