CATASTROPHIC CONVERGENCES. WAR, CLIMATE COLLAPSE, AND POSTHUMAN ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY SPECULATIVE FICTION
CATASTROPHIC CONVERGENCES. WAR, CLIMATE COLLAPSE, AND POSTHUMAN ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY SPECULATIVE FICTION

Summary/Abstract: The 21st century is marked by catastrophic convergences – of war, environmental collapse, and ethical disorientation – that destabilize inherited paradigms of justice, agency, and survival. This article examines how three post-9/11 Anglophone novels – Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” (2003), Don DeLillo’s “Zero K” (2016), and Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” (1993) – construct a speculative posthuman terrain where climate change, technocapitalism, and militarized necropolitics intersect. Drawing on posthumanist theory, trauma studies, and environmental thought, the article introduces the concept of the ecology of excess to describe systems overrun with waste, data, species, and suffering beyond their capacity for coherence. These texts do not merely depict collapse; they perform it formally and ethically, enacting the breakdown of narrative order and anthropocentric ethics in a world where survival is unevenly distributed and deeply entangled with multispecies relations. By exploring the ethics of bioengineering, cryogenic preservation, and radical adaptation, the novels interrogate what it means to endure in a world that may not be survivable. Literature, in this context, becomes a speculative laboratory for rehearsing new forms of care, relationality, and ethical imagination. Rather than offering salvation, these narratives remain with the trouble, foregrounding shared vulnerability and planetary entanglement. Ultimately, the article contends that posthumanist fiction is vital for rethinking conflict, coexistence, and the ethical possibilities of survival in the Anthropocene.

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