Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins (review)

Susan Watkins' monograph Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (2020) offers a new and distinctive perspective to the growing body of scholarship on post-apocalyptic fiction with the post-apocalyptic turn in recent decades. Watkins focuses on exploring how contemporary women novelists "successfully transform and rewrite the apocalyptic genre to imagine different possible futures for humanity post-apocalypse" (1). Her studies enrich the nascent researches on this genre represented by Claire P. Curtis' Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: "We'll Not Go Home Again" (2010), Majid Yar's Crime and the Imaginary of Disaster: Post-Apocalyptic Fictions and the Crisis of Social Order (2015), Heather J. Hicks' The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity beyond Salvage (2016), and Mark Payne's Flowers of Time: On Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (2020). This book is comprised of an introduction, five analytical chapters, and a conclusion. Its choice of texts is very extensive, primarily including more than twenty contemporary women's post-apocalyptic fiction since 2000 from the UK and North America.

In the "Introduction: Rewriting and Transforming Tradition," Watkins lays out the scope and themes of this book. This part opens with a series of probing questions: "How is contemporary women writers' writing of the apocalypse distinctive? Why do so many texts that are set in a post-apocalyptic future focus on men who are trying to survive, trying to protect women and trying to rebuild things the way they were before? Why is there so much emphasis on men's nostalgia for the world before things changed?"(1). These questions fully engage readers' attention and enable them to understand the aim of the book, "to establish the distinctive ways in which contemporary women writers imagine the apocalypse" (2). Watkins then offers a useful overview of the specific contexts which explain the prevalence of post-apocalyptic fiction in different times since 1989. It is noteworthy that she encapsulates three salient post-apocalyptic features shared by the novels she discusses, which helps readers understand the scope of her subsequent analytical chapters better. They are "the world before the disaster is in living or cultural memory" (9), "the clear attribution of blame for the apocalyptic disaster on human carelessness for the environment, the excesses of techno-science and capitalist exploration of natural resources," and "the focus of the narratives is on taking the chance to rebuild in a different way" (9–10). She claims that it is very important to examine how women writers "work to rewrite and transform the male-authored texts that also contribute to that field" and "acknowledge the literary history of women's work in the 'ustopian' and apocalyptic genres and pinpoint how they build on their ancestor's work" (14).

Then five analytical chapters are devoted to explicating the distinctiveness of contemporary women's post-apocalyptic fiction. In the second chapter "Science, Nature and Matter," Watkins utilizes new materialist theories, especially those of Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo to examine how Jane Rogers's The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011), Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (2009), and Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army (2007) re-explore the relationship between science, nature and matter from the perspective of attitudes to gender and sexuality. She places these novels within the tradition of feminist science fiction and puts forward the most compelling argument that these novels push out "our gendered thinking in relation to science and technology and culture by focusing on the concept of matter and materiality" (44). The third chapter "The Posthuman Body" draws on Donna Haraway's ideas concerning humans' kinship with machines, animals and plants to elaborate how Tama Janowitz's They Is Us (2008), Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007), Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003), and Nnedi Okorafor's The Shadow Speaker (2007) rewrite and rework "the motifs of gendered embodied selfhood that are key to conventional apocalyptic narratives—narratives of loss, nostalgia or mourning...