Into the Wastelands

“Only the wastelands can save us now.” An urban investigator has been commissioned by a global corporation to determine how cities worldwide are being engulfed and destroyed by the wastelands that are mysteriously appearing at their heart. They are being "wastelanded," generating turmoil and catastrophic technological meltdown in every global megalopolis. Throughout his inquiries he discovers that the world’s cities are becoming apocalyptic, experiencing ecocide. The investigator himself will have to travel to the "true north" to escape that endpoint. Today, urban imaginaries and speculative fictions often depict abandoned wastelands and ruinous cities that hold the expansive potential to engulf all urban and environmental space and render it entirely apocalyptic. In his novel Into the Wastelands Stephen Barber examines urgent aspects of our wasted realities through fictional narratives: How does the figure of the proliferating, infinitely expansive wasteland enable us to understand that point of rupture for urban futures? Does the wasteland allow us to accurately assess the contemporary dynamic between the apocalyptic and the urban?