This dissertation investigates how science fiction portrays the collapse of American society and its failure to recover in the wake of large-scale cataclysmic events in elation to the discourse of post-Cold War American hegemony. Although apocalyptic themes are as old as the genre itself, the analysis of post-apocalyptic SF has largely been tied to the Cold War and nuclear fears, or more recently to a shaken post-9/11 American psyche. However, this subgenre has a greater continuity that links those produced during the Cold War to recent stories; this analysis is critical of the cultural assumptions of a post-national future predicated on American-style democracy and liberal humanist values--both typical of mainstream SF. In the aftermath of cataclysm, the United States does not always recover and core values of American civic culture are among the casualties, something that counters the myth of American exceptionalism and "New World Order" representations of global hegemony.The argument for SF as a reflection of political and social discourse is not new. In the context of postcataclysm, SF is a minority discourse that remains subversive in its ability to talk about the unthinkable, whether that means the end of the world or just the post-American world. A number of political scientists and cultural critics draw from SF when they talk about a coming American "dark age," or "clash of civilizations," and even the "end of history." Others use it to illustrate the consequences of the peak oil crisis and resource scarcity; post-cataclysmic SF is the nexus in which these views meet in representations of a post-modern and post-industrial America. As dystopias these novels, television episodes, and films offer a view of the replacement of the American Dream with a new calculus of survival that includes slavery, colonization, disenfranchisement, and gender and racial inequities that are more than analogies for individual freedoms and rights, but that draw on the discourse of globalization to consider America's loss of power and prestige on the global stage.
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