Book Review: American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by Robert Yeates

 

American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by Robert Yeates

 212 pages, Hardcover
Published November 2021 by UCL Press

 This review is 200% a victim of my being behind 8 book reviews, and being ass deep with organizing the Global Time Slip/ PKD festival.  Normally, this would be a longer, more intense review.

I read this book to prep for the LIVE PKD hangout interview, which I just conducted. And it was great. Yeates is a British-born researcher, and as such, this research about the depiction of American cities in decay is quite interesting. Starting with early SF prose, Radio, movies, and into Video games and streaming TV, Yeates paints a vivid picture of American cities in speculative decay over the decades.

 The titles of the chapters give a great overview of the whole book.

1 Urban apocalypse in the magazines

2 Listening to ruins on the radio

3 Cinema and the aesthetics of destruction

4 Urban decay in the transmedia universe of Blade Runner

5 Playing in virtual ruins from Wasteland to Wasteland 2

6 Cities and sanctuary in The Walking Dead


I was really happy that Yeates spent a good amount of time on Jack London’s Iron Heel and The Scarlet Plague. I have read both, but Iron Heel only recently (see my Amazing Stories column about it). The history of the Radio shows was a thing I knew a little about, but was happy to learn more. 


Chapter four about Blade Runner and urban Decay was the one I was doing an interview about, so perhaps I paid a little more attention to it. The information that crossed all Blade Runner media from PKD’s novel, the movie, the sequel novels, and video games was excellent. 


What was new to me was the information about video games and the Walking Dead Universe. I learned about the extensive fan fiction community of The Walking Dead, for example.  What happened in that space was fascinating, and I knew none of it.
 

This is a great academic book, it was published in 2021 by UCL Press in the UK and is expensive, but on the website there is an open-access PDF available. 


PDF of the book here!