This chapter focuses on the atomic bomb as imagined, debated, and dissected in the fiction and criticism of the twentieth century. Long before its invention in the Manhattan Project, atomic fission was an obsessive object of speculation in fiction by writers such as H. G. Wells, Talbot Mundy, and Olaf Stapledon. Rejecting the notion that research was directed simply toward the development of clean sources of energy, such writers steered the public conversation toward the apocalyptic consequences of the employment of nuclear physics in the development of arms. Larabee focuses on how the threat of nuclear apocalypse impacted literary criticism’s sense of its social mission. Although she reads the movement known as “nuclear criticism” as a failure, she reads John Adams’s and Peter Sellars’s opera Doctor Atomic as exemplary of “new critical and creative forms” that might “bring the humanities and sciences together to address threats such as nuclear weapons.”

The chapter looks at the devastations caused by nuclear testing, the links between environmental thinking and nuclear culture, and the twenty-first-century apocalyptic imaginary generated by climate breakdown and the post-Chernobyl and post-Fukushima nature of the second nuclear age. It reviews the Derridean moment of Nuclear Criticism at the very end of the Cold War through the lens of green Marxism by way of a meditation on the representation of nuclearized sites, deserts, islands, and wastelands, from the Cold War to the present. The chapter redefines the questions raised by Nuclear Criticism on the textuality of global war systems, on the impossibility of post-archival dreaming, through the modalities of environmental apocalypse now. The aesthetic repertoire of the chapter comprises John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, stories by J. G. Ballard and the work of Jessica Hurley on Maori author James George’s Ocean Roads, Marlo Starr on Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner's Iep Jaltok, Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘Second Variety,’ DeLillo’s Underworld, and the work of the Nuclear Culture Research Group.

This chapter discusses the relationship between nuclear literature and criticism on the one hand and climate fiction and criticism on the other. It demonstrates, first, a long-standing preoccupation in nuclear texts with weather and climate, suggesting that nuclear literature might usefully be considered a special subcategory of climate fiction. It then deals with a thriving - and relatively new - tradition of nuclear criticism and theory. It shows how, by opening up three key problematics (nuclear geographies, nuclear temporalities, and nuclear subjectivities), nuclear criticism brings into focus the interdependence of global and local, the significance of deep time, and how humans are produced by their interactions with technology and nature. This critical tradition can feed usefully into an understanding of climate fiction.

This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the abstract and intangible phenomenon of climate change visible, it argues that there is also a significant body of writing on the subject which turns to alternative forms and narrative strategies in the effort to represent climate change, and manages to overcome some of the limitations of realism. In other words, where climate fiction meets the challenges of representing climate change, it has the potential to provide a space in which to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns.