Dossier: “The Future of Threat is Forever”: Canadian Apocalyptic Fiction
This article analyzes Thomas King’s The Back of Turtle. See this issue’s introduction for full context regarding the study of King’s novel.
Patchwork Family Roles and Tropes in Canadian Apocalypse Literature
Apocalypse narratives, whether they are portrayed in cinema, shows, literature or children’s fiction, often feature a pattern of tropes that can be identified and analyzed. Authors continue to return to these same tropes because apocalypse narratives often reflect reality and projections of reality into the speculative. As Laura Delaney points out, one such recurring narrative is that of the chosen family, a depiction of a group of people brought together by the circumstances of the apocalypse, such as common trauma, feelings of desperation and isolation, the desire to survive, and knowledge of survivalist techniques. In Canadian apocalypse literature, the chosen family trope often presents itself in Indigenous speculative fiction, such as novels like Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle1See this issue’s introduction for full context regarding the study of King’s novel. and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, as these narratives revolve around healing and the share of knowledge within an apocalypse context that reflects the current injustices that Indigenous people face in Canada. Additionally, Catherine Leroux’s novel The Future focuses on a group of children struggling to survive in an apocalyptic Detroit in order to speculate on the effects of climate change on a future generation. Apocalypse narratives that feature characters who live alone or who survive by themselves are few and far between, because they do not relate to our natural desire to live with others. Stories of characters living in a group can also focus on each individual’s character traits, as well as how they interact with each other. Authors continuously come back to the chosen family trope because a narrative that portrays a family or a group of individuals surviving an apocalypse as a team mirrors humanity’s biological need for community and connection in hostile environments. These works also relate to the importance of creating a support system of trustworthy people in times of hardship.
Apocalypse narratives and speculative fiction in general are works in which authors can propose critiques of current climate action and political decisions that may steer society into the dystopian worlds they have created. Maria Manuel Lisboa writes about apocalyptic narratives and their evolution through history in her book The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture. As she examines the continuous revisiting of biblical narratives in apocalypse fiction, she states that, “even before it was actually practicable to destroy the entire planet, indeed since the dawn of earliest human consciousness, the fear of global catastrophe has informed the human psyche, resulting in persistent returns to cultural renditions of apocalypse” (18). Authors continue to use the same tropes in their apocalyptic stories because they are often repetitions of each other, but also reflections of real events and possible effects. As Manuel Lisboa explains, sacred texts have served as a basis for apocalyptic narratives, while writers build on them to attempt to explain catastrophic events. Due to the frequent mass-destruction events during the wars of the twentieth century coupled with the threat of extinction due to climate change, authors have been attempting to write apocalypse narratives to analyze human responses to political, environmental, and sociopolitical unrest. Our interpersonal relationships and the effects of world-ending events are reflected in apocalypse fiction.
Power in Numbers: Group Survival and Trust
Not only are individual characters’ traits or roles within the group similar, but the way in which these groups survive as a collective in all three novels shares many resemblances. The Back of the Turtle, The Marrow Thieves, and The Future all follow the power in numbers trope that is at the core of many fictional survival narratives that feature a group. Characters are drawn to others they believe they can trust, often getting excited when they find other possible survivors of the apocalypse that could join them, out of the hope that having more members would increase their chances of survival through the share of knowledges, chores, and responsibilities. However, their willingness to trust others from similar backgrounds often causes them to be, as Frenchie from The Marrow Thieves puts it, “…lulled into complacency by the color of skin and an accent that made home feel real” (132). Therefore, the groups often live in isolation and have little to no contact with others outside their group, because it is hard to discern who they can trust. The newly created families are often limited to the members who serve a specific role within the group. The children at the center of Leroux’s The Future live in a fictional Detroit that was never surrendered to the United States. They have created their own encampment in a park they call the Ravine that is completely isolated from adults who are looking to abuse or exploit them. Just like the sea people from The Back of the Turtle, the children steal food for survival, which leaves the only trace of their existence to others. Both groups manage to go almost completely unnoticed, although they are scared that they will be found by authority figures that are looking to arrest them (King 435), or commit violence against them. In contrast, the survivors in The Marrow Thieves live on the run as they are being chased and they could be easily found if they set up a permanent encampment.
A closer analysis of group dynamics in Canadian apocalypse literature allows for a deconstruction of the common patterns that can be observed in The Back of the Turtle, The Marrow Thieves, and The Future. There are recurring roles and traits of characters within the group that allow for their survival as well as to demonstrate typical interpersonal relationships in times of socioeconomic struggle. Manuel Lisboa illustrates why apocalyptic fiction frequently reflects life and why narratives are repeatedly similar across formats. She writes that:
[S]tories of apocalypse ultimately narrate us. It could not be otherwise, since we make them up. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that not only does the basic plot, mythical, theological, or sci-fi alike, always stays more or less the same, but in the inimical other, in the violent alien, whatever its shape or form, if we look closely, we find ourselves. (105)
Authors can therefore create a diverse cast of characters who are relatable, often precisely because of their less desirable characteristics. When typical family roles are renounced in the interest of survival or because families are separated, new groups form, and often each character has a specific predetermined role within the plot. Characters take on new roles within their chosen family unit in order to maximize the safety and survival of the group. Typical tropes can be identified as the male leader of the group and young or vulnerable dependents.
Gendered Leadership in the Chosen Family
The groups of survivors that are central to all three novels are all led or accompanied by an alpha male archetype typical of any narrative that follows a group. These men do not forcefully take command of the group, but rather naturally have essential survivalist knowledge that places them in the role of leader. They frequently act as teachers or as father figures for the younger members of the group. Miig acts as a stand-in father for the children he is travelling with, as they have all been orphaned by the state-sanctioned genocide of Indigenous peoples, or they never knew their fathers to begin with. Crisp from The Back of the Turtle and Solomon from The Future provide food and comfort to the more vulnerable and isolated groups, who are eventually integrated into the larger communities that they have created. Even Sonny from The Back of the Turtle, who is completely infatuated with his father even though he is absent, admits that “Mr. Crisp smells very much like Dad. Now that he thinks about it, Mr. Crisp has the same deep voice that Dad has. But Mr. Crisp is not Dad. … Still, Mr. Crisp is here and Dad is not” (486). Crisp begins to replace Sonny’s Dad as his father figure, as he is more present and is gentler with Sonny. For vulnerable people like Sonny, or people living in hiding, like the children of the Ravine, the sea people, and Frenchie’s father’s group, the alpha male archetype character is the intelligent, experienced shepherd to their scared, hunted, and directionless flock.
Authors tend to portray leaders and knowledge holders as masculine, and the decisions that women are allowed to have opinions about are usually only domestic in nature. It is possible that authors create their characters to have biases to demonstrate how gender roles are upheld within groups, even while the fate of the world is at stake. While observing Wab take care of the day’s hunt, Frenchie maintains that:
[A]s the only woman in the bunch, other than crazy old Minerva, the management of the cooking fell into her domain. Not that she had to cook everything herself, just that she got to say who did it and how. As the woman of the group, she was in charge of the important things. (37)
It is counterintuitive that Frenchie claims that domestic decisions are important because generally decisions around the group’s safety, such as choosing encampment locations, when to travel and in which direction, as well as communication with other groups are deemed more important. Frenchie is growing into the leader and knowledge holder’s role, as Miig decides that the young man is ready to hear the traumatic coming-to stories of each of the members (Dimaline 97-99). As Briohny Doyle states in her essay “The Apocalypse is Masculine: Masculinities in Crisis in Survivalist Film”:
[U]nfortunately, what is lost in this representation of masculinity fighting for survival in a time of tribulation is a dialogue between generations of men in which trauma associated with war as well as different understandings of masculinity can be articulated as well as any input from men of different cultures and sexual orientations and women. (7)
Miig transmits these traumatic stories to Frenchie without concern about how the young man might react. Miig’s actions prove Doyle’s argument that male characters often avoid discussing trauma in many forms as well as ensuring that knowledge also be shared with the young girls of the group. The leader of the group is, consciously or unconsciously, passing on harmful gender roles to the next generation of survivors. The alpha male characters tend to avoid asking women for advice and rarely relinquish actual group leadership to women, outside of just delegating domestic tasks to them. The alpha male archetype in apocalypse fiction mirrors men’s tendency in everyday situations to take the lead in group settings, regardless of what expertise or knowledge their female counterparts bring to the table.
