Alexa Weik von Mossner
The dystopian mood, defined by Peter Fitting as “the sense of a threatened near future” (140), has been a dominant feature of much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, and, in recent years, it has found particularly powerful expression in the young adult novel. Perhaps most remarkable is the flood of publications that turn toward environmental or ecological concerns and their consequences for human existence. Eco-dystopias such as Jacob Sackin’s Islands (2008) and Iglu (2011), Suzanne Weyn’s Empty (2009), Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2010), or Cameron Stracher’s The Water Wars (2011) speak to the anxieties and desires of a generation that grows up with the vague understanding that by the time they are thirty, the natural world around them will have changed dramatically, and not for the better. That the nightmarish scenarios outlined in these novels resonate with contemporary teenage audiences is evidenced by their phenomenal success in the marketplace. As Karen Springen points out in her review of recent young adult publications for Publishers Weekly, “end-of-the-world novels are selling briskly” (Springen). And no end of the flood is in sight.
Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Last Survivors series has been especially successful with North American teenagers. In Life as We Knew It (2006), The Dead and the Gone (2008), and This World We Live In (2010), Pfeffer imagines the possible social, political, and personal costs of a sudden, radical environmental change in the very near future. Although she chooses a non-anthropogenic cause for this global disaster—an asteroid hits the moon and knocks it closer in orbit to the earth, thus changing its gravitational pull—Pfeffer offers an intriguing account of its possible local effects in the United States. Whether they live in the rural setting of Howell, Pennsylvania, or in the crowded urban space of New York City, her teenage protagonists not only quickly develop a whole new set of priorities as a result of radically changed ecological conditions, they also learn that their bodies, their thinking, and their very being are inextricably linked to the environment in which they live. When that environment changes radically, so must they and other humans around them. Emphasizing the material aspects of the global ecological crisis she depicts as well as its multifaceted and stratified social outcomes, Pfeffer’s novels ask readers to redefine their understanding of what Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman have called “the relationships among the natural, the human, and the nonhuman” (7) and remind them that agency is not exclusively or even primarily human.
This, I will argue in the first part of this chapter, is a commendable achievement, although it is not without occasional missteps. What I find more problematic about the series, which made the New York Times bestseller list for Young Adult Literature in 2008, is the nature of the social and personal changes Pfeffer depicts, many of which are meant to soften the blow of the apocalyptic narrative for her young readers and give them a glimmer of hope. As I will show in the second part of the chapter, the Last Survivors series draws on the rich historical mythology of the American frontier in its combination of an environmentalist message about human entanglement in and critical dependence on the natural world with a nostalgic plea for a simpler and more family-oriented life. The material pressures arising from future ecological disasters, Pfeffer’s dystopian novels suggest, may beget new kinds of community and new kinds of human-nature relationships that look very much like those of the old American pioneers, with the main difference being that people will eat a lot more canned food.
The Last Survivors series consists of two companion novels and a third book, which functions as a sequel to both of these. While the first novel, Life as We Knew It, is set in a rural Pennsylvania town and focuses on sixteen-year-old Miranda Evans and her family, the plot of the companion book, The Dead and the Gone, takes place at the same time but in a different location: New York City, where seventeen-year-old Alex Morales and his younger sisters have to fight for survival after enormous tidal waves have taken the lives of both of their parents. This World We Live In, finally, brings the two protagonists of the earlier novels together in Pennsylvania and involves them in a complicated love relationship.
Life as We Knew It is told through Miranda’s journal entries, which give us a glimpse into her busy life and complicated family relations. Her parents are divorced, her father has remarried a much younger woman, and, in addition to her two brothers, she will soon have a half-sibling from that union. Miranda tries her best to deal with the new situation and with her everyday troubles at home and in school. What bothers her most is that her father is now living in upstate New York, and that her older brother Matt is also far away, having gone to Cornell for his undergraduate studies. The temporal setting of the narrative is undefined. Miranda’s journal gives specific weekdays and dates, but she never mentions a year. However, everything in her account—from her suburban environment to consumer goods and technical gadgets she describes—will likely look quite familiar to the average American teenager. The only thing that separates the imaginative world of the novel from a contemporary reader’s immediate present—apart from biographical differences—is the fact that we learn early on that an asteroid is on a collision course with the moon, and that scientists are debating the possible consequences of the event.
