 Thank you very much Tony for that warm introduction. Thank you to all of you for coming out this evening. It's nice to see some familiar faces as well. I should correct you on one thing actually. I didn't go to standard life to find out how the world worked. I just went there because I needed a job. I never heard of university. I left school and got this job. Then I met lots of students during the holidays who came to work part-time at the university. I thought, haha! So I applied and then on I went. As Tony said, this is called Not the End of the World, dystopia is nostalgia, the ongoing attraction of the apocalypse in fiction. I'm going to steer away from my own work when discussing this. I'm going to range quite personally actually through a number of texts, but later on I'll be very, very happy to answer questions about my own evocation of the apocalypse and what the apocalypse means to me. It seems very appropriate at this precise time to be writing about the end of the world. I maintain that writing about the end of the world is always in some way going to be an act of nostalgia. I think it's also frequently a rather political act and these two statements can appear to be in opposition with each other. The Oxford English Dictionary defines nostalgia as a sentimental longing or wistful attraction for a period in the past and they illustrate it with a statement that's rather appropriate to us tonight. It's overcome with acute nostalgia for my days at university. It's a beautiful sentence. So nostalgia looks backwards while political acts, although often inspired by long histories, presumably look forward towards an improved future. There are, as you know, binge watchers of Netflix, readers of novels, TV, fans, many, many, many ways for the world to end. Alien invasion, pandemics, zombie apocalypse, climate change, warfare, nuclear conflagration, the wrath of God. The apocalypse is, of course, different things to different people and one definition would be the complete and utter final destruction of the world, the type of arrogance depicted so effectively by the book of revelations. There before me was a pale horse, its rider was named Death and Hades was falling close behind. Quite frankly, this isn't much used to the novelist. You need a few people left to support a novel or a poem, at least for the duration of that novel or the poem. So my apocalypse will therefore involve destruction on a scale devastating enough to suggest the end of civilisation as we know it, but with some few remaining souls whose presence may yet signal survival of a sort. The apocalypse is so fundamental to human outlook that we've been laughing at it forever since time began. There's a version of the chicken lichen, you remember chicken lichen, the little chick who missed an acorn lands on his head and he thinks it's the sky that's fallen on him. A version of this has been traced back 25 centuries to the Buddhist texts the Jataka tales. As you'll remember in the various European versions, which may exclude the Disney version and the Disney version all ends rather well, but the European version, the chicken runs frantically around the arm yard gathering the rest of the birds who all rush into the forest in the hope of escaping the sky landing on their heads and the fox follows them and eats them all up. It's a nobody panic. There's a vote tonight, but it'll probably be alright in the end. It's not all fun and games though. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which comes from ancient Mesopotamia. 21,000 BC emphasises the necessity of death. Gilgamesh is desperate to discover that thing that we all want to know, what's driven there, lots and lots of novels, the secret of eternal life, but he learns instead that when the gods created man, they let death be his share and life withheld in their own hands. This is a message of course that repeated again and again and again in a myriad of folktales. I'm going to choose the Scots Irish folktale, death in a nut, which is one of my favourites because it involves a wily old woman. The wily old woman beats death on the road. Death has come for her, but she manages to trap him inside a nut shell and immediately the world disappears. And because she can't live in a barren universe, she has to let him go. She's forced to release death. And in some versions death immediately cuts the old woman down. But in other versions he's impressed by her hits back and he allows her another period of life before he comes and collects her. Either way, death and decay are proven to be an essential part of life. The natural death of an individual is of course one thing, the sudden death of a civilisation, quite another. Our fascination with the preserved city of Pompeii is fuelled, not merely I should say by the information it provides about ancient Rome, remarkable though that is, but by the unexpectedness of the disaster which felled Pompeii's population as they went about their daily life. And there is of course a voyeuristic edge to this. The ancient Pompeians were getting up to all sorts of things the day that the volcano hit and engulfed them. But the ongoing appeal of Pompeii's sudden destruction doesn't belie our sympathy for the victims' suffering. And I think this mix of fascination and compassion is typical to our responses to contemporary disasters as well. We have repeated news broadcasts about tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, landslides, forest fires, avalanches, and they all capture our attention largely I think because we relate to and fear the plight of those involved. We're also guilty about it, we feel guilt because we're fascinated by it but we also feel overwhelmed, we feel useless, we're relieved not to be there, we're glad it's not us. I think there's another element that makes us feel uneasy about these emotions the composition of fear itself. In writing in psychology today, Dr John Ae Cal describes the anatomy of fear. Your automatic nervous system kicks in and suddenly your heart rate increases, your blood pressure goes up, your breathing gets quicker and stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are released. The blood flows away from the heart and out towards the extremities preparing the arms and legs for action. These effects served as well millennia ago in situations where we were faced with beastly animals that thought they had found dinner. I love his reference to beastly animals. But what Dr Cal doesn't say is that under the right circumstances typically those involving fiction or roller coasters fear can be rather pleasurable. The things that we fear form a core of much of the stories we tell each other partly because they allow us to identify and confront anxieties we'd be foolish or too scared to engage with in real life but also because they give us a friction of enjoyment. According to Aristotle, the role of dramatic tragedy is to invoke fear and pity to act as catharsis. I can feel myself on rather dodgy ground here because I know that within the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow there are people much better versed in matters dramatic and Aristotelian than me and there are various interpretations of what Aristotle meant by this but I think what he meant is that precariously experiencing fear in a safe environment enables us to identify our own anxieties by relating to fictional characters who are undergoing fear invoking trauma our capacity for understanding and empathy are enhanced. So in other words were you to go home tonight and download the horror movie Saw. It might have a positive effect on your humanity. Edwin Burke and his philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful published in 1757 identifies terror alongside pain as the most sublime emotion and he too recognises something pleasurable in the experience of being scared. As proof he quotes John Milton's Paradise Lost in which he considers death and Satan examples of sublime invocations of terror and I'll give you Milton's description of death. The other shape of shape it might be called that shape had none distinguishable in number, joint or limb or substances might be called that shadows seemed for each seemed either black he stood as night fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell and shook a deadly dart. What seemed his head the lightness of a kingly crown had on? Burke concludes that in this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible and sublime to the last degree. The friction of fear lies I think of course in our inability to quite see the object of our terror and what seems but is uncertain and Milton leaves space for the reader's imagination to conjure its own terrors which is of course a technique still employed by savvy horror writers and film directors. What scares us and why we like being scared also concerns Sigmund Freud who boils it down in his famous essay on the Gothic as Das Anheimlich which is usually translated as the uncanny but also as the unholy. I also think the unholy would make a great horror movie title. Freud gives us a useful list of things that can be used to terrifying effect including doubles, the inanimate made animate, dolls, the reanimation of the dead. All things he points out that with the right handling in fairy stories or religion perhaps are not frightening at all and he concludes that the storyteller has a peculiarly directive influence over us by means of the state of mind into which he can put us and the expectations he can arouse in us. He is able to guide the current of our emotions dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material. I think that's my favourite sentence because I'm really guilty of charge of obtaining a variety of effects with the same material. This is every novelist's ambition. So I realise I've gone off on a bit of a tangent here. Where is the apocalypse? But Freud's essay I think suggests the importance of knowing a manipulating atmosphere. The enjoyable presence of fear in literature benefits from the reader's own sense of security at the point of enjoyment. The opposite of unheimlich is surely heimlich, homely and that I would suggest can be allied in some ways to nostalgia. So let's get back to the impending apocalypse. I know you came out tonight to avoid that. Earth's imminent destruction is a trope that's been used for countless sci-fi movies often involving external forces, rapacious aliens intent on capturing our planet who are finally vanquished by Sigurni Weaver, Bruce Willis, Doctor Who or some other lone hero. This is, I would say, Apocalypse's backdrop effective and entertaining but a kind of space-western. It doesn't really matter who the monsters are in these movies. The sight of the massing on the mountain ridge with their bows and arrows is enough. The audience surfs the adventure but we know the deal. Sigurni is needed for the sequel. Bruce gets the girl and Doctor Who survives to regenerate another day. The aliens are sucked out of the decompression hatch. The craft blown to smithereens, the alien force massacred, border restored. Like the sci-fi villains, the