Appalachia In Science Fiction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road And Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games

In literature, science fiction and Appalachia seem to exist in two separate—even opposing—worlds. Science fiction is a genre typically devoted to technology and an imaginary future. The Appalachian region, on the other hand, is often celebrated for its roots in tradition and history. Yet there are a number of literary works where science fiction and Appalachia not only cross paths, but converge. Using an ecocritical approach, this study focuses on two recent science fiction texts set in southern Appalachia—Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel The Hunger Games—their treatment of place, otherness, and the impact of human modernization and technology on the post-apocalyptic futures envisioned in the works. The emotional power of these novels, similar to other science fiction works set in Appalachia, lies in the startling and often uneasy convergence of tradition and innovation, of past and future—of what was, is, and may be—and all that can be lost along the way.