Apocalyptica is an interdisciplinary, international, double-blind peer-reviewed, open access journal published by the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University. The journal publishes incisive analyses from diverse perspectives regarding the end of worlds. The journal publishes research from a broad range of fields in order to champion the potential of critical thinking and cultural analysis in the humanities as well as the social and cultural sciences. Apocalyptica encourages the production of cross-disciplinary knowledge and debate on the apocalypse as a figure of thought, a discursive node, a historical experience of past and present, and an empirical phenomenon.
Apocalypse and Crisis in the Work of Ernesto de Martino
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the streaming series Stranger Things not only portrays the battle against otherworldly monsters or the threat posed by concrete political or demonic enemies but also explores the struggles of particular groups’ own respective monsters. The present contribution delves into how children grapple with the loss of naivety and the awareness of life’s finiteness, how adolescents confront sexuality and concomitant feelings of guilt, and how adults cope with the pain of letting their children go into the ‘next,’ adult world. These themes are discussed through a psychoanalytic examination of the series, concluding with some brief remarks about the potential contributions of psychoanalysis/psychology to the study of (post-)apocalyptic thinking.
Science as a Discourse of Power in Apocalyptic Times in the Film Don’t Look Up
Apocalyptic narratives of environmental collapse have become increasingly visible in contemporary media and art. Films, as important cultural texts, help us understand how society imagines and responds to ecological crises. Primarily, this article examines the cinematic narrative of Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021). It discusses the film’s portrayal of humanity’s response to an impending environmental apocalypse predicted and warned of by science. The analysis attempts to examine whether the film depicts human indifference to science surrounding the apocalypse or reasserts science itself as a masked exercise of power that shapes what counts as knowledge through discourse. Seemingly, the film illustrates a contemporary society that is driven by short-term gains fostering a mass culture of scientific negligence, and sidelining crucial warnings of self-destruction. However, bearing on Michel Foucault’s discourse theory and other ecocritical perspectives surrounding uncertainty and the apocalypse, this article advocates for expanding the discussion on the particular representation of science and scientists in film. Arguably, Don’t Look Up appears to champion science as the watchdog and panacea in times of imminent events of destruction. This suggests a subtle exercise of power that discourages skepticism and promotes unquestioned trust in scientific discourses about environmental apocalypse. In this light, this article explores how political incompetence, propaganda distribution, and societal ignorance mask science as a discourse of power in the film.
Cultural productions that deal with the idea of the end of the world are a common phenomenon in Western imagination. However, it is not the human species as a whole nor even the planet that is facing an end, but, rather, the unsustainable way of existence based on excessive accumulation and limitless exploitation of ecosystems, which puts humanity at risk of a real apocalypse due to climate change and the ecological crisis. Additionally, many other worlds have already undergone their demise or exist within a post-apocalyptic framework, as evidenced by the experiences of various Indigenous peoples. This article aims to examine the representations of the end of the world presented in three Brazilian novels, which employ a combination of satire and pessimism to portray dystopian scenarios threatened by the end. Não verás país nenhum [And Still the Earth] (1981), by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, a critique of the process of re-democratization following the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil, set against the backdrop of the severe consequences of the ecological crisis; A Morte e o Meteoro (2019), by Joca Reiners Terron, addresses the extinction of an Indigenous people resulting from the devastation of the Amazon as a metaphor for recurrent colonial exploitation; A Extinção das Abelhas (2021), by Natalia Borges Polesso, a fragmented narrative that reflects the collapse of the world, from an urban center to an escape through solidarity. In light of the insights offered by thinkers such as Danowski, Ferdinand, and Viveiros de Castro, and in dialogue with the work Metade cara, metade máscara (2004) by the Indigenous writer Eliane Potiguara, we argue for the need to broaden the conception of single world and single end, in order to transcend this colonial construct that is so unproductive regarding the challenges of the Anthropocene.
