When the End is Not Now: Relationalities and Temporalities of the Apocalypse in Nuclear, Indigenous, and Climate Fictions

This thesis examines how literary representations of catastrophes shape collective imagination and mediate fear across two interconnected traditions: Cold War nuclear fiction and Indigenous Futurism. Through the close reading of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), a literary genealogy is traced, revealing how different narrative frameworks construct temporal experiences and affective responses to existential threats. Chapter 1 establishes nuclear fiction as an early laboratory for representing slow violence and temporal suspension, analyzing how texts develop sophisticated narrative strategies for articulating the phenomenology of gradual catastrophe, while simultaneously exposing the colonial blind spots inherent to Western apocalyptic imagination. Chapter 2 examines how Indigenous Futurism challenges these frameworks through regenerative temporalities, embodied archives, and structures of relational kinship, repositioning apocalypse as an ongoing colonial condition rather than a future event. Drawing on affect theory, postcolonial ecocriticism, and Indigenous epistemologies, the thesis argues that literary form is not merely a vehicle for environmental content but actively shapes how we imagine futurity during crisis. By foregrounding marginalized voices and alternative perspectives, it demonstrates how the fear embedded in Western apocalyptic narratives operates as a form of paralysis or resignation, rejecting it to imagine collective futures beyond extractive and colonial logics.