In the dozens of movies listed between 1951 and 1966, the entirety of the themes which would make up the genre’s conventions later on is already taking shape. These films display a radioactive future and portray an extremely disparate image of the collapsed world. As a consequence, rocky and deserted landscapes merge with the ruins of a decayed city. . . . the paradisiac idleness contrasts with the hard search for basic survival conditions. (114 115)

3Regardless of its association with popular culture and genre movies, the idea of ‘future ruins’ is challenging in more than one obvious way. First of all, how long does it actually take to declare a city ‘in ruins’? What is this decay signalized by? Moreover, the contemplation of the anachronistic image of ‘future ruins’ can only lead the reader to envision their own city as ruins in the making. This effect—the ‘future perfect’—has been introduced by (post)apocalyptic fiction scholars such as Irène Langlet, Richard Saint-Gelais or Denis Mellier. The latter talks about the ‘janiform’ and oxymoronic form of postapocalyptic fiction, both characterising a lost past which re-emerges under the shape of the ruin within the timeline of the narrative and which indeed projects the daily décor of the reader’s own present as symbolic future vestiges. According to him,

This effect of ‘future perfect’ is widely known by science-fiction theoreticians (Jameson, Saint-Gelais, Langlet) and I am not commenting on its temporal dimension, but rather on the double semiotic discourse operated by the object which then assumes the role of sign and index by virtue of its very nature of vestiges and remains. . . . In post-apocalyptic fiction, this role allows for hermeneutical insights that are susceptible of opening up the dual effect of anticipated nostalgia and contemporary criticism. (Mellier 2017, 251–252; translation mine)

4An utter reversal of traditional geographical and socio-political paradigms completes the uncanny experience of the ruins of the future. In the stories under study, the city loses its status as the centre of civilisation. The traditional division between the refined, civilised city and the less sophisticated, marginalised periphery is overturned in contemporary speculative fiction: civilisation and culture only endure outside of the city. To explore this paradox, I offer to analyse the depiction of ruins of the future in three novels that share the characteristics of apocalyptic, speculative and science-fiction.

5Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885) delves both into the pastoral description of new wild England and the effect of the traumatic ‘apocalypse’ turning British people into barbarian tribes. In the novel, for a famously unknown reason, cities were destroyed. As a consequence, humanity reverted to pseudo-medievalism in populated areas, clans of woodsmen in others, while scientific knowledge drastically regressed. This state of the nation is explored by the author in the first part, aptly entitled ‘The Relapse into Barbarism’. Jefferies’s novel is one of the first of its genre to take comfort in the disappearance of modernity rather than make it a tragic event. In The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage, Heather J. Hicks describes this evolution of the genre at the turn of the 20th century:

this elegiac treatment of a venerated modernity remains largely dominant through the publication of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). Yet one also begins to detect a shift in the beginning of the twentieth century: the sharp eyes and light step of Edwin in Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) hints that perhaps the premodern might be an improvement over the swarming cities of the modern era, whose effete denizens have so readily succumbed to the plague. (4)

7J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) sets its characters in a world not unlike Jefferies’s. As a result of an extreme rise of temperature and sea levels, the human population is now confined to the ice caps, whilst London has become a sweltering lagoon where the only human presence is that of scientists in charge of monitoring climate and biologic evolution. The main characters of the story are scientists who all live on the highest stories (the only ones that have not yet been submerged) of a luxury hotel, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere in which each of them develops a peculiar relationship to their new environment. If Ballard’s narrative echoes Jefferies’s novel in the way they convey a form of relief at the collapse of the industrial civilisation, Hicks identifies the author’s more ambivalent contribution to post-apocalyptic fiction, as ‘looking toward some new postmodern existence for solace’ (2016, 5)—which Hicks characterises at the third stage in the history of post-apocalyptic narratives.

8Finally, Angela Carter offers its reader a take on another iconic city in The Passion of New Eve (1977): New York. In Carter’s fiery text, the city becomes a metonymy of the decaying ethos of its inhabitants, as the apocalyptic metropolis becomes the locus of consumerist and sexual greed, a reversed mirror of John’s New Jerusalem. The reader follows the bewildered point of view of an English man called Evelyn, who goes on a life-changing (life-ending?) journey on the inadequately named ‘New World’.

