ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (2012) and Michelle Tea’s Black Wave (2015) as examples of “pre-extinction fiction” – texts which detail the anticipation of secular extinction events. These texts refuse an ending that assures human continuation, rejecting narratives of reassurance and redemption that are often prevalent in fictional articulations of planetary risk. By frustrating expectations for survival, they critique techno-utopian and anthropocentric responses to climate change. Rather seeing these works as being nihilistic, this chapter suggests they can be productive, exploring how the absence of satisfactory closure and the experience of anticipatory planetary grief might be productively utilised when considering eco-catastrophe.