form the apocalypse takes is not really the most important thing. It is there, in Freud's words, to guide the current of our emotions. As I've already mentioned, it seems certain that apocalyptic visions predate the written word. I imagine that our ancestors sitting in their huts and caves and homemade structures talked often about the end of the world. But the first emanation of the apocalypse and the form of the novel is generally agreed to be Mary Wilton Crath Shelley's The Last Man, which is published in 1826. Set between 2073 and 2100, The Last Man evokes a world rather like Mary's own. There are no visible technological advances. Please look elsewhere for your flying cars. The Last Man evokes a world rather like Mary's own. People ride horses, they drive carts, they sail, and wear floaty dresses occasionally equipped with veils. The Last Man is narrated by Lionel Verney who relates the progress of a devastating pandemic and the responses of a surviving population to the crisis, which includes with shades of our own time, perhaps, factionism, religious extremism, and ultimately silent warfare. In a move that has become a staple of apocalyptic fiction, the surviving population of Britain go on the march, seeking warmer and healthier climes. They fail and, spoiler alert, there is only one person left standing, our unhappy narrator, Verney, who is left all alone on the earth with only a sheepdog for company. I don't know if Richard Matheson, the author of the post-pandemic zombie apocalypse classic I Am Legend, which is published in 1954 and has been adapted for the big screen several times, including in 2007, as some of you might remember, with Will Smith. I don't know if he had the last man in mind, but the image of that poster of the man and the dog alone in the wilderness always conjures Mary Shelley as the last man for me. So, despite the soundness and the originality of its time of this concept, the last man is no Frankenstein. It's a sprawling, unfocused, wish-fulfillment novel, lacking in pace and drowned by nostalgia. At the beginning of the book, Verney describes his father as one of those men on whom nature had bestowed the prodigality to prodigality, the envied gifts of wit and imagination, and then left his bank of life to be impelled by these winds without adding reason as the rudder or judgement as the pilot for the voyage. Of course, the romantics delight in imagery connected to the sea and sailing, but I think it's impossible for us to know Mary's most and craft Shelley's history and not glimpse her husband Percy Shelley in these lines. He's a man of prodigious talents and prodigious recklessness, and Shelley, of course, drowns in 1822 at the age of 29 and a sudden storm and a gulf of Spezia. The Courier, a leading London newspaper, began his a victory with the words, Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned. Now he knows whether there is a God or not. Mary is urged to develop herself and this nostalgic project is understandable. By the time she's writing this, she's lost most of the people close to her. By the age of 27, she's lost her husband, her half-sister, several children, and all of the people with the exception of her step-sister Claire Claremont, who's now a governess in Russia, who had spent the summer of 1816 together at the Villa di Adate near Lake Geneva, where, of course, Frankenstein was conceived. She's a young woman, but her youth is now behind her. So the last man, I think to an extent, attempts to resurrect the players of that summer. Percy Shelley is Adrian, the kind and noble protector of England. Byron is represented by the dazzling Lord Raymond, commander of a liberated Constantinople, and Mary herself is, of course, the last man, deserted by the companions of her youth to face the burden of life alone. There's another form of nostalgia expressed in The Last Man. Nostalgia for the political ideas of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft and her father, William Godwin, and the failure of the French Revolution, perhaps, to bring about an ideal state. The Last Man with its plague-riven society, divided by religion and warfare, confronts the concept of the inevitability of progress and the idea that the collective will, collective effort, can lead to collective improvement. So Mary's dystopian vision is political as well as nostalgic, but this is the politics of disappointment rather than hope. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's The Last Man is itself a failed experiment. Nevertheless, it anticipates many of the troops of later apocalyptic fiction, the isolation of the individual from the rest of humanity, the images of massed populations upritted from their homes and on the march. The questions of what humanity is when the veneer of civilisation is removed. There are so many apocalyptic visions to choose from that I can't actually imagine how big the big book of the apocalypse would be. It would, I don't know, it would fill Glasgow. So I'm going to proceed with a few books that smeared me at an impressionable age. Books, I think, that occupied the carousel in Bobby's bookshop rather than the shelf and the library. But I'm going to begin with a classic. H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds published in 1898. This too falls into the camp of sci-fi speculative fiction or fantasy with a massive dose of horror added for good effect. And it's one of the first apocalyptic novels I fell in love with. Endlessly malleable, a gift to illustrators and broadcasters, film and TV