Famine and the sword are central symbols of total destruction in the apocalyptic literature of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Islam. This symbolic framework also shaped early modern interpretations of natural disasters and wartime devastation. This paper examines how apocalyptic beliefs influenced the interpretation of famine and war in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iran. While historians have extensively documented these crises, the religious and cultural transformations that accompanied them remain underexplored. Moreover, the concept of apocalypse in Islam— particularly within the Shi’ite tradition—has received limited scholarly attention. In Qajar Iran, a period marked by frequent famine, conflict, and epidemic disease, apocalyptic thinking flourished. Crises were increasingly interpreted through religious archetypes and cosmic narratives. Drawing on understudied sources such as memoirs, laments, marginalia, and visual representations, this study demonstrates how apocalyptic discourse provided a framework for comprehending catastrophe and imagining redemption through destruction. Using a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, the paper treats apocalyptic symbolism as a dynamic form of religious interpretation, emphasizing the interplay between cosmic upheaval (qiyāmah) and personal transformation through tribulation (balā). The portrayal of famine and war as apocalyptic events entails a confrontation with existential questions about the self and its place in divine order. It invests the natural world with theological agency, presenting famine and disaster as expressions of divine intervention and internal moral decay. Apocalyptic discourse, in this context, not only critiques existing theodicies but also destabilizes Qajar political theology, which sought to legitimize hierarchical authority through claims to divine favor and historical continuity.
Desert Settings and How to See the Apocalypse
Deserts have long been treated as apocalyptic spaces in cultural narratives. This is especially true of science fiction (SF), a genre which, throughout its historical development, has both narrated and critiqued colonialism. This article investigates deserts as apocalyptic settings in some American and Australian SF texts within the context of colonial and Indigenous beliefs and knowledges. I read the apocalyptic as a technique of seeing in relation to desert settings. I treat ‘setting’ as a formal, necessary precondition for narrative development, organising visual fields and producing agential environments. I then examine literary and filmic examples of SF desert settings with varied dominant perspectives: George Miller’s Mad Max 2 (1981) meditates on settler colonial anxieties in its treatment of the Australian desert as a symbolically rich yet materially empty arid ‘wasteland,’ eliding Indigenous occupation. A similar perspective emerges via Denis Villeneuve’s penchant for using aerial photography to present post-Romantic sublime desert views in Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024), since desert aerial photography has a specific colonial history dating back to WWI. Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) (Villeneuve’s source text) instead privileges the more postcolonial view from below of the “Fremen.” Finally, Claire G. Coleman’s (2017) Terra Nullius is an anticolonial text which shifts between perspectives from above and below. The novel’s radical narrative rupture halfway through re-orients the reader’s understanding of the text’s apocalyptic framework in relation to Indigenous history. Coleman shows how the apocalyptic can be mobilised as a technique of seeing to critique historical injustice in desert SF settings.
Ongoing Apocalypse and Ecological Consciousness in Han Song’s Science Fiction
In contrast to the usual format of apocalyptic fiction which provides redemption or resolution, Chinese science fiction writer Han Song’s Subway (2010) (as well as his other works) uniquely embodies Timothy Gilmore’s concept of “continuously unfolding apocalypse,” which is associated with a “wildness” that prompts true ecological consciousness. Most science fiction of the apocalyptic mode unwittingly promotes either technological optimism or moral and ideological certitude, and dispels feelings of helplessness and uncertainty engendered by these very apocalyptic scenarios. However, Han’s post-apocalyptic visions depict urban collapse from which there is no easy recovery, nor a convenient way to assign blame. Subway inventively refuses to provide satisfactory resolution but instead mires the reader in uncertainty through many aspects of the text, including narrative technique and stylistic choices. I argue that in doing so, Subway provides a challenging new way of looking at apocalypse, one that, in its very difficulty and unpleasantness, challenges the gospel of hyper-development and is a more effective ecological text than those that provide simple catharsis.