Another example of highlighting gender roles and biases within groups of survivors in these apocalypse stories is in The Future. The children in the Ravine have a girl named Fiji as one of their leaders, because she is older and more knowledgeable than the other children. However, the other members do not take her advice as seriously as the other leader’s, who is a boy. When she begins to show signs of having started puberty, she is overthrown as leader by the other children. They even plot to ostracize her from the group when her physical features develop into those of a young woman. The children find it repulsive when their leader starts bleeding “’tween her legs” and developing “buds” (Leroux 164), so they begin to question her abilities as a leader, despite the fact that she holds more knowledge and has more experience than her male counterpart. As Doyle emphasizes, “apocalyptic threat, or the apocalyptic imagination operates in these texts as the inevitable, motivating context for the restoration of specific, gendered standards. This threat is also seen as part of a process of restoration of a natural order” (3). There is a trend in the science fiction genre in general that portrays men as strong leaders and women as those who need to be told what to do and protected. The way in which the children in The Future govern their group could be perceived as a critique of the promotion of gender roles in science fiction, especially in content that targets young adults. Clearly, the children of the Ravine have implicitly learned biases that have taught them that the female body is revolting and that feminine traits and womanhood are causes to expel a person from the group because they are different. They believe that to be able to survive in an apocalypse, a person must be if not male-presenting and masculine, then at the very least androgynous. For children, femininity is seen as a sign of weakness and masculine traits, such as strength, assertiveness, fearlessness, and lack of emotion are essential to staying alive in the apocalypse.
Children and Vulnerability in Apocalyptic Futures
People surviving the apocalypse together generally also welcome children into their group, though in the case of The Marrow Thieves and The Future, children make up a majority of the community. Young characters are central to both these novels because they both portray the effects on future generations of uncontrolled climate change and they offer relatable characters for readers of young adult fiction like The Marrow Thieves. Sam Haddow suggests in his book We All Die at the End that young people of today are being faced with climate disasters and environmental changes at a young age, and many do not know how to cope with this feeling of accelerated mortality. He claims that “there is a lot to take in and very little time in which to do it” (20). The Marrow Thieves and The Future portray societies in which children are not permitted to have a peaceful childhood as everyone should have. Because of apocalyptic events, their societies annex “childhood in order to annihilate it” (20). As Haddow explains, these future societies:
[do] not cosset the young in order to give them a few years of happiness before they shoulder off the burdens of adult life. Instead, it sutures childhood to kill off the child, allowing the awfulness of reality to consume the adult entirely. With their childhood obliterated, the adult is broken in half, saturated with anger and confounded that they have permanently lost the version of themselves who wasn’t. (21)
Children play a large role in these apocalyptic novels because their suffering in these narratives is meant to serve as a warning to the effects of environmental pollution, both in general fiction like The Future and young adult fiction like The Marrow Thieves. In the interest of preparing readers for inevitable climate disasters, authors use characters who experience poverty and exploitation due to the widespread consequences of these catastrophes. Haddow argues that to prevent children from being uneducated and unprepared for the realities of our current environment, they should, in fact, be reading fiction that features children attempting to cope with the effects of destruction, and that shielding young people from these disasters only intensifies issues. He writes that “everybody is born into this world and must live in it. If they do not do so as a child, their childhood risks being destroyed entirely, along with its lessons and the values needed to negotiate the strangeness of the adult world” (21). He later claims that “stories offer an intergenerational link between adults and children, a chance to fuel youthful imaginations without concealing the global ecological crises” (23). Therefore, apocalypse fiction becomes an essential tool for teaching children and adolescents about environmental realities, and for beginning conversations on climate action.
