ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines the birth and evolution of dystopian and post-apocalyptic narrative strategies, the relationship between fear and popular culture and the role of dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives as a vehicle to express the fears of their times. It then highlights what fears have been expressed over time by these narrative strategies and how environmental issues have become so mainstream in recent years as to be the object of dystopian parodies. Lastly, it is stressed that the great popularity of post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives risks undermining their communicative power. Whereas at the end of the 1990s, the apocalypse could still be considered a powerful metaphor for the environmental imaginary, today excessive recourse to the same metaphor risks imposing its “normalization” to accustom the public to a future in which environmental disaster is the norm and not an event to be feared.
