ABSTRACT
Tragedies are really popular. Not real-life tragedies, you understand—those are just sad. But fiction is chock full of tragedies, and people love to consume them. There’s the story of King Arthur, for example, which leaves me in floods pretty much no matter how bad the adaptation. But maybe it was Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012) that did it for you, or Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel (2020). If Cli-Fi is your thing, then maybe it was J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972), or Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (2012).
