Eva Horn is professor of German literature and cultural history at the University of Vienna. She is the author of The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction (2013).
Tacking between the fictional and the real, Horn provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of why we are such avid consumers of dystopian disasters and what these not-so-artificial scenarios mean for our ability to contend with these portentous events. The Future as Catastrophe examines the content, sources, history, and function that the catastrophic has for politics, knowledge, and the human capacity to imagine its own destruction. -- Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University