This article examines Vietnam’s revolutionary trajectory as an attempt to follow Lenin’s concept of the ‘transitional period’ to achieve a distinctive vision of the ‘end of history.’ Drawing on case studies of Phạm Tuân’s 1980 space mission and Trần Đức Thiệp’s 1992 nuclear accident, I analyze how Vietnam’s revolutionary ambitions produced unexpected apocalyptic risks. For Vietnamese thinkers and politicians, the apocalyptic threat was twofold: dependence on foreign powers at the superstructural level and technological backwardness at the infrastructural level. Yet, paradoxically, it was their commitment to avoiding these threats that created genuine apocalyptic risks through teleological thinking and ideological dogmatism. As they simultaneously attempted to maintain a communist political superstructure while accelerating technological development, a dangerous disconnect emerged between advanced theoretical knowledge and underdeveloped material infrastructure. This contradiction was vividly demonstrated in both Vietnam’s celebrated space achievement and its lesser-known nuclear accident. Rather than treating Vietnamese revolutionary thought as derivative of European Marxism, I illuminate how revolutionaries transformed abstract ideology into lived experience, creating distinctive forms of temporal consciousness that evolved from dogmatic teleology toward a more nuanced engagement with historical contingency as Vietnam navigated between ideological aspirations and material realities.
This article argues that J. G. Ballard’s 1966 novel, The Crystal World, with its crystalline apocalypse, unsettles binaries such as life/death and organic/inorganic. It traces similarities in Ballard’s work to Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, while making the case that both Ballard and Conrad can be situated in a lineage of subterranean extraction and imperial mastery. Building on Kathryn Yusoff’s work on geology, extraction, and the racialization of black and brown bodies, this study shows how both extractive processes in both Conrad and Ballard trouble the divisions between organic and inorganic. The crystalline apocalypse–and the accompanying overabundance of crystals–in Ballard’s novel disrupt subterranean networks of value extraction. Emphasizing how Ballard’s crystalline transformation petrifies bodies, this article suggests that crystallization in The Crystal World is an opportunity to rethink the categories of organic/inorganic and life/death. From this analytical perspective, The Crystal World offers opportunities to reimagine value networks under capitalism.
Doomsday Prepping as Prophecy, Predestination, and Media Spectacle
Subaltern Apocalypses and Cosmopolitics of the Peoples in the Southern Cone of America
Nepantla, Between Mesoamerican Time and Colonial Space
Reviewing Anaïs Maurer’s The Ocean On Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists (2024)
Affordances of Apocalyptic Environmentalism
This paper traces the fictional roots of recent claims by those in the AI industry that superintelligent machines pose an existential risk. This irrational anxiety, given that fiction is not science, that grants AI agency is not only a distraction from real concerns, but a psychological displacement, an unconscious defense that substitutes a new object, autonomous machines, in place of one that cannot be acknowledged: responsibility for the environmental and societal damage caused by a resource-intensive industry that persists, despite the climate catastrophe, with a mechanistic worldview, one that treats nature, including humans, as a lucrative commodity. Initially seduced by the story of AI evolution, Stanley Kubrick consulted computer scientists when he was making 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released a year before the moon landing. In the problematic cycle of fiction directing science, the film’s depiction of AI has, in turn, shaped research in the field. Yet, if at first Kubrick embraced the scientists’ vision of evolving, intelligent, immortal machines, by the time he was working on A.I. Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s, the field was entering one of its many winters and environmental concerns had dampened faith in technological progress. Kubrick again consulted AI scientists, but this time he returned the field to its fictional roots and presented AI as a dark fairy tale about a corporation that persists with the myth that it can turn ’mecha’ into ‘orga’ despite the climate crisis.
The contemporary American zombie apocalypse narrative engages aspects of the elemental world, and fluid elements in particular, in ways that reshape our views of both the pre-apocalyptic worlds of zombie terror and the post-apocalyptic worlds that emerge from the ruins. Two such shows, the AMC television series The Walking Dead (2010-2022) and its first major spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead (2015-2023), circulate polyvalent images of three particular fluid substrates—blood, water, and oil—that structure the violent collapse and agonizing rebirth of the contemporary world. I argue that these fluids reshape the zombie apocalypse narrative as an elemental apocalypse that exposes certain forms of ongoing social and ecological violence. They mobilise the material realities and rigid forms that constitute our sense of a shared society and planet and transform them into a set of softened, malleable structures that make us more attentive to the uncertainties, ambiguities, and uncomfortable complicities that characterise the shows’ allegorisations of global catastrophe. Contemporary zombie apocalypse narratives like The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead re-establish the centrality of the fluid elements that have long structured the zombie mythos and its intersecting histories of violence toward human subjects and the nonhuman environment.