Tom Moylan has famously argued that dystopian texts have the capability “not only to delight but also to teach” because “discovering and thinking through the logic and consequences of an imagined world” may lead to “an enlightening triangulation between an individual reader’s limited perspective, the estranged re-vision of the alternative world on the pages of a given text, and the actually existing society” (xvi–xvii). Pfeffer no doubt wants to provoke just such an enlightening triangulation, but she deliberately starts out with an imagined world that looks deceptively familiar, thus drawing her readers into a narrative about the life of a teenager not unlike themselves. It is only when the asteroid hits the moon that the narrative starts to convey a sense of impending disaster. Observing the spectacle with her mother from the road in front of their house, Miranda is “shocked when the asteroid actually made contact with the moon. With our moon. At that second, I think we all realized it was Our Moon and if it was attacked, then we were attacked” (Life 18–19). This is the first time Miranda senses that there is an actual relationship between herself and the moon, and that this unusual cosmic event may have a direct impact on her life. As a result of the collision, she observes, the moon looks “tilted and wrong” and it is “larger, way larger” than it used to be (19). This moment of cognitive estrangement and sudden insight marks the end of the world as Miranda—and the reader—knew it and the beginning of a new and scary era in which the natural environment of the earth changes dramatically, forcing humans around the world to change with it or die.
While the complex relationship between human bodies and minds and their surrounding natural environment is a prominent theme in much dystopian fiction (regardless of whether it is written for young adult or adult audiences), scholarly inquiry has often neglected the material aspects of this exchange. In Bodily Natures (2010), Stacy Alaimo rightly bemoans the fact that in our readings of cultural texts, as well as in human readings of nature more generally, “Matter, the vast stuff of the world and of ourselves” has too often been “flattened into a ‘blank slate’ for human inscription. The environment has been drained of its blood … in order that it become a mere empty space” in which human development takes place (1–2). This is a problem because, as Nicole Boivin argues with reference to the work of environmental psychologist James Gibson, “The environment, or material world, forms the final component of what amounts to a linguistically separated but deeply interpenetrated triad composed of mind, matter, and body” (74). Humans, as Alaimo puts it, “are the very stuff of the material, emergent world” (20) and it is a mistake to think of them as purely socially, culturally, or linguistically constructed subjects. As creators of fictional humans and fictional worlds, writers have always had to “grapple with ways to render murky material forces palpable or recognizably ‘real’” (Alaimo 9), and literary scholars would thus do well to pay attention to the representation of such material forces in literary texts.
In the case of speculative or science fiction texts, such attention is particularly vital. Alternative natural environments as well as all kinds of material objects play a central role in what Moylan describes as “world-building”: the “ability to generate cognitively substantial yet estranged alternative worlds” (5). In Moylan’s view, much of science fiction writing requires the reader to participate in this complex world-building process, because it is necessary to learn “the complexity of the alternative world in order to understand the characters’ actions” (6). Readers who are unwilling to do such work will have trouble fully understanding or appreciating the narrative because they have not grasped the fictive world and the influence it exerts on individual characters and their actions. Quite frequently, the alien world to be grasped also includes an estranged natural environment. As eco-critic Patrick D. Murphy has observed, science fiction can be “nature-oriented literature, in the sense of its being an aesthetic text that, on the one hand, directs reader attention toward the natural world and human interaction with other aspects of nature within that world, and, on the other hand, makes specific environmental issues part of [its] plots and themes” (263). Among the examples Murphy offers are full-blooded science fiction novels such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992–96), which confront readers with complex alien environments whose unfamiliar dynamics they must learn and appreciate in order to understand the narrative. Near-future dystopias set on planet Earth require less effort in this regard, because their worlds tend to be more familiar and are thus more easily grasped. Nevertheless, such novels often introduce natural environments that are quite different from the world in which contemporary readers live and whose difference is central for plot and character development.
The crucial difference Pfeffer introduces into the imaginative world of the Last Survivors series is the changed gravitational pull of the moon, which almost immediately transforms the material living conditions of her protagonists. Literally overnight, the planet on which they live becomes a different one. Changing tides and weather patterns not only kill millions of people the world over, they also make life on the former coastlines impossible. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions exacerbate the situation, and once the volcanic ash reaches the atmosphere, it begins to slowly block out the sun. Only a few weeks have gone by in Miranda’s journal, but the planet on which she lives has now become so strange that it would deserve that somewhat odd name—“eaarth”—that environmentalist Bill McKibben has recently suggested for our actually existing planet because it, too, is on its way to becoming unfamiliar as a result of—in this case anthropogenic—ecological change (1). Pfeffer’s novels, however, do not engage with any of the scientific data that inform McKibben’s gloomy predictions, and Pfeffer has acknowledged that the natural disasters happening in her fictional world are only vaguely related to scientific principles. Scientific accuracy, she explains, is not really her point.1 Instead, she is interested in the ways in which humanity would deal with radically new and much less friendly planetary conditions, and in the immediate effects such an ecological change might have on the life of an average American teenager and her family.
The effects are profound. There is an immediate breakdown of nearly all communication systems, including cellphones, land lines, the Internet, and satellite TV. The electricity grid becomes increasingly unreliable and the supply lines for food, gas, and many other essential goods begin to break down. Two days after the collision, Miranda’s mother takes her elderly neighbour and her children to the local supermarket, which now has turned into a bizarre consumer battlefield with “people racing for carts, people screaming, and two guys punching each other out” (Life 35). The Evans family grab as many canned goods from the half-empty shelves as their carts will hold, throw their hundred dollar bills at one of the “poor terrified cashiers” (36), and drive away with a profound sense that they have been “stocking up for the end of the world” (39). Over the next few weeks, however, they will realize that what they have is not nearly enough. Large parts of the United States are now a disaster zone, and even as the inhabitants of Howell, Pennsylvania, are relatively lucky in being only indirectly affected by the destruction, they will have to prepare for the worst.
The American government, with its police, military, and disaster relief forces, is strangely absent from Pfeffer’s first book. Not only is there a complete breakdown in infrastructure, but all governance seems to have been wiped out by the disaster. While the American president—Miranda’s mother calls him “the idiot”—does broadcast a brief message from his ranch in Texas, that message only admonishes people to “place [their] faith in God” (Life 25). It will take federal relief efforts almost a year before they reach the people in Howell. Until then, Miranda and her family are forced to fend for themselves and to try to somehow survive the bitter-cold winter with “no power and no food coming in and no gas for the car and no oil for the furnace” (123). Her brothers cut wood to keep a small wood stove going, and the two women do their best to control the food reserves. A visit from Miranda’s father, who has decided to take his pregnant wife farther west where things are supposed to be better, and the death of the elderly neighbour both result in additional food provisions, but by December Miranda and her mother are down to one small meal per day, and the two brothers are eating only slightly more. Things are getting tough, very tough. People less well prepared than the Evans family are dying of starvation, and many of those who still have food are taken by the flu. Miranda’s journal is now focused narrowly on a very small selection of topics: how to get food and water, how not to consume too much of either of them, how to stay warm, how to cure her family members of disease, and how to survive until spring. The natural environment and the biological needs of the human body suddenly gain a significance they never had before in the young girl’s life. Without the elaborate infrastructure of the American consumer society, her body and mind are much more vulnerable to the material forces of nature.
Nature, as environmental historian Linda Nash points out, does not have agency in the sense of intentionality or choice. However, Nash suggests, the problem might actually lie with our definition of (human) agency: “Perhaps our narratives should emphasize that … so-called human agency cannot be separated from the environments in which that agency emerges” (69). In their introduction to Material Agency (2010), Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris explain that, in fact, “when agency is linked strictly to consciousness and intentionality, we have very little scope for extending its reach beyond the human” (ix). This, however, we must do if we want to account for the manifold ways in which non-human living things such as trees and seemingly “dead” things such as stones and buildings have significant effects on their environments, including humans. Pfeffer’s Life as We Knew It chronicles some of these effects. In her desperation, Miranda starts to “hate the moon” as well as “tides and earthquakes and volcanoes.” She hates “a world where things that have absolutely nothing to do with me can destroy my life and the lives of people I love” (132). But of course these “things” do have something to do with her and always did, only she never before realized just how much. Now that the sun is hidden from the ash cloud, she recognizes how much she—and every living thing around her—needs sunlight, and without any oil or running fresh water in the house she develops a totally different relationship to the snow-covered woods.
In such moments, the reader is invited to share Miranda’s insights, which is why one reviewer has suggested that this is a book that “everyone should read to help you realize how we take the earth for granted and how one seemingly harmless incident can change everything” (Two Readers). Such realization, if it happens, is the result of the “enlightening triangulation between an individual reader’s limited perspective, the estranged re-vision of the alternative world on the pages of a given text, and the actually existing society” that Moylan sees at the heart of the dystopian endeavour (xvii). Many reviewers and readers have read Life as We Knew It as a cautionary tale warning us to respect and take care of the planet and its life-sustaining systems. The fact that Pfeffer has chosen a non-anthropogenic cause for her future disaster seems to make little difference in this regard. Pfeffer herself has said that until reviewers and readers began to tell her so, she did not even realize that she had written an ecological dystopia.2 What interested her most when writing the book, she has explained, was “the domestic response to disaster” (Cynsations), and it is in this domestic realm that she creates spaces of hope in the middle of an ongoing and unstoppable global catastrophe.
Pfeffer’s bleak look into a dystopian future would be difficult to bear for a teenage readership if it were not for the moments in which she offers glimmers of utopian hope. The German philosopher Ernst Bloch saw the “principle of hope” at the heart of the utopian endeavour, which he located not only in literary texts but also in political practice and common daydreaming. And while Ruth Levitas has argued in The Concept of Utopia (2010) that “the essential element in utopia is not hope, but desire … for a better way of being” (221), scholars and writers tend to agree that in the case of the young adult dystopian text, one cannot in fact write such texts without at least a glimmer of hope. Lois Lowry, author of the best-selling dystopia The Giver (1993), firmly believes that her young readers “need to see some hope for [a better] world” and “can’t imagine writing a book that doesn’t have a hopeful ending” (“Interview” 199). Monica Hughes, author of the Isis trilogy (1980–83), agrees that even the most dystopian young adult text must retain hope in order to be socially responsible. “Dystopian worlds are exciting,” she writes, “but the end result must never be nihilism and despair” (156). Given this general agreement that it would be unethical to write a young adult dystopia without utopian moments of hope, it is unsurprising that the first book of the Last Survivor series was marketed as “the heart-pounding story of Miranda’s struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world.”3 All three novels are in fact quite typical of young adult dystopian literature in their approach to survival-related hope, and given that Pfeffer is a veteran author who has published more than seventy books in the field, this is perhaps to be expected. What is remarkable, though, is that in Life as We Knew It, as well as in the two following books in the series, this hope for a better future rests predominantly, if not exclusively, on the survivor qualities of the American family.
As a companion novel to Life as We Knew It, The Dead and the Gone covers the same time span, opening on the evening on which the asteroid hits the moon. The novel makes no reference to the first book of the series and focuses instead on seventeen-year old Alex Morales and his struggle to take care of his two sisters after their parents disappear when enormous tidal waves submerge parts of New York and their native Puerto Rico. The intelligent and highly ambitious son of a nurse and a caretaker not only has to deal with the fact that his parents are missing (they are never officially declared dead) and that his high-flying dreams for the future are destroyed; at the age of seventeen he is also the new head of the Morales household, with almost no money to spend and very little idea what to do. Unlike Miranda, who was raised by an atheist mother and has little understanding of the more fundamentalist form of Christianity she observes in her friend Megan, Alex and his sisters are devout members of the Roman Catholic Church. As such, they are called upon to understand the global ecological disaster as an act of God. While Alex feels increasingly challenged in his faith as human life becomes almost impossible in the slowly decaying New York, his sisters refuse to give up hope that some good will come out of the situation and that their parents will eventually return. However, the narrative does not reward such unwavering belief; at the end of the novel both hopes are shattered.
In his review of the book for the New York Times, John Green argues that what makes The Dead and the Gone “so riveting is its steadfast resistance to traditional ideas of hope in children’s books” (Green). If this were true, Pfeffer would indeed have chosen an unusual way out of what Kay Sambell has called the “significant creative dilemma” faced by all writers of dystopian novels for young adult audiences. “Whereas the ‘adult’ dystopia’s didactic impact relies on the absolute, unswerving nature of its dire warning,” writes Sambell, “the expression of moral meaning in the children’s dystopia is often characterized by degrees of hesitation, oscillation, and ambiguity” (164). According to Sambell, “In the adult dystopian vision, appealing heroes are unequivocally shown to fail” and “any hope they represent is extinguished in the dystopia’s denouement” (164). The authors of young adult dystopias, by contrast, tend to hesitate “to depict the extinction of such hope in the narrative resolution of their stories,” a strategy that, in Sambell’s view, compromises the imaginative and ideological coherence of their texts (164). The question is, however, whether such complete extinction of hope is really necessary for a successful dystopia. Offering a pessimistic outlook on future developments does not necessarily mean excluding all possibilities for improvement and amelioration. The Dead and the Gone is a dark and scary novel, and its appealing hero is shown to fail frequently and tragically as he roams the streets of New York, first for food and later in search of a passage to one of the fabled “safe towns” for himself and his ailing sisters.4 Like Miranda, Alex is often powerless against the forces of nature and the direct and indirect effects they have on the desperate humans around him. He cannot even prevent his devout sister Briana from dying a horrible and senseless death in a malfunctioning elevator. Kneeling over her emaciated body, he almost finds comfort in the fact that “The moon had killed her, not man” (Dead 297).
Despite these tragic moments, however, The Dead and the Gone is not entirely without hope. It is what keeps Alex going, and sometimes a most serendipitous coincidence rewards him for his persistence. As in the first book of the series, when federal food rations reach the Evans family just at the right time, not all of these moments seem realistic or probable, but Pfeffer does succeed in portraying a world in which survival depends as much on chance as on anything else. As Green puts it, she “subverts all our expectations of how redemption works in teenage fiction, as Alex learns to live, and have faith, in a world where radical unfairness is the norm” (Green). The source of this faith, however, is not so much his religious beliefs as it is his unwavering commitment to his family.
The mutual responsibilities and expectations between both biological and chosen kin figure prominently in all three of Pfeffer’s books. Relying on the members of one’s immediate—if sometimes highly patchworked—family is presented as the only chance for survival in an increasingly hostile material environment. As food, water, and fuel are becoming everybody’s central concern, the community of those for whom one feels responsible is getting smaller and smaller. In Life as We Knew It Miranda is admonished by her mother again and again that “This isn’t the time for friendships” and that “We have to watch out only for ourselves” (101). The Dead and the Gone continues this theme of self-reliance and the survival of the family, despite its sustained engagement with Christian values and ethics. When Alex sends one of his sisters to a convent in upstate New York to work with the nuns there, this has very little to do with faith or the belief that she can do something meaningful for the community. It is solely meant to secure her survival, as well as his own and his other sister’s, since they are left with more food. This World We Live In, finally, in which the protagonists of the first two books meet, extends the notion of the family beyond biological kinship, but nevertheless insists that there are people one needs to care for and people who are not one’s responsibility, regardless of whether they are dying or not. “Now being a good neighbor means minding your own business” (Life 280), declares Miranda, and when things get tough, the only thing that counts is to save your family.
Surprisingly, Pfeffer’s novels do not really suggest that this loss of larger civic solidarity and interpersonal compassion is regrettable or problematic. On the contrary, readers are led to appreciate the virtues of a self-reliant and rugged existence in a newly emerging American wilderness. This attitude is already taking shape at the end of the first book, when Miranda has learned to appreciate the basic pleasures of being alive and having food, and wonders how people, back in the old, affluent times, never seemed to realize “how precious life is” (Life 287). Now that she is forced to live in a state of utmost deprivation and uncertainty, she is “grateful for the good things that have happened to me this year. I never knew I could love as deeply as I do. I never knew I could be so willing to sacrifice things for other people. I never knew how wonderful a taste of pineapple juice could be, or the warmth of a woodstove … or the feel of clean clothes against freshly scrubbed skin” (Life 287). Having less and being forced to fight for one’s survival, it is suggested, can lead to a more fulfilled and purposeful life.
For Alex in The Dead and the Gone, who lives in the decrepit urban environment of New York, things are more complicated, but he, too, realizes that in these decaying remnants of American civilization there will be no future for him and his sisters. Like the American pioneers centuries before, he decides that he must go west, because he has heard of places where people have food and water and everything they need. But in This World We Live In, which is set a year after the events of the first two books, we learn that he and Julie never made it to one of these utopian places, and that what Frederick Jackson Turner termed the frontier experience has become a lot more complicated, not least geographically. Wandering through the wilderness, Alex and Julie happen to meet Miranda’s father and his wife and baby son, who are on their way back to Pennsylvania because they have been told that “there was no point” in going farther west: “Colorado, Nevada, were devastated. What survivors there were had been moved east or south” (World 92). The frontier of the Last Survivors series is no longer connected to westward expansion, then, but once again it is the place where “the wilderness masters the colonist” because “the environment is at first too strong for the man” (Turner 15).
Much of the plot of the third novel of the series centres on the question of who does and who doesn’t count as family once Miranda’s father and his new acquaintances have arrived at the house in Howell.5 The other big question, however, is whether they should stay put and wait for the next winter, or whether it is better to move on in search of a better life elsewhere. The narrative closes with Miranda, Alex, and her father’s family leaving together, “crossing Pennsylvania, making our way south to Tennessee. It will take months, but we’re strong, we’re all strong, and we have reason to live” (World 238). As a result of the dystopian conditions they live in, Miranda’s new, extended family has grown and changed for the better, and even as they have lost people they love, the narrative closes with a somewhat ambiguous happy ending. As William Katerberg points out in Future West (2008), “frontier myths incline people to imagine the future as a return to primitive conditions” (5), and in its own way, the Last Survivors series participates in those myths and in an American tradition of utopian and dystopian writing. Like the science fiction narratives Katerberg examines, Pfeffer’s novels imagine a future in which “society has been swept away by some kind of natural disaster or human-made holocaust. In the primitive conditions that ensue, survivors have been forced to start over and perhaps build a new kind of society” (Katerberg 5). What society Pfeffer’s survivors will build is unclear, but there is reason to believe that it will be more attuned to the new conditions on planet Earth. At least that seems to be the vague hope of the protagonists.
In 2007 the American Library Association named Life as We Knew It one of the Best Books for Young Adults, and the novels in the Last Survivors series are now so frequently read in high school classrooms that they come with their own teaching guides.6 Indeed, they seem to inspire their teenage audience to reflect critically on their lives and their current assets. The letters she receives from readers, says Pfeffer, “pretty uniformly say the positive they get out of the books is to appreciate their lives and the people they love…. What I’m getting from the kids is, ‘I never thought to appreciate all the everyday things I took for granted’” (qtd. in Springen). A quick glance through readers’—mostly enthusiastic—comments posted online similarly suggests that the reading experience primarily makes young adults more satisfied with their current lives rather than awakening desire for a better way of being. While the fact that all of the books are marred by a number of logic and writing problems (and an American obsession with canned food) seems to have angered some young readers, the books are mostly praised for their gripping disaster scenarios and as “a very good read.”7
All this seems to suggest that, despite its celebration of a simpler and less wasteful life, the critical potential of the Last Survivor series is rather limited. Rather than offering the opportunity for an “enlightening triangulation” (Moylan xvii), Pfeffer’s novels seem to promote a greater acceptance and indeed appreciation of the status quo. As Claire Curtis has pointed out, the novels present “injustice as a fact to be accepted and adaptation to injustice as the best case scenario for moving forward” (7) rather than encouraging readers to play an active role in the shaping of a more just and sustainable world. Curtis rightly bemoans the fact that Pfeffer’s novels do not offer young adult readers a space to resist the reality of their imaginative future world and, by extension, the inequalities and unsustainable practices of their own twenty-first-century world. The reason for this lack of critical engagement with contemporary American society might be found in the novels’ relatively claustrophobic concentration on two protagonists and their kin. We learn only very little about how the rest of the world is dealing with this global disaster, and in their insistence on the need to care only for those who are near and dear to us, the novels actually discourage the recognition of the claims and needs of those who are not immediately related to us but with whom we nevertheless share the same planet. Pfeffer’s nostalgic evocation of the American frontier and celebration of family solidarity stand in the way of a more critical engagement with citizenship responsibilities and the limits of solidarity and empathy in the face of ecological disaster.
From an ecocritical point of view, the choice of a non-anthropogenic cause for the disaster also takes away a lot of the books’ critical potential. Eco-dystopias that put anthropogenic disasters at the heart of their stories—such as, for example, Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 (2008) and The Carbon Diaries 2017 (2009), which imagine the mid-term effects of climate change and severe carbon rationing on the life of a London teenager and her friends and family—are in a much better position to formulate critiques of current human behaviour and potential future consequences. As the commercial success of The Carbon Diaries and other critical eco-dystopias demonstrates, there is considerable interest in books that dare to engage with human responsibility for our ecological future.8 By inflicting disaster from the outside rather than making it something that humanity has brought upon itself, Pfeffer forgoes the chance to relate her critique of mindless consumer capitalism to the slowly unfolding real-world ecological disaster that is the background of her young readers’ lives. What nevertheless makes the Last Survivors series an interesting object of study is the books’ intense engagement with something that most contemporary teenagers give very little thought to: the fact that the earth’s biosphere is a fragile and complex interactive system that is dependent on a number of delicately balanced factors. Pfeffer’s achievement lies in having evoked for a twenty-first-century teenage audience how drastically a disturbance of that delicate system would affect the material and social aspects of human life, and how easily it could lead to the end of life as we know it. Unfortunately, she does not really offer them a chance to critically reflect on their own involvement in the bringing about of such a disturbance.
1 Pfeffer has made this argument on her own blog: Susan Beth Pfeffer: Meteors, Moons, and Me. 7 July 2008. Web. 9 Feb. 2012.
2 Interview. Reading with Tequila. 15 Apr. 2010. Web. 22 Sept. 2011.
3 I am taking this quotation from the Harcourt Discussion Guide for the novel, but it is also widely used on websites that promote the novel or offer it for purchase.
4 In the novel, safe towns are secret and highly protected communities that have food, water, fuel and all other amenities that now have become luxuries. They can be reached only by a very small and privileged elite in possession of the necessary transit papers.
5 Pfeffer originally planned to conclude the series with This World We Live In but is now working on a fourth book with the working title “The Shade of the Moon.” For more information, see her blog http://susanbethpfeffer.blogspot.co.at/2011/04/when-shade-of-moon-meets-sleep-of-pill.html.
6 Teaching guides for the three novels are available at http://www.hmhbooks.com/lifeasweknewit/classroomresources.html.
7 This quotation from Ally’s review of Life as We Knew It is only one example chosen from 407 customer reviews of the series currently available.
8 For a critical discussion of Lloyd’s novels see my article “Hope in Dark Times: Climate Change and the World Risk Society in Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 and 2017,” in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, ed. Balaka Basu, Kate Broad and Carrie Hintz (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
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Green, John. “Scary New World.” New York Times Sunday Book Review 7 Nov. 2008. Web. 20 Sept. 2011.
Harcourt Discussion Guide for Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. 16 June 2008. Web. 27 Sept. 2011.
Harcourt Discussion Guide for The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer. 2 June 2010. Web. 27 Sept. 2011.
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