Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Research Paper

First Advisor

dAve pAddy

Abstract

For the purposes of this research, I have examined examples of apocalyptic science fiction narratives as a subset of speculative fiction. Speculative fictions, science fiction in particular, move beyond the concrete realities of the “actual” world, opening up potentials for new ideas of reality, while examining those same realities in a way that interrogates what may lay beyond and within them. The speculative fiction genre includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, and magical realism. Focusing in on science fiction, we find narratives that move beyond our reality while keeping it in view. In many instances, dystopian and apocalyptic narratives practice a type of extrapolation, pushing a known reality to still-possible, still-conceivable extremes, often to be read as a type of prophetic omen or warning. Thus, my research will examine how utopian vision, as impulse and process, coincides within and is produced from the dystopia and apocalyptic. My research will also expound on several of the multiple relationships between the science fiction genre and religion or theology, from its use of literary form as a prophetic voice to an examination of moral direction and spiritual formation within communities. As with religious texts of apocalypse, science fictions of apocalypse retain a potential for faith, justice, and hope, here read as an utopian-impulse.

Comments

WSP Major: Storytelling and Spirituality

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