This contribution offers a critical analysis of Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021) and its representation of apocalyptic borderscapes and topographies of exception. It examines how the film portrays the ethical dimensions of survival and death in the context of a zombie apocalypse, in which the border functions as a site of exclusion where subjects are not only excluded from a specific territory or the sphere of the law but also, more importantly, from the sphere of the living. The author analyzes the narrative, aesthetic, and cinematic strategies that Army of the Dead employs to shed light on this necropolitical dimension of the border and the ways in which this dimension is intertwined with the imaginary of survival in and of the apocalypse. In particular, the author argues that the plural and particular apocalypse(s) in the film not only expose patterns of seeming exceptionalism that mask the everydayness of biopolitical exclusion and the topographies of exception they produce but also make visible the territorial dimension of the border as a recurring instrument of bio- and necro-political control that regulates and structures survival.
This article examines the origins of the videogame zombie by tracing their appearances in the Japanese videogames Phantom Fighter (Marionette 1988), Sweet Home (Capcom 1989) and Biohazard (Capcom 1996). The nascent versions of interactive zombies in these games offer a distinctively Japanese variation to the mediated figure of the undead. Their monsters draw upon and contribute to traditions of Japanese folklore teeming with yōkai (supernatural demons, monsters and ghouls). Through analysis of Phantom Fighter, Sweet Home and Biohazard, I demonstrate how Japan’s prototypical videogame zombies build upon their yōkai roots to reflect a public consciousness that is grappling with the jarring reanimation of long-unresolved trauma: the tragedies, crimes, and anguish of the Pacific War and its devastating conclusion. The figure of the zombie—trading in abject and uncanny forms of monstrosity, and upending sense and meaning through its impossible terrors—appears to be a natural product of this moment of rupture in Japan’s post-war history. The appearance of the zombie in these videogames invites players into the mediation and negotiation of popular cultural memorial anxieties.
Gabriele Schwab’s Radioactive Ghosts: A Review
Experiencing the Trinity Test in New Mexico
What is a ghost? Is it a continuing spirit through time that refuses to die? If so, that is what my book, The Manhattan Project Trinity Test: Witnessing the Bomb in New Mexico, is about—the legacy of the first atomic bomb, set off in the southern New Mexico desert, 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945. Known as the Trinity Test, this event, happening almost 80 years ago, has been called the dawn of the nuclear age. For the 60th anniversary of that first atomic bomb in 2005, the newspaper I was working for, the Alamogordo Daily News, brought the staff together to dig out the stories our paper had printed regarding the event and to write new stories for a special edition. I put together a replica of the front page of that long-ago style of the paper, bringing all those elements together. It was that project which made me realize as the event falls back into history, those people who experienced it and were affected by it are rapidly disappearing. Thus, the idea for the book was born and I started talking with those who remember and who are still alive today as well as their children. I also worked to unearth the words and experiences of those no longer alive—the scientists and journalists, for example, who had left written accounts and other pieces to sort through.
The Brennillis Plant, A Nuclear Ghost at the Gates of Hell
The following is an excerpt from our ongoing project on the Brennilis plant in the Monts d’Arrée in Finistère, France, which has been a nuclear ghost since 1985. The project combines photography, interviews, and philosophical reflections. It aims to show how the myths and legends of Brittany (France) overlap with the lifeworlds of inhabitants around the Brennilis plant in an effort to highlight the impact nuclear technology has on its surrounding area. We juxtapose this documentation with sociological, philosophical, and literary reflections. In converging these elements the project combines each aspect to create something new altogether. Our approach is echoed by the use of Lomography, a photographic technique that admits flaws and blurs, heavy vignettes, unusual lightening, apparitions and tinctures, illuminating those haunting aspects and ghostly traces in lived environments less obvious to the unmediated eye. As typical with all ghostly matters, ours is a work still in progress.