Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction.

Mark Payne. (2020). Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press.

In this book, the discussion centres around fictional depictions of survival after apocalyptic events provide examples for how devastation can create space for new ways of life, especially how survivors build new societal structures after a catastrophic event. As Payne puts it, ‘Postapocalyptic fiction is political theory in fictional form. Instead of producing arguments in favor of a particular form of life, it shows what it would be like to live that life’ (p. 2). The book discusses authors from antiquity right through to contemporary times, particularly Hesiod, Rousseau, Mary Shelley, Olaf Stapledon and Octavia Butler. Chapter 1 – “The Apocalyptic Pastoral” – is particularly interesting for Classicists. It features a reading of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man in tandem with the poetry of Hesiod, examining how Shelley constructed her post-plague world by looking back to the ideas put forward about society in early Greek epic.

Example quotation

The return to primitive agriculture is the outcome of the plague’s drastic reduction of the human population, and it produces proximity to the ancient Greeks in the form of a return to their mythology. Greek mythology is a natural translation of the lived experience of the survivors. Its return is immediate, not willed or reflective. As the remnant population of Europe goes back to doing the same things all day as the Greeks did, they come to care about the same things as the Greeks did, in much the same way as the Greeks did. Occupation is directly productive of mentation. Because human beings are once again directly dependent on local forms of nonhuman life for their survival, they experience affects of dependency that are directly productive of mythological thought.

(pp.44-45)