directors, steampunk enthusiasts. War of the Worlds is, of course, located in the period in which it was written. I'm going to underestimate the power of this. Robert Louis Stevenson, whose work H.G. Wells repeatedly denigrated, which was very cheeky of him, had established the efficacy of locating proto-sci-fi fantasy horror in the contemporary period almost ten years earlier with the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde published in 1886. Oscar Wells, the picture of Dorian Gray, followed in 1890 and Bramster, Guastracula in 1897, all locating supernatural horror novels and dark and dangerous contemporary cityscapes steeped in drug abuse, sexual and propriety, economic exploitation and bloody murder. So it might not have been an original trope by this time, but War of the Worlds' modernity adds to its shock effect. Something, incidentally, that Orson Wells uses to good effect in his famous 1968 radio remake, which he relocated to contemporary America and which, as you know, costs some panic amongst listeners. The locations chosen by Wells, Woking, Letterhead, Richmond Hill and Sheperton, a setting later used by J.G. Ballard to good effect in his own dystopian fiction, seemed designed to underline the impact of outrageous acts happening on domestic territory. These are suburbs, not battlefields occupied by normal citizens, non-combatants rather than soldiers. We're told the milkman came as usual and that the narrator heard a train running towards Woking, comforting everyday details. The disruption of a reassuringly familiar world or, if not familiar, a regular world, one with habits and rituals that reoccur at predicted times. For the modern reader, the circumstances might be reminiscent of witness reports that follow terrorist attacks and which often seem to need to express a location of the event within until then an eventful present. I'd been at the gym and I was cycling to work when it happened. A man told BBC Radio 4 in the aftermath of the recent Westminster attack, perhaps nostalgia is an inevitable part of any disaster. We long for the moment before the redundancy notice, the accident, the poor diagnosis. As I said in my introduction, writing the apocalypse is often a political act and as you'll hear, Wells is no egalitarian but his novel inevitably draws comparisons with the expansion of the British Empire, which at the time of the book's publication was at its height with colonised territories in Africa, Australia, North and South America, the Middle East, South and South East Asia, and the Atlantic and Pacific Islands. Chapter 1, The Eve of the War, says of the Martians. Before we judge them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but on its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of 50 years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? H.G. Wells was a huge influence on the next dystopian novel, which snared me in its tendrils. John Wyndon's post-apocalyptic The Day of the Tripods was published in 1951. Unlike the War of the Worlds, it imagines an invasion by a ruthless superior species and the Tripods have, of course, more success than H.G. Wells' Martians. After a meteor storm succeeds in blinding most of the human population, the Tripods hold sway, leaving only a few pockets of survivors. The novel's first chapter is entitled The End Begins, and its very first sentence both establishes and undermines a cozy evocation of a world governed by regularity. When a day you happen to know is Wednesday, starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. Wyndon's choice of days, Wednesdays and Sundays, which I suspect in the period he was writing were the dullest days of the week, a suggestive of boredom, but this is no ordinary Wednesday, something is seriously wrong. The protagonist in apocalyptic fiction of this period, tend like Wells and Wyndon's narrators to middle class. This helps to underline the paradise-lost aspect of the books. The economic imperative is at bay, and so the collapse of society comes as a shock, rather than as a relief. Brian Aldis singled out Wyndon's Day of the Tripods when he coined the phrase cozy catastrophe in his History of Science fiction, Billion Years Spree, published in 1973. Aldis might as just have easily signalled the War of the Worlds as narrator as an unnamed journalist. It's true that John Wyndon's hero, biologist Bill Mason, maintains such a constant stiff upper lip we could suspect him of Botox, but the horror that follows the breakdown of law and order in the wake of the Tripods victory is, I think, far from cozy. The population divides between blind and seeing. Those with eyesight are in hot demand and liable to find themselves shackled to a work-gang acting as a guide for visually devastated people. The working classes are represented by the form of a despotic scavenger named Torrance, who eventually heads a fascistic militia. Written during the Korean War and at the beginnings of the Cold War, the day of the Tripods allegory of a blinded population of the mercy of rapacious plants might seem clunky. Indeed, the plants themselves are ridiculous, as big a challenge to filmmakers as the slow-moving, bandaged Egyptian mummies of early cinema who always caught their victims despite moving at a snail's place. Nevertheless, the book functions. More than that, it's remained print and popular since its first publication. I don't know why this is, a combination of voice style, characterisation, pace and place. John Wyndon manages the act of prostigination that all writers strive for. A