Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood's <em>Oryx and Crake</em> and <em>The Year of the Flood</em>

It was Fredric Jameson who remarked, in a line from the preface to The Seeds of Time that has since become proverbial (as well as anonymized and widely misattributed 1 ): ''It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism'' (Seeds of Time xii).This is to say that the ideological assumptions of capitalism have now become so utterly naturalized, and our imagination of any possible alternatives to what currently exists so totally impoverished, that we cannot imagine even the mechanism by which some alternative might emerge.The entire world would end first-and even that might not be enough.For Jameson it is this loss of faith in the possibility of revolution-the evacuation of futurity that Francis Fukuyama called ''the end of history''-that marks the shift from modernity to postmodernity.When we were modern, we believed the world could change; now that we are postmodern, we are certain it cannot.In a later essay, 2003's ''Future City,'' Jameson revises his famous line a bit.He writes:Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world. . . .But I think it would be better to characterize all this in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here.The problem is then how to locate radical difference; how to jumpstart the sense of history so that it begins again to transmit feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia.The problem to be solved is that of breaking out of the windless present of the postmodern back into real historical time, and a history made by human beings.(''Future City'') This article follows Jameson's historical imperative to argue that the science fictional imagination of the apocalypse functions today as the postmodern version of Jameson's called-for ''radical break,'' which is ''the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system'' (Archaeologies 231-32).The apocalypse is the only thing in our time that seems to have the capacity to shake the foundations of the system and ''jumpstart'' a history that now seems completely moribund-the only power left that could still create a renewed, free space in which another kind of life might be possible.Apocalypse (especially eco-apocalypse) is increasingly the frame we use for imagining an end to capitalism, precisely because (after the ''end of history'') we can't imagine any other possible way for it to end.And in a way this is eerily appropriate; the increasingly dire predictions of ecological science warn us that ''the end of the world'' and ''the end of capitalism'' may in fact describe the same event-the one is catapulting us faster and faster towards the other.If capitalism has always been, in K. William Kapp's memorable formulation, ''an economy of unpaid costs'' (231), then I argue our increasing recognition that the bill is coming due represents a kind of nascent revolutionary consciousness.Looking through the lens of the apocalypse-skipping ahead, that is, to the end of the story-we can see capitalism more clearly, without the distortions of ideology, complacency, and reaction that ordinarily cloud our view. 2And though apocalypse might appear at first glance to assert the impossibility of significant change in our social relations (the first version of Jameson's quote), the radical disruption of history offered by eco-apocalypse is, in fact, a dialectical reassertion of both the possibility and the necessity of such change (the second version).Apocalypse reminds us that the logic of consumer capitalism is not, in fact, timeless and eternal; there was a time before it, and there will be a time after it.History does, indeed, go on.This article therefore seeks to draw out the unexpected utopian potency lurking within our contemporary visions of eco-apocalypse, taking as its primary object of study two recent eco-apocalyptic novels by Canadian author Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake (2003) and its 2009 ''midquel,'' The Year of the Flood.Both books seek to open up new space for imagining a post-capitalist future through a satirical, science-fictional staging of capitalism's final, catastrophic breakdown-and the subsequent emergence of other kinds of lives, after the end of history.

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