Boom times for the end of the world

See, whose 2006 novel, "There Will Never Be Another You," centers on chemical warfare, said that even more important was the fearmongering that followed 9/11. The worry over anthrax and other threats, she said, "lodged in a sick part of our unconscious. It turned something ordinary, like 'yellow cake' or opening a letter, into something that would kill you in a fearsome and disgusting manner."

Literary issues are also at play.

"I think to a certain extent it's a delayed reaction," said Steve Erickson, a novelist who edits the Cal Arts journal Black Clock. "It's been going on in popular culture for a while, whether with the Clash's 'London Calling,' " which imagines a nuclear attack on Britain, "or 'Blade Runner,' which conveys a feeling that outside Los Angeles the rest of the world has kind of dropped off."

This new emphasis also has to do with a blurring of lines between literary and genre fiction, said Erickson. "Twenty years ago, there was still an insularity to a lot of fiction, especially work put out by the New York publishing houses. It was still doing Raymond Carver and that neorealist minimalist thing. It regarded the futurism that's kind of implicit in apocalyptic writing as kind of lowbrow."

Now, Erickson said, "there's a new generation of writers who are more involved with other things happening in the culture."

One of those writers is Matthew Sharpe, 44, whose second novel, "Jamestown," comes out next week and has been getting strong early reviews.

His uncomfortably funny book was written from Wesleyan University, where he teaches, out of anxiety for the future as well as what he calls "frustration and rage" about recent U.S. policy, he said. His bumbling settlers look for oil, food and water in scenes meant to highlight our current short-sightedness. "One item in the writers toolkit I draw on a lot," he said, "is hyperbole, to intensify and exaggerate the situation."

His exaggerations come from historical models. When Sharpe started researching the 1607 Jamestown settlement, which was mercantile in inspiration, for his job advising middle school teachers, he "was fascinated by the sheer extremity and weirdness of it: 100 guys, and they were all guys, getting on a boat and coming to a continent they expected to be so narrow that a river would run through to the Pacific. And expecting to find, like the Spanish, gold in the ground. And then they got here and promptly started dying."