9The three novels premise the imagination of future ruins on a fairly common ground. First, they are all indebted to the traditional apocalyptic discourse: the depiction of Babylon as a hypernym for all sinful, decadent and greedy cities in the Book of Revelations meshes with the novel’s contemporary critical discourses on neoliberal and capitalist politics. Secondly, the city as a synonym of a cohesive social and political hub is utterly fragmented. Finally, imagining ruins in the future means envisioning an overall reversal of temporal measure and a unique discourse on memory and trauma.

10In this context, it is still essential to ask: how can one account for the proliferation of the image of the decayed or decaying city in speculative novels, especially when it relies on a pleasurable aesthetic experience? Indeed, the uncanny juxtaposition of the portrayal of contemporary anxieties, such as the collapse of a social fabric (centralised and iconised by the city) against the aesthetic contemplation of modern ruins questions the source of the witness’ gratification. In her study of post-apocalyptical novels in the 21st century, Heather J. Hicks evokes a sort of nihilistic joy at the idea of the downfall of our society, calling it a ‘gleeful relief at the collapse of modernity’ (4). In her seminal essay on horror and science-fiction genres, Sontag identifies the science-fiction or horror film audience’s experience as a somewhat cathartic one: ‘in the films it is by means of images and sounds, not words that have to be translated by the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity’ (44). The spectacle of one’s own death, or their civilisation, is indeed mediated through words in the stories under study. Of course, there is nuance to bring to this somewhat pessimistic appraisal of the human condition. Such novels set ‘after the end’ denote the idea of humanity dwarfed by a tragic sense of inescapability, as one is confronted to the immanent presence of the past, or the imminence of what will soon come to pass. This is epitomised by the image of the former centre of civilisation, the city, in a state of ruins. The inclusion of the images of future ruins could be said to be both a symptom and a cure for this sense of entrapment, which Jameson describes in his essay ‘Future City’:

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. I think this writing is a way of doing that or at least of trying to. Its science-fictionality derives from the secret method of this genre: which in the absence of a future focuses on a single baleful tendency, one that it expands and expands until the tendency itself becomes apocalyptic and explodes the world in which we are trapped into innumerable shards and atoms. (n.p.)

11Is the spectacle of ‘contemporary ruins’ eschewing or implementing a deep introspection into the inevitable, i.e.: the end of the world, or rather, the end of our world? This dichotomy premised on the unimaginable and unutterable idea of a total end can be further investigated using three simple questions: why has the city come to be in ruins? why does the reader experience gratification at its spectacle and, consequently and most importantly, how does the spectacle of the ruins make the reader relate to the way they inhabit their own city, both temporally and spatially?

The Origins of the Ruins

12The imagery of contemporary ruins now relies on recognisable tropes. In films, novels and television series, the usual vision of the post-apocalypse is that of blasted ruins of cities, often accompanied by dispersed bands of survivors, scavenging around demolished urban landscapes. The deserted ruins of the former cities suggest a fragmentation of communities, a human consequence to a man-made catastrophe. Indeed, the common feature of cities in all three novels is the idea that each had reached its economical, demographic and technological apex, and/or even morbidly surpassed it. This dynamic of senseless hypertrophy is explored in Baudrillard’s essay ‘The Anorexic Ruins’, published in the collection Looking Back on the End of the World:

We are no longer in state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence, meaning that which incessantly develops without being measurable against its own objectives. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself. (32)

13Baudrillard equates the postmodern world with an organic body riddled with cancer, victim of rampant dysfunction. The satiation and inertia (Baudrillard 31) of the systems have cultivated the desolated state of our world, which already lives in the aftermath of the end. Carter’s depiction of New York presents a similar image of the city as an organic and decaying body, characterised by its insatiability: ‘The first thing I saw when I came out of the Air Terminal was, in a shop window, an obese plaster gnome squatly perched on a plaster toadstool as it gnawed a giant plaster pie. Welcome to the country where Mouth is king, the land of comestibles!’ (1977, 7) This gaping mouth welcomes and swallows the character into New York’s chaos, where Man is no longer in control. The omnipresence of rats defines the character’s experience of the city: no longer parasites, the animals are on the same level as humans on the food chain. The process of them taking over the ruins of mankind has already started:

The next thing I saw were rats, black as buboes, gnawing at a heap of garbage. And the third thing was a black man running down in the middle of the road as fast as he could go, screaming and clutching his throat; an unstoppable cravat, red in colour and sticky, mortal, flowed out from beneath his fingers. A burst of gunfire; he falls on his face. The rats abandon their feast and scamper towards him, squeaking. (1977, 7)

