Abstract: As one of the major narrative modes of English climate fiction, post-apocalyptic writing began to flourish in the twenty-first century. Post-apocalyptic speculative fiction, as a literary response to climate change in the Anthropocene, reflects on the dire impacts of Anthropocentrism on humans, non-humans, nature, society, and the Earth, placing increasing emphasis on the entangled relationship between humans and non-humans in the globalized risk society. Taking global climate change and the unequal distribution of resources into consideration, twenty-first-century English speculative fictionists use the dystopian narrative mode to caution readers and emphasize the importance of interdependence among humans and non-humans. This
article first discusses the three turns of New Materialism and then interprets three post-apocalyptic novels, i.e., Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven respectively, from the lens of New Materialism to explore the ethical messages conveyed in their envisioning of the future world.

Key words: post-apocalyptic speculative fiction, New Materialism, The Windup Girl, Oryx and Crake, Station Eleven