A review by octavia_cade
The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe in Contemporary Culture by Mark Bould

informative medium-paced

3.0

I have to admit, I enjoyed the wide variety of primary texts here - everything from Sharknado to Amitav Ghosh to The Fast and the Furious - but I remain wholly unconvinced by the author's thesis. I'm actually reviewing this for Strange Horizons, so a full review will be up there shortly, but in a nutshell: there's an awful lot of bullshitting here, and I say that as someone who has done their academic share of it. Don't get me wrong, it's entertaining bullshit, and Bould's prose is for the most part lively and opinionated, with minor rambles into academic turgidity, but it seems to me, by the end, that he's overlooked an obvious counterargument. I can understand why, goodness knows I too am baffled by the levels of indifference people can display to our depressingly ongoing apocalypse, but wishful thinking doesn't make something so, and it's clear to me, at least, that Bould is wishing hard.