It goes without saying that when the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this month, it had a profound impact on how we imagined the world around us. At the sci-fi blog io9, Chanda Phelan shows that the event also changed the imaginings of apocalyptic fiction:
I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time. … As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that’s to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war’s popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991? That surprised me.
Read more (and see the accompanying chart) at io9.
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AMA citation:
Schneider N. What the end of the Cold War did to the apocalypse. The Immanent Frame. 2009. Available at: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/11/10/what-the-end-of-the-cold-war-did-to-the-apocalypse/. Accessed March 20, 2010.
APA citation:
Schneider, Nathan. (2009). What the end of the Cold War did to the apocalypse. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from The Immanent Frame Web site: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/11/10/what-the-end-of-the-cold-war-did-to-the-apocalypse/
Chicago citation:
Schneider, Nathan. 2009. What the end of the Cold War did to the apocalypse. The Immanent Frame. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/11/10/what-the-end-of-the-cold-war-did-to-the-apocalypse/ (accessed March 20, 2010).
Harvard citation:
Schneider, N 2009, What the end of the Cold War did to the apocalypse, The Immanent Frame. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from <http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/11/10/what-the-end-of-the-cold-war-did-to-the-apocalypse/>
MLA citation:
Schneider, Nathan. "What the end of the Cold War did to the apocalypse." 10 Nov. 2009. The Immanent Frame. Accessed 20 Mar. 2010. <http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/11/10/what-the-end-of-the-cold-war-did-to-the-apocalypse/>
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