central driver, the element of nostalgia in Wyndon's The Day of the Tripods, is once again for order and regularity many of his first readers, a lot of whom would have experienced the Second World War, a bombsite from rationing had perhaps never really known. What a Benjamin is like from the standard of an age yet to come. Readers alienated from the mechanisms of contemporary world may find release in the struggles of wells and Wyndon's protagonists fighting against the odds in apocalyptic landscapes. It's hard to square these books' popularity with the depiction of the working classes as either a simple folk destined for cannon fodder or brute intent on surviving at all cost. Perhaps this is also part of the prostigination. John Christopher's 1956 novel The Death of Grass and the Clue to the Apocalypses in the title might be seen as a reply to Wyndon's cozy catastrophe. Once again, the central protagonists are middle class. John Constance is a comfortably off engineer. His friend Roger Buckley an equally comfortable civil servant. The class is important because they have a long way to fall. Once again, the threat comes from outside, though in the case of The Death of Grass the source is not extra terrestrial. The deadly Chun Mili virus has spread from China devastating all the crops of western Europe and causing massive famine. It's not long before the veneer of civilization disappears and vigilantes start roaming the English countryside looting, raping and killing. John Constance's brother, David, farms a little known hidden valley. He saw the disaster coming and has been growing a virus-free strain of potato. This I think is the only novel but the hero is indeed a virus-free strain of potato that our salvation lies. The novel follows John and Roger's quest to reach the valley with their families. So the two moments start off as typical stoical Englishmen and the journey takes a matter of days but in the short period between leaving his home and arriving at the valley who has more leadership qualities than you might consider healthy becomes a ruthless survivalist. I think the most shocking moment comes roughly midway through the book when John goes to a farmhouse a woman opens the door and he shoots her in the face. He shoots her in order to gain access to the food in her farmhouse. John's son, David, asks him what was the shooting daddy? John looked into his son's eyes. We have to fight for things now, he said. We have to fight to live it's something you'll have to learn. Did you kill them? Yes. Where did you put the bodies? Out of the way. Come in, we're going to have breakfast. There was a stain of blood at the door and another where the woman had lain. David looked at them but he did not say anything else. A shock to the reader comes not only from John Constance's act his resorption to violence his shooting of the woman in the face in her own home. The real surprise I think is his sanguine attitude afterwards. There's no soul searching and when Roger's wife Olivia insists the woman's teenage daughter Jane who's likely to die on her own comes with their group John reflects that crisis were always likely to produce strange results in terms of human behaviour. The strange results he's referring to is his wife's compassion rather than his own ruthlessness. Shortly afterwards the teenager Jane is claimed by Perry a London gun dealer who's joined the group and has executed his own wife for infidelity. John and Roger's wives object they want to arm the girl and encourage her to slash Perry's throat shocking in itself but the men consider Perry's skills as a sharpshooter worth any sacrifice young Jane may have to make. The gender politics in the death of grass is clear when the apocalyptic chips are down men step forward and women should look out. Despite international laws we know that systematic rape continues to be used as a weapon in war and that the international states in their lives broke apart report in 2004 the opportunistic rape and pillage of previous centuries has been replaced in modern conflict by rape used as an orchestrated combat tool. Writers engaging with the Stokeen visions inevitably address sexual violence. It's perhaps not surprising that Wells, Wynddon and Christopher don't give much agency to female characters in their novels though women are treated with a mixture of paternalism amusement and impatience. However we feel about this whether we dismiss it as a reflection of the times in which the books were written a blot on the text or a reason to avoid the novels altogether. The convention is a physically weak woman who however intelligent and capable they were prior to the disaster of forced by prices to return rely entirely on men is an invitation to other novelists engaging with the genre to turn things around. Just as a portrayal of working class characters is nasty brutish and short out to prevent the inequalities of previous social systems are opportunities for reinvention. And this of course has happened in the 20th and 21st centuries. The elasticity and allegorical opportunities of the apocalyptic genre has resulted in it being embraced by feminist writers notably Margaret Atwood who commands I would say a whole section of the apocalyptic bookshelf to herself. Atwood's novels explore the fragility of hard-won human rights in civic society. The Handmaid's Tale possibly her best known apocalyptic novel evokes a world where widespread infertility is accompanied by the rise of fundamentalist religious sect. Women's rights including reproductive rights are