Overview

Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security. Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts--as well as plenty of science fiction--she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others. Training for Catastrophe makes an important case for how these documents elicit consent and compliance. Thomas draws from a huge archive of texts to ask difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction.

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Lindsay Thomas is assistant professor of English at the University of Miami. She is also a principal investigator for WhatEvery1Says, a large-scale digital humanities project that explores public discourse about the humanities. Karen Peakes is a narrator and an actress who works primarily on stage in theaters in and around Philadelphia. She has also worked with the Folger Theatre in Washington, DC, and can be heard in several of the Folger's audio recordings of Shakespeare plays.

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