14In this Boschian hellscape, the inhabitants of the city are both devoured and devouring; they become synonymous with its degeneration. The mouth appears as a leitmotif that spans the entire description of the city and its inhabitants: the instrument of gluttony, lust and greed. Rats become exemplary of the dehumanisation of the city, as they are seen feasting on the relics of human society, and sometimes human remains. In Jefferies’s After London, the narrative subtly addresses the hypertrophic implosion of the city as a consequence of mankind’s hubris. Indeed, although the circumstances that brought about the disaster are never made clear, the narrator infers that as the catastrophe was impending, the richer portion of the population took flight and disappeared never to be seen again. This reminiscence of the fate of the merchants of Babylon in the Book of Revelations indicates Jefferies’s inclusion of a subtle social criticism, in an era where the fast-paced industrialisation transformed and, according to some, disgraced the urban and rural landscape of Great-Britain.

15However, even in such an early example of speculative fiction, one must not forget the essential characteristic of the three representations of the disaster: the struggle of man against the lethal forces of Nature. Indeed, the image of the city shrouded in toxic air is a notable feature of each text’s urban landscape. After London, often quoted in ecocritical essays as one of the first texts that could belong to the subgenre of ‘climate fiction’ or ‘cli-fi’, can be considered a possible source for Ballard and in some ways, Carter’s novel. Speculating on the circumstances of the destruction of the city, the narrator devises a theory combining the effects of the compressed gases in industrial London met by the ascending tide, as sea levels rose to an extreme. Pollution is thus seen as a combination of Nature’s might and mankind’s transgression.

16In The Passion of New Eve, the noxious air is similarly represented as a what future studies scholar Walter W. Wagar called the ‘rebellion of Nature’. According to the H.G. Wells specialist, the literary apocalypse manifests itself through a cosmic upheaval: ‘the largest public disaster available to the literary imagination, or any other, is cataclysm in the heavens. When the sun no longer shines or the sky falls, we are well and truly lost.’ (Wagar 1983, 147) If Carter’s depiction of New York does draw on the idea of rebellious, cataclysmic heavens, the terminology used in its description decidedly associates the traditional apocalyptical idea of fire and brimstone with a sort of post-industrial, alchemical landscape:

The skies were of strange, bright, artificial colours—acid yellow, a certain bitter orange that looked as if it would taste of metal, a dreadful, sharp, pale, mineral green—lancinating shades that made the eye wince. From these unnatural skies fells rains of gelatinous matter, reeking of decay. One day, there was a rain of, I think, sulphur, that overcame in rottenness all the other stenches of the street. (1977, 8; emphasis mine)

17Engulfed by the image and smell of the rotting body of the city, the protagonist already falls victim to the toxicity of its environment. Its borders imperceptible, the long, slow death brought about by the poisonous air makes it rather more threatening. This insidious form of morbidity makes the city remarkably uninhabitable except for what is already inanimate. This sense of contamination of the living by the lifeless is strongly indebted to the Gothic aesthetic. As they roam the ruins of the future, the survivors of the end paradoxically conjure a spectral presence, both of the future and of the past. In The Drowned World, the few scientists left to observe the sunken London wander in a part of the city that was drained by a strange team of pirates. This uncanny experience is conspicuously framed by the narrator as a gothic experience: ‘for several hours they wandered like forlorn elegant ghosts through the narrow streets’ (Ballard, 1962, 125–126). Similarly, After London’s main character, Felix, reaches solid ground somewhere above the central Lake which contains the remnants of the greater London:

The earth on which he walked, the black earth, leaving phosphoric footmarks behind him, was composed of the mouldered bodies of millions of men who had passed away in the centuries during which the city existed (chap. 23).

18Metamorphosed into a boundless cemetery, the remnants of London and Londoners create a supernatural atmosphere, dwarfing the solitary wanderer and giving him the illusion of being the sole man on earth, witnessing the traumatic relics of the end of the world by an unnatural turn of events. The mention of phosphor and later of salt-like walls is an unmistakable reference to the story of Lot and his wife in the Genesis (Gen, 19:24–6). London turns into the modern equivalent of Sodom, punished for its hubris and its sin, and the gaseous emanations of its corpse are a clear image of the Bible’s ‘brimstone and fire’.

