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Lathe of Heaven ; the universe responds to his effective dreams, often in unexpected ways that give rise to more problems, but otherwise it stands aloof, and help has to come from outer space. Resolution requires an analogous but grander anomaly in Coupland: a teenage ghost, a fake apocalypse. By the time of the carnivalesque Kraken , however, we can speak of a release of human fearlessness in the face of apocalypses, and here the universe is “persuadable,” though it seems to be only by luck that what persuades it is the version of itself that Darwin advanced, rather than the more violent versions on offer in the world of the novel. The trajectory from The Lathe of Heaven to Kraken is, then, one that illuminates the issues at stake with contemporary apocalypse, because of the variations played on the relations between the human dream of apocalypse and the universe’s responses to it.
    These novels further suggest that the ordinary cannot be imagined without being put into relation with the banal and commodified. It is this contemporary condition that challenges Coupland and Atwood, in particular, calling forth their strongest diagnoses. Both Coupland and Atwood give us bizarre and weird worlds, but make us recognize them as our daily and familiar creations, not as alternatives. In the society of Oryx and Crake language operates to conceal and trivialize the horribleness of the products of science and commodity culture; Snowman’s ordinariness is mediocrity at best, and Oryx, the elusive outsider to the system in this novel, does no more than haunt the aftermath of disaster. Coupland’s dealings with the banalities of consumer culture in Girlfriend are ambiguous, and incite him to a series of risky narrative moves that only just come off. In this regard Miéville’s tactic in Kraken is noteworthy in its difference: Miéville seeks instead to redeem and revitalize the banal in ordinary things and to knit them into a thoroughgoing erasure of and play with the blurring of ontological boundaries. Kraken thus builds an alternative to our current world not out of extremity or radical difference, but out of its most familiar and most ordinary bits and pieces—and the effect is freeing.
    Notes
    Javier Marías, Written Lives , trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (London: New Directions, 2006), 99.
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    1 . Perry Anderson, “The Force of the Anomaