Post-apocalyptic Fiction as a Space for Civic Love

This article analyzes the civic love that emerges from three recent post-apocalyptic novels. Post-apocalyptic fiction captures our collective fears and reworks imaginatively how we might live together. In imagining how we might live together these post-apocalyptic texts go beyond the collective fear that might seem to be central to the genre to instead illustrate and inculcate civic love. This civic love is both evidence of just communities and illustrates the emotion necessary for creating such communities. Marge Piercy's He, She and It (1992), Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents (1998) and Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 (2012) illustrate the persuasive power of novels that highlight living in just communities. The love these characters have for their own communities, illustrated in their personal love relationships, awakens in the reader a sense of possibility for how we might live together.