Preppers and Survivalism in the AustLit Database
This work has been affiliated with the Preppers and Survivalism project due to its relationship to either prepping or prepper-inflected survivalism more generally, and contains one or more of the following:
1. A strong belief in some imminent threat
2. Taking active steps to prepare for that perceived threat
3. A character or characters (or text) who self-identify as a ‘prepper’, or some synonymous/modified term: ‘financial preppers’, ‘weekend preppers’, ‘fitness preppers’, etc.
As a tier two work, this text has been identified as key to prepping in a broader, more conceptual relationship. These texts have been classified as ‘key’ prepper-adjacent texts that are important to prepping, even if they themselves are not about prepping or do not include preppers. These texts have been identified in the database through various means such as interviews with preppers, scholarship on preppers, and online prepper forums.
'This paper explores how George Turner's The Sea and Summer utilizes nostalgic narrative to develop an affective attachment to the climate disaster and instigates, in its narrative, meaningful change. Through a consideration of Svetlana Boym's reflective nostalgia, the affective response the novel activates, and the affect created by Gothic tropes, I suggest that this combination produces an exemplary response. The narrative presents a frame story set in a distant future after the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, and the bulk of the prescient climate sf novel is presented as a novelistic rendering of this pre-apocalyptic scenario. This combination allows the reader to consider the temporal scale, producing a medium scale, which allows the reader to grasp the complexity of the problem without being overwhelmed by its vastness. I argue that rather than exorcising our fears, such literary narratives can make the realities of climate change more present to contemporary readers.' (Publication abstract)
