ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to a given post-apocalyptic discourse, narrative subgenre or individual work, but they principally refer to believable or conceivable speculative scenarios of a decidedly devastated future. The trauma of apocalypse, the fact that there indeed was an apocalyptic process brewing, hidden in plain sight among the ever-present discourse on apocalyptic disaster, perhaps comes to be felt only later. Images of future-as-disaster abound and are interpreted in the light of events and fears to their production and reception. The thought of future-as-disaster, in not only pointing out the failures but compromising the transcendental condition of rationality realizing itself in history, threatens to undo a modern history’s worth of how humanity makes sense. The existential and textual futures summoned by the spectre of a complete nuclear holocaust have been extensively analysed by a critical pursuit called nuclear criticism.
