Fin-de-siFcle Fictions, 1890s-1990s ― Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire

`A portrait of centuries' ends, of catastrophic denouements and apocalyptic rebirths, Fin-de-Siecle Fictions, 1890s/1990s brings to life the millennial preoccupations characteristic of the emergence and consolidation of global capitalism and technoscientific Empire. The range of texts -- from H. G. Wells to Octavia Butler, future war fiction to Star Trek, lost world fiction to The X-Files, and contexts with which it engages -- is impressive.' --Dr Mark Bould, University of the West of England, UK

H.G. Wells wanted his epitaph to be `God damn you all, I told you so'. But when his descriptions of aerial bombings of New York in War in the Air (1907) seem uncannily similar to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, do we read his futurist visions of global conflict and industrial warfare as just a matter of prediction? Did the late Victorians really `discover the future' or did the 1990s simply recycle the 1890s? Looking backward from a post-millennial perspective, this book identifies startling connections between Nietzsche and chaos theory, Dracula and The X-Files, StarTrek's Borg Queen and H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha, singularity fiction and Henry Adams, among others. Recent apocalyptic scenarios of post-industrial meltdown and global crisis, this book suggests, are rooted in the imperialist upheavals and technological eruptions of that period that brought the crisis of the Victorian and the arrival of the modern, the fin de siecle.

Aris Mousoutzanis is a lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Brighton, UK. He has published on the apocalypse, science fiction and the Gothic in literature, film and television, as well as on globalisation, new media and online communities. He is currently researching on the relations between trauma theory and media culture.