Abstract

The formal limit to imagining a post-catastrophic future remains a historical one: how can a novel bent on representing an after, bent on imagining the movement of history as such, do so “in an age,” as Fredric Jameson puts it, “that has forgotten to think historically in the first place.” Brent Ryan Bellamy’s claim is that Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming struggles to represent the present historically and that in doing so it strikes at the very limits of post-apocalyptic narrative form.