Contemplating the Ruins: Between Aesthetics and Traces of Traumatic Memory

20One central theme conjured by Jefferies’, Ballard’s and Carter’s texts is the contemporary readers’ relationship to their own historicity, and the way they inhabit the city in the span of their own lives. Coming back to his essay ‘Future City’, Jameson envisions science-fiction as a way to conceptualise a way out of the inert mall-city of late capitalism:

It is the old world that deserves the bile and the satire, this new one is merely its own self-effacement, and its slippage into what Dick called kipple or gubble, what LeGuin once described as the buildings ‘melting. They were getting soggy and shaky, like jello left out in the sun. The corners had already run down the sides, leaving great creamy smears.’ 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. (n.p.)

21Jameson’s text insists on the sense of entrapment of this late stage of history, which relates to the awe provoked by the reading of the post-apocalyptic text. This experience could be made sense of both as the recognition of the reader’s own sense of impending catastrophe and the idea that the event has already symbolically come to pass. Surviving episodic ‘ends’, the world, according to Baudrillard, already lives in the after. The bomb has already exploded (35), we already live beyond the limits. The ruin of the future, in its essence, produces a paradoxical memory discourse. A vision of the inevitable, the speculative fiction offers its reader a feeling between uncanny unease and aesthetic pleasure. This uncomfortable position can be justified by the duplication of the suspension of disbelief induced by the very nature of speculative fiction and its temporal quandaries. Saint-Gelais explains the tensions inherent in this peculiar mode of narration:

The writer and the reader know very well that the story being told belong to their future whilst the narration does treat it as already belonging to the past. . . . The discursive ‘normalization’ of speculation allows—and demands—this temporal double-dealing. One of the most notable consequences of this game is the way it implicitly sketches another anticipated world, one that is even farther than the world of fiction: the posterior world from which point of view the first future is described. (par. 18; translation mine)

22Disconcertingly, it is despite (or thanks to?) this fragile narrative structure that a certain nostalgic longing for ruins fosters the contemplative experience of the reader and characters. Andreas Huyssen, author of the essay Nostalgia for Ruins, justifies the contemporary fascination for ruins as follows:

over the past decade and a half, a strange obsession with ruins has developed [. . .] as part of a discourse about memory and trauma, genocide and war. This contemporary obsession with ruins hides a nostalgia for an earlier age that had not yet lost its power to imagine other futures (8; emphasis mine).

24Kamper and Wulf’s introduction to their collective essay Looking Back at the End of the World formulates the imagination of the end of the world in these terms: ‘the aestheticizing of horrific visions in an attempt to offset the inescapable fate resulting from global catastrophe’ (xii). Indeed, if Jefferies’s text in particular is sometimes akin to a vision of hell, the description of the ‘Lake’ spans entire chapters of the novel and the lyrical tone used to highlight the terrible fate of the ancient Londoners is supported by the peculiar aesthetic of the dead, submerged London: ‘These skeletons were the miserable relics of men who had ventured, in search of ancient treasures, into the deadly marshes over the site of the mightiest city of former days. The deserted and utterly extinct city of London was under his feet.’ (Jefferies, chapter VII) This passage revisits the literary category of the sublime, whereby the human perspective is dwarfed by the scale and might of Nature. Here, although Felix stands above the ultimate demonstration of Nature’s might, the image is none the weaker. First published the same year as Jefferies’s narrative, Georg Simmel’s determinant essay on ruins provides us with a satisfying theory for the aesthetic gratification felt before the images of dilapidated cities. Already in 1911, the idea (now a paradigm in ecocritical thinking) of Nature reclaiming its rights is anchored in Simmel’s analysis to justify the appreciation for ruins. Moreover, according to the philosopher, ruins materialise a point in time when a balance between man and Nature is struck—more precisely, when the work of man appears as the product of Nature. On a more abstract level, they also represent the harmony between two tendencies seen in history: soaring and sinking (Simmel 381).

25In The Drowned World, the main character Kerans goes diving in the lagoon that was London. This long descriptive passage likens the protagonist’s gaze with that of the 19th-century tourist visiting ancient ruins: the reverence and sublime experienced in front of the ruins is strikingly familiar. However, as a rogue company of men manage to drain the lagoon and expose the ruin, the balance that Simmel talks about is thrown off:

She [Beatrice, one of the scientists] gazed out at the emerging city, an expression of revulsion on her tense face . . . veils of scum draped from the criss-crossing telegraph wires and tilting neon signs, and a thin coating of silt cloaked the faces of the buildings, turning the once limpid beauty of the underwater city into a drained and festering sewer (1962, 121).

