post-apocalyptic titles more than doubled in the last decade is surely a sign that niche publishing has continued the growth of markets for the book industry, even if those measures of growth (1% in revenues) don’t match standards in other industries. I’d like to briefly suggest that this detail doesn’t tell us as much about the changing nature of our fears or our dreams as one might expect from a spike in the production of stories about surviving the end of the world instead, I think this intensification reveals something about how cultural production remains underpinned by the a logic of growth and can be explained, in part, through what Chris Anderson has dubbed the long tail. What catches the eye is that the number of volumes released during what I’m calling the contemporary (2002 to 2013) phase of post-apocalyptic fiction is greater than those released from 1946-2001. post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be also the most banal. The most striking thing about looking at the bibliography of U.S.
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