Parenthetical.net

One last piece of dystopiana: Research Reveals That Apocalyptic Stories Changed Dramatically 20 Years Ago.
Chanda Phelan wrote this article based on her thesis, for which she looked at a ton of apocalyptic literature from 1826 to 2007 and charted the nature of the apocalypse. Click the image at the top of the article for a [...]

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Post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian fiction! It’s: a) pretty much all I read as an adolescent, b) what made the hippie I am today, c) ridiculously popular all of a sudden in YA lit, or d) all of the above?
D, obviously. The YA lit world is exploding with talk of dystopias. This article from [...]

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Hey, everybody, it’s post-apocalyptic YA from the ’80s! Home, sweet home. It even has a watercolory cover and a fresh-faced, all-American heroine named “Janie Johnson”! This book was brought to my attention recently [and by "recently," I mean about six months ago, when I actually read it -- Ed.] by an old [...]

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From the (Environmental Protection) Agency’s Earth Day history page:
EPA was born in 1970 – a time when rivers caught fire and cities were hidden under dense clouds of smoke. We’ve made remarkable progress since then in protecting human health and safeguarding the natural environment.
Remember 40 years ago, when life was like a science fiction movie? [...]

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I wrote recently about the fact that my mental picture of “apocalypse” is stuck in the Cold War — instantaneous disaster, as opposed to the currently more likely slow(-ish) environmental collapse. I mused about what current YA readers of science fiction will picture, which made me wonder: other than Uglies, what’s being written in [...]

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While cataloging Alas, Babylon, a classic 1959 apocalyptic sci-fi novel by Pat Frank, it occured to me how quaint nuclear holocausts seem to me now. Oh, the Russians bombed us into the Stone Age? How terrifying! We tore our short-sleeved dress shirts, and the girls in the typing pool were vaporized! [...]

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Feed, M.T. Anderson: I don’t read post-apocalyptic sci-fi anymore, and certainly not immediately-pre-apocalyptic, but I didn’t know that’s what this was. All I knew was that it was about a future in which everyone has the internet in their brain and they’re advertised to all the time, and that it’s extremely popular and draped [...]

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