ABSTRACT
This book devoted to Doomsday Clock Narratives—which I define as stories obsessively focused on an imagined approaching future calamity— starts by reminding the reader of Enrico Fermi. In Pohl’s nuclear holocaust story, “Fermi and Frost,” an unexpected, brief nuclear war ends in the annihilation of nearly the entire human race and the advent of a nuclear winter. The question of whether catastrophic climatic change resulting from the use of atomic weapons is going to kill off the few survivors is left open, leaving the reader with little hope that humanity will squeeze through the bottleneck and recreate a better world. The story is important for my discussion of (eco)anxiety for two reasons: firstly, it directly links nuclear and climate catastrophes, which become two sides of the same coin—one single, probable, horrid nature-killing event. Secondly, it refers to Fermi’s famous hypothesis that as soon as any intelligent race evolves to be smart enough to travel into space, they will bomb or pollute their planet and annihilate themselves—which explains why no aliens have ever visited or contacted humanity.
