As a term, Anthropocene has made a rapid transition from geology on to the rest of the sciences and the humanities. Coined in its current form in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen, the term has in the past two decades seen an explosive rise in popularity in a range of disciplines outside the sciences, including but not limited to philosophy, literary studies, cinema studies, architecture, anthropology, sociology, politics, and law.1 It is inarguably the most common denominator of the era that we have entered, a notion that “has gained an almost viral popularity,”2 and it clearly identifies the entity that it understands as the cause: the Anthropos.

Geologists, much like practitioners of their sibling disciplines of paleontology and archaeology, are interested in phenomena that stretch over thousands, millions, and sometimes billions of years. While distinct in their areas of specialization (minerals and stone, dinosaurs, humans) and time scales (billions and millions of years vs. thousands of years), geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists all share a preoccupation with the past, one that is motivated through a way of chthonic reading dependent on the unearthing and disturbing of that which was once hidden. Looking to the past, geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists make sense of the present by charting shifts that have occurred over thousands of generations as well as cosmic temporalities in which the human registers as barely a blip. Thus it is not strange that scientists from this discipline should take the relatively long history of the Anthropos in mind, rather than just the past 250 years. As will be discussed, it is certainly true that while most of the damage done to the planet has been done since industrialization, the invention of the steam engine, and the proliferation of capitalism, the Anthropos has had a significant impact on the planet for a very long time. Before Columbus arrived in what is today known as America, the number of societies practicing agriculture and animal husbandry on this continent was so significant that they had begun a small but noticeable warming of Earth’s climate.3 In this way, the Anthropocene in fact predates the invention of the steam engine and the industrialization that Crutzen proposes as the beginning of this epoch, even if it is not until the introduction of what Andreas Malm refers to as fossil capital that it begins to have a truly significant effect on ecology.4

As the first term to recognize that human societies have long had an impact on planetary ecology, it remains a useful umbrella term. It is via this concept that humans, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, recognize that they have, through sheer numbers and reliance on the fossil fuel economy, “become a geological agent on the planet.”5 In this way, as observed by Jason W. Moore, the “Anthropocene sounds the alarm—and what an alarm it is!”6 Moore, as will be discussed in the part on Capitalocene, is one of many to have taken issue with the concept, but even critics of the concept do recognize the important role it has played for the sciences and in critical humanities and social sciences scholarship. As the most widely used denominator, it has made an entire generation aware of the price the planet is paying for the comforts generated by modernity. Because of its impact, even resistance to the term must necessarily engage with it at length, simply because of its by now pervasive influence. As T. J. Demos admits, albeit reluctantly, “the term Anthropocene is likely here to stay.”7 Also, while it is true that the generic nature of the Anthropocene can be misleading, it does, however, for those very same reasons, also allow for a wider range of subjects to be discussed under the heading of anthropogenic change that competing -cenes in their focus on one or the other may leave out. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued, even while critiquing it for its supposed blindness to questions of empire and the Global South, “the Anthropocene is both forward-looking and a future retrospective, characterized by ‘anticipatory logics’ and anticipatory mourning . . . [which] is constituted by a deep geological sense of the longue durée, as well as disjunctive special relations between the enormity of the planet and the experience of local place.”8 Thus DeLoughrey continues to find the term useful precisely because “the Anthropocene dictates that we need multiscalar theorizing of the human.”9

The essays included in this part address this problem both through theoretical discussions of the concept as such and via interrogations of gothic and horror texts where Anthropocene is the structuring concept. In the part’s opening chapter, titled “The Anthropocene,” Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock observes that gothic has become a privileged mode in the critical and cultural attempt to understand not just concerns about the climate crisis but the concept of the Anthropocene as such. Weinstock shows how three gothic master tropes—spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse—have become central to theoretical paradigms that struggle to understand both the ongoing, global, and increasingly catastrophic transformation of the Earth’s ecosystem and the complicity of the human in this development.

Michael Fuchs’s chapter “De-extinction: A Gothic Masternarrative for the Anthropocene” examines various de-extinction projects and the discourses surrounding them to explore visions of resurrection science as they have been reimagined in popular culture and vice versa. Fuchs argues that de-extinction epitomizes the Anthropocene in that the potential for the creation of Anthropocene specters of once-extinct animals promises (and threatens) to unlock a future in which the undead will literally walk the Earth again. In this, Fuchs suggests, we see an evocative merger of the gothic and the Anthropocene in “necrofaunal revenants” like once-extinct animals, such as the mammoth, resurrected, but he also asks poignant questions about the manner in which de-extinction as ideology can be seen to perpetuate human technological imperialism while also seeking to atone for it.

In “Lovecraft vs. VanderMeer: Posthuman Horror (and Hope?) in the Zone of Exception,” Rune Graulund argues that while the Anthropocene is often portrayed as unfolding in a state of emergency and exception, it can also be construed as the opposite. For, while the Anthropocene may seem to present a potentially horrifying new normal in which humans have gained a catastrophic upper hand over nature, the supposed dominance of the human species is in fact anything but. In an analysis of the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space” (1927), Graulund juxtaposes the terror of the nonhuman in weird fiction with the far more acceptant approach to the monstrous, the bestial, and the vegetative as seen in the fiction of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation (2014). Reading these two texts in the light of the exception zone, Graulund suggests that they exemplify two very different kinds of strategies for dealing with anthropogenic change, one of them dystopian, the other utopian.

In her chapter “Monstrous Megalodons of the Anthropocene: Extinction and Adaptation in Prehistoric Shark Fiction, 1974–2018,” Jennifer Schell examines the gothic representations of monstrous sharks and marine science and argues that these creatures rarely engage with the subversive potential of monstrosity; rather, they are foils for showcasing the power of white American masculinity, which triumphs over these massive predators by overcoming them and brutally slaughtering them. Within this narrative trajectory, man exerts supreme power over his environment and conquers threats posed by the environment in which he finds himself. In megalodon narratives, she asserts, gothic tropes are appropriated for reactionary political ends and are rarely used to espouse environmentalist agendas or progressive politics.

In the final chapter of this part, “A Violence ‘Just below the Skin’: Atmospheric Terror and Racial Ecologies from the African Anthropocene,” Esthie Hugo examines what she terms atmospheric racism. Reflecting on the broader problem of a world suffocating in literal as well as figurative terms—gasping for air on a planet suffering from air pollution, rising temperatures, and pandemics like Covid-19 targeting the respiratory system—Hugo’s chapter queries the politics and aesthetics of racial toxicity of atmospheric terror. Reading Nigerian author Ben Okri alongside the artistic portraits of Beninese photographer Fabrice Monteiro, Hugo lays bare the racialized experience of deathly atmospheric vulnerability as it is experienced through the “slow violence” of poisoned air, water, and land.