Claire Curtis provides thoughtful political interpretations of nine recent novels and stories in the genre of postapocalyptic fiction. She describes her own interest in writing about these particular works as grounded in two “impulses”: “First, I am a fan of the genre and I would like that fandom to be rooted in something other than my own potentially morally suspect characteristics. Second, I am convinced that approaching the genre for what it is can help us clarify our own personal and political desires” (p. 188). Curtis amply demonstrates that the works that she has chosen may challenge thoughtful readers with a variety of perspectives on political life. Whether or not postapocalyptic fiction per se, or these particular works, offer new insights for political theory may be a more difficult claim to sustain, but the book does not rely on such a claim to be interesting and valuable.

Curtis ties these recent works of fiction into the traditional interest of political theorists in a “state of nature” as the literal grounding for social contract theory. The work begins from an explication of the “classic” state-of-nature theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and proceeds toward the more hypothetical and normative original-state reasoning of John Rawls's Theory of Justice. The fit between the novels and the social contract theories that they purportedly explore varies from chapter to chapter. The connections between Lucifer's Hammer (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 1977) and Hobbes's account of the state of nature are robust and interesting. The connections between Alas Babylon (Pat Frank, 1959) and Locke's state-of-nature reasoning are less compelling.

The Rousseauian readings of Malevil (Robert Merle, 1972) and Into the Forest (Jean Hegland, 1996) are particularly rich, even though they point (as Rousseau's thought does) in profoundly disparate directions. Malevil, in Curtis's interpretation, demonstrates the Rousseauian argument that moral needs rather than physical conditions give rise to the true “social contract,” a society operating according to a “general will,” a collective expression of what the common good requires. It is precisely when the limitations of the physical conditions, real inequalities, and entrenched powers are stripped away that we may be able to refashion society, that we may “live on the basis of laws one gives oneself” (p. 109). But Curtis's reading of Hegland's Into the Forest calls into question whether the society of Malevil can be seen as an authentic site of moral freedom and whether the truest possibilities of the postapocalyptic can be found in “starting over,” or rather in refusing to do so. The characters in Hegland's novel are read as exploiting the collapse of society to return to that moment “at which you would have desired your species had stopped” (Roger Masters's translation of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 20), but even in doing so, they remind us that the return to nature is chosen only by people transformed by their life in society and (in this case) its tragic aftermath. Thus, they are “in nature” in a much different way than a “natural human being” who might be simply embedded, unaware that where he or she is could be called nature or could be anything other than what it is.

The ambiguities of this realization of being a social self stripped from society's framework are expanded and explored in the second section of the book. Curtis argues that the works of Octavia Butler (including “The Book of Martha,” 2005; The Parable of the Sower, 1993; and the Parable of the Talents, 1998) offer fresh insights on the possibilities for and limitations of John Rawls's “veil of ignorance” as a state of nature heuristic. Here, Curtis invites us to reconsider the assumptions and terms of social contract theory as such, as well as the political possibilities offered by a radical disruption of the existing order. The short story “The Book of Martha” is read as an exploration of the limitations of Rawls's ideas about reasoning from the veil of ignorance. Martha, offered an opportunity to transform humanity by “god,” works through different theories of how a just society might work, but she is constantly torn by the tension between her own self-identity and role in the existing world and her irreconcilable aspirations for a better one.

Curtis then proceeds to read these anxieties and the many dimensions of the human desire for “control” and “security” to show how we might use the postapocalyptic register to “take the social contract in a new direction” (p. 135) through Butler's radically untraditional and immensely ambitious Parable novels. Curtis reads these works as offering the possibility that the postapocalypse can be the source of “a radical hope” (p. 178) and that we might transcend the limits of our conventional desires for unattainable security. We might read this as the decisive rejection of the impulse for stability that leads us “up” from the Hobbesian state of nature in the first place.

The most curious chapter in the book may be the first, in which Curtis explores Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) as exceptions that explicate the rule; by dwelling on the existential “pointlessness of creating civil society,” she argues, they may reveal the “conditions necessary for entering into a social contract” (p. 19). Shute's novel is astonishing in its simplemindedness, but its unrealistic optimism about the durability of political life sets up Curtis's provocative reading of McCarthy's relentlessly dark narrative in The Road. Curtis argues that McCarthy's deep pessimism about the cost of achieving and maintaining human dignity in a post-political phase of human existence parallels Shute's optimism about humanity's capacity to make a noble end. It is precisely in this fading light that Curtis would have us define humanity in terms of the agency and self-determination that is denied in a dying world populated by cannibals feeding off the flesh of other human beings.

The Road may offer a deep insight into human nature, but it offers little that we might do. And this is perhaps its great benefit because Curtis's book seems least a work of political theory when it reads the more “realist” authors just as they would wish to be read—as providing “how to” insights into what life will be like when the apocalypse comes. If their works are intended to provide guidance on how to be a survivor, how to reconstitute political life, how to work with others to fight off cannibals, and even how to stock and ration canned goods, it seems that these authors are making confident predictions about that which we cannot know. Most of what we discover about political theory in these postapocalyptic works are insights that Curtis (carrying in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls) installs there, and thus, the analysis proves to be more about her thinking through traditional political theory while reading postapocalyptic literature than about her finding some original and challenging perspective on political life in postapocalyptic literature.

This is not to say that these readings are without value. Curtis's work reminds us that political theory requires an engagement in those thought experiments that probe the limits of the institutions, categories, and practices that we take for granted in the study of existing states and their laws. Whether or not these literary works were understood by their authors to be forms of political theory, the prospect of Armageddon certainly allows us to make the possibility of radically new political organizations plausible. The author shows that these particular narratives, and perhaps the postapocalyptic genre as such, raise possibilities and pose questions that are well worth considering.

Furthermore, this book should be of particular value to those political theorists who teach courses on utopias or dystopias, politics and literature, or politics and film. Reading one or two of these works along with selections from the social contract theorists, and being informed by Curtis's careful unpacking of the themes, images, and questions posed by the narratives, should stimulate very valuable class discussion and imaginative theorizing in undergraduate audiences who may have trouble seeing the fertile possibilities when reading more traditional theory alone.