Future Shock: Rewriting the Apocalypse in Contemporary Women's Fiction

Recently, a number of contemporary women writers have published fictions of apocalypse, including Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake [2003] and its sequel The Year of the Flood [2009]), Jeannette Winterson (The Stone Gods [2007]), Doris Lessing (Mara and Dann [1999] and the sequel The Story of General Dann [2005]), Maggie Gee (The Ice People [2008] and The Flood [2005]), and Liz Jensen (The Rapture was a popular success in 2009). These novels have had a mixed reception, and reviews have revealed much about the prejudices of the literary establishment. Despite the long tradition of women’s speculative writing and the respectability of the ‘‘literary’’ tradition of apocalyptic writing, there still seems to be some question about whether women writers can move between these genres with the same success as men, for women’s writing within the genre is sometimes dismissed as preachy agitprop. This essay will examine what attracts these writers to the idea of apocalypse and explore what their apocalyptic narratives share. I argue that contemporary women writers offer a new intervention in the literature of apocalypse that has much to say about the important relationship between gender and the way we imagine the end of the world as we know it. Contemporary women’s apocalyptic writing is interested in a number of key ideas. First is a suspicion of techno-science for its destructive complicity with patriarchal and colonial enterprises and an alternative interest in debating the relationship between nature, gender, and matter in new ways. Second is a concern to transform identity and sexuality through extending the boundaries of scientific wisdom and being open to the redefinition of the ‘‘human,’’ particularly via cyborg technology. The third feature of contemporary women’s apocalyptic writing that I will discuss is the replacement of colonial and patriarchal narratives of paternity and conquest with metaphors of mother-daughter relationships. Related to this maternal imaginary is a