Furthermore, portraying society’s most vulnerable populations in apocalyptic fiction demonstrates the effects of natural disasters on people who are most susceptible to being exploited by adults. Children surviving the apocalypse on their own are seen as vulnerable, which is why the protective alpha male characters tend to invite them into their groups. However, young characters in The Marrow Thieves and in The Future are left to fend for themselves before they are found by their new patchwork families. Denis Newiak touches on authors’ tendency to leave their young characters to survive alone, which demonstrates their lack of safety in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds. He writes: “On nearer inspection, a recurring narrative strategy is remarkable: While adults in the fictional post-apocalyptic worlds of television often perish from its gnawing uncertainty, the youngest are left to take their fate into their own hands” (79). Although Gabriel in The Back of the Turtle is not a child, he is at a vulnerable and emotionally unstable stage in his life, which explains why Crisp and Mara have integrated him into their newly founded community by the end of the novel. His moral reflections that bring him into question the importance of his life and the impacts he has left on his community are relatable to readers who are at a crossroads in their lives. The lessons Gabriel learns warn readers not to sacrifice their values in exchange for the sake of scientific research and prestige. In this way, his vulnerable character is at the heart of King’s novel.
In conclusion, authors use the patchwork family trope as a way of illustrating how group dynamics change, but often remain the same, as society shifts into a state of crisis. Writers pose arguments about how stereotypes and biases are upheld while the world is ending. Apocalypse stories that feature groups of diverse individuals create narratives where each reader can picture themselves in the shoes of the people struggling to survive in an apocalypse. Novels that are science fiction, speculative, or apocalyptic in genre, yet are realistic enough for readers to imagine their own realities in the apocalyptic frame, offer the most effective cautionary tale against climate inaction that could lead to environmental disasters and societal collapse. Illustrating how society’s most vulnerable populations are often even more at risk of violence and exploitation in an apocalyptic setting shows how rapidly the world could turn to anarchy. Readers enjoy the fact that they can identify with the people who display admirable characteristics, such as bravery, intelligence, and kind-heartedness, and who also strive to protect the most vulnerable members of their group. However, authors use group dynamics and emotional connections to demonstrate that today’s society is not that far off from the apocalypse fiction that is meant to be speculative.
Works Cited
- Delaney, Laura. “The Concept of Chosen Community in The Marrow Thieves and The Back of The Turtle.” Blog post, ANGL4682, CLIC, Université de Moncton, 16 Mar. 2026, https://clic.umoncton.ca/d2l/le/239220/discussions/threads/205146/View [requires an UMoncton account to access]
- Dimaline, Cherie. The Marrow Thieves. Cormorant Books Inc., 2017.
- Doyle, Briohny. “The Apocalypse is Masculine: Masculinities in Crisis in Survivalist Film.” IM: Interactive Media, vol. 8, 2012. https://researchportal.murdoch.edu.au/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/The-apocalypse-is-masculine–Masculinities/991005544502707891.
- Haddow, Sam. We All Die at the End: Storytelling in the Climate Apocalypse, Manchester University Press, 2025. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umoncton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=31955495.
- King, Thomas. The Back of the Turtle. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2014.
- Leroux, Catherine. The Future. Translated by Susan Ouriou, Biblioasis, 2023.
- Manuel Lisboa, Maria. The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture. Open Book Publishers, 2011, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt0h.
- Newiak, Denis. “Youth on Its Own: Growing Up in a Lonely Post-Apocalyptic World.” Screening Children in Post-Apocalypse Film and Television, edited by Debbie Olson, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umoncton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30768138.
Notes
- 1See this issue’s introduction for full context regarding the study of King’s novel. ↩︎
About the Contributor
Laura Delaney
Laura Delaney (she/her) is a student currently pursuing a Bachelor of Education degree at Université de Moncton. Majoring in English, she hopes to teach English as a second language to Francophone students by promoting the development of critical thinking skills and encouraging authentic literary creativity. Patchwork Family Roles and Tropes…
Laura Delaney (she/her) is a student currently pursuing a Bachelor of Education degree at Université de Moncton. Majoring in English, she hopes to teach English as a second language to Francophone students by promoting the development of critical thinking skills and encouraging authentic literary creativity.
Patchwork Family Roles and Tropes in Canadian Apocalypse Literature is her first published work.
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