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?
Stephen Barber ist derzeit Fellow am Käte Hamburger Kolleg für Apokalyptische und Postapokalyptische Studien an der Universität Heidelberg. Ansonsten ist er Professor für Kunst und Film und Co-Direktor des Visual Culture Research Centre an der Kingston University in London. Er ist Autor von drei bereits bei Diaphanes erschienenen Büchern - White Noise Ballrooms (2018) Film's Ghosts (2019) und The Projectionists (2020) - und mehreren in Vorbereitung befindlichen Büchern, darunter Wasteland/Apocalypse. Außerdem hat er für Diaphanes zwei Bücher mit Schriften von Antonin Artaud - Artaud 1937 Apocalypse (2018) und A Sinister Assassin (2023) - übersetzt. Seine Bücher wurden von der britischen Zeitung The Times als "brillant, tiefgründig und provokativ" beschrieben.
"Beginning in 1993 with Artaud: Blows and Bombs, Stephen Barber has quietly, independently forged one of the most
singular and enriching bodies of work in contemporary writing."-David Peace