26The very literal re-emergence of the past delves into the horrific spectacle of the silted and dilapidated city, cluttered by barricadesc all signs of the last effort of its inhabitants to protect themselves against their inevitable drowning. This irruption of remains of the city shocks the character back into the kairotic moment of trauma, which is made clear when Beatrice exclaims: ‘it’s all so hideous. I can’t believe anyone ever lived here. It’s like some imaginary city of Hell. Robert, I need the lagoon’ (Ballard 1962, 123). When Nature no longer shields the cruel stigmas of the catastrophe to the eyes of the contemporary onlooker, the past is forcefully brought into the present, contradicting Simmel’s analysis of the functioning ruin: ‘the past with its destinies and transformations has been gathered into this instant of an aesthetically perceptible present.’ (200) In this pivotal episode of the novel, Ballard questions this supposed essence of ruins as a vision of the sublime by creating a claustrophobic atmosphere where a small community’s attraction to ‘London’ matures into a morbid obsession, and a total rejection of an alternative past or future. Indeed, the draining of the submerged city becomes as much as an absurdity as a drowned London would be to the reader:

For a moment Kerans fought to free his mind, grappling with this total inversion of his normal world, unable to accept the total inversion of his normal world, unable to accept the logic of the rebirth before him. First, he wondered whether there had been a total climactic reversal that was shrinking the formerly expanding seas, draining the submerged cities. (Ballard 1962, 121)

27As he dives in the lagoon, Kerans experiences a suicidal urge to end his life in the midst of the ruins—losing his sense of self, this leads the character to go on a heroic mission to re-submerge the ruins towards the end of the novel. The ruins become a psychological landscape for the survivor, putting into practice Ballard’s belief that speculative and science-fiction should not extrapolate stories in the outer world but focus on the human psyche. In this topsy-turvy world, apocalypse, catastrophe and chaos become the rule, and the dead ruin the living present. Comparing it to Baudelaire’s héautontimorounemos, the executioner and sacrificial lamb, Mellier examines the ambivalent emotions elicited by the contemplation of future ruins:

We can see how the fiction of the after is not shaped after the model of pharmakon nor the one of the oracle, but follows a strictly neo-gothic logic of contradictory emotion and dreadful pleasures . . . More specifically, it is therefore a type of fiction which duplicate itself and both analyses the terrifying causes of the catastrophe and indulges in the spectacular effects of its consequences. (255–256; translation mine)

28The extreme reactions to the spectacle of future ruins encompasses two central elements of post-apocalyptic fiction: (1) an ambivalent aesthetic experience of a (2) stratified, symbolical landscape which urges the reader into a hermeneutical work regarding their own history.

Conclusion

‘Ten years ago, I’d have said that I, myself, wanted to write stories that could be read by guttering candlelight in the ruins of our cities and still give pleasure, still have meaning. Perhaps I still think that’ (Carter 77)

29The aesthetic and emotional experience felt by readers and characters alike before the spectacle of dead cities is perhaps akin to nostalgia, as Huyssens claims. More importantly, this peculiar attraction is induced by the presence/absence of the ruin as a symptom of both past and future, as it is premised on the impossibility of reclaiming what was lost. This could easily be summed up by what Ballard describes as his theory of science-fiction, his ‘inner space’: ‘time-sculptures of terrifying ambiguity’ (2008, 200). In Jefferies’s, Ballard’s and Carter’s works of fiction, the reader enjoys the feeling that there is yet life after the end. Following this logic, the presence of the ruins of the future act as an icon of the traumatic memory that recalls its witnesses to the traces of the disruption of linear time and civilisation, as nostalgic longing tied to memories of something that has yet to happen.

31On a more abstract and metahistorical level, what increasingly attracts readers, audiences or even urbex enthusiasts is worth exploring. Increasing representations of future ruins in soft science-fiction and more specifically apocalyptic fiction mirrors an effort to delineate a space at the crossroads between cosmic time and human time, one that strives to make sense of the infinite futures, including ones where humanity does not belong. The temporal paradox and sense of vertigo epitomised by the contemplation of future ruins is symptomatic of a larger evolution of speculative fiction, which refuses to eschew the simplification of history, memory and futurity. To quote Flusser once more,

one is tempted to say that linear texts have played only an ephemeral role in the life of human beings, that “history” was only a diversion, and that we are now in the process of turning back to two-dimensionality, into the imaginary, magical, and mythical. (2011, 6)

32To escape the inertia of dead ruins, speculative fiction introduces the reader to a uchronic dimension whereby the present is the past, therefore envisioning alternative (infinite) futures. The ruin as semiotic object acts as a catalyst, on which all the alternative and possible past and futures fold onto each other.