Patrick Whitmarsh's "Writing Our Extinction"

Patrick Whitmarsh is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the Chandler Center for Environmental Studies at Wofford College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science, and reported the following:

Page 99 partially features an introduction to the materials discussed in the corresponding chapter, followed by a brief description of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s experience in orbit around the earth and how his words illustrate the idea of “orbital perspective” that I examine in three literary texts: Don DeLillo’s “Human Moments in World War III,” Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. As the page states:

Orbital perspective is a provocation for literary narrative, which until the availability of flight technologies could only fantasize about such views […]. The prospect of not only seeing from above but seeing from an artificially produced vantage presented a new dimension to the artifice of fiction, an opportunity to connect the literary imagination with the one being authored by vertical science.

Page 99 successfully identifies the book’s central themes: developments in vertical science (in this case, orbital technologies specifically) after World War II and literary engagements with these developments, which reveal industrial modernity as a planetary narrative that spells human extinction. The page and chapter argue that Gagarin’s orbital experience informs literary perspectives on the planet from above. The discussion of works by DeLillo, O’Brien, and Pynchon (featured briefly on the page) expresses summarily how vertical science manifests in these authors’ perspectival experiments, and that these experiments illuminate the precarious links between industrial modernity and ecological crisis.

The remainder of the book examines alternative examples of vertical narration in literary texts, including subterranean and geological imaginings in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, planetary perspective in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and the racial dynamics of Anthropocene geology in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (to name only three). More generally, the book argues that several works of fiction, from the 1960s to the present, recast the earth as a script and industrial science as a narrative practice—one that composes the epoch of geophysical crisis and despoilation we call the Anthropocene, and in which we can read intimations of our species’ extinction.

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--Marshal Zeringue