removed. They are forbidden to read, be educated or have any agency at all. As Atwood has pointed out this is not so much sci-fi as reality for many women across the globe. Dangerous pregnancies strange births and threatened reproductive rights haunt speculated fiction by women writers. I've already mentioned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There's also Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child Octavia Butler's Blood Child all classics of perilous, provocative fiction. Pregnancy is the perfect vehicle for body horror. Birth is dangerous. You do not know what you might be harboring in your womb or who might take you. Take it from you. Fertility rights are central to Louise Erdrich's near future dystopian future home of the living God which was published last year, 2017. This novel embodies the complexity of race identity and the matriarchal line and the person of Cedar Hawk songmaker, a young pregnant woman and a world that is running backwards. Evolution is reversing. Animals, birds and insects reverting towards their prehistoric forms. Human-eyed babies look increasingly less human. Life births are dwindling, women dying in childbirth and perfect children becoming rare. As the crisis progresses fertile women are encouraged to become womb volunteers and gestate embryos from in-featured clinics. Pregnate women are rounded up imprisoned in hospitals and the newborn babies taken from them. It's only a matter of time before Cedar is imprisoned and rather than awake her fate she goes on the run. The fear of child abduction is ancient, fundamental and ongoing. Still in children with ghostly presences and folk tales and news reports from around the globe. A tribal member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Louise Erdrich engages with magical and religious certainties in a contemporary political world. The history of indigenous peoples including that of Native Americans are blighted by church and state sanctioned forced adoption programs. The Indian adoption project was a federal program which ran from 1941 to 1967 and its victims include children snatched from mothers who are subsequently jailed for trying to bring them home. As baby songmakers birth for us near the tension ranks up as nature regresses and the new self-imposed authorities determine to continue the human race at the cost of women's freedom. As I've said already many apocalyptic fictions that I could discuss and I think many of you will have your own favourites but I'm going to end with an optimistic note I'm going to end with a book that while never of turning away from the dangers of the road I don't know if you saw what I did there also contains elements of joy and I think this is because it can connect the post and the pre-pandemic world that evokes through the medium of culture. Canadian author Emily St John's novel Station 11 begins on the night that the Georgia flew hits Toronto and it begins with a sudden heart attack and death of Arthur Leander a Hollywood actor who is on stage then King Lear. The narrative travels through between before and after the pandemic stretching some years into the past and 15 years into the future. Arthur Leander's death of course has nothing to do with the pandemic but Emily St John's focus on it and the lives and deaths of Arthur's friends and associates answers the question that apocalyptic novels often dice with does one death matter in a world of mass destruction? The focus of the post pandemic world is on the travelling symphony a combined group of actors and musicians who travel dangerous routes around the new settlements playing concerts and giving performances of Shakespeare. They've tried adding more modern plays to their repertoire but these never seem to go down as well as Shakespeare and Dieter, a member of the symphony believes that this is because people want what was best about the world. There's a phrase that flits through the timelines of station 11 things happen for a reason and the novel's narrative refutes this. The just do not get the reward and the guilty often go unpunished but all is not lost because at the heart of all things there is culture which helps to make an impossible world possible to live in because in the world of the travelling symphonies motto which they stole from Star Trek Voyager survival is insufficient and in case I make station 11 sound pompous it's important to note that a broad sway the cultures embraced by the novel including comic books, films, television at one point Annette says that the most apocalyptic movies she's seen had all involved zombies and just saying she said it could be much worse. I go to finish with a short extract from station 11 which I think reads like a love letter to the world that we have the privilege to occupy now, right now we've got no need for nostalgia because we are here and she heads it as an incomplete list. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power at the electric third rail no more cities no more screens shining in the half light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages no more concert stages lit by candy coloured halogens no more electronica punked electric guitars no more pharmaceuticals no more certainty of surviving a scratch on one hand a cut on the finger while chopping vegetables for dinner a dog bite no more flight no more towns glimpse from the sky through aeroplane windows points of glimmering light no more looking down from 30,000 feet and imagining the lives lit up by those light at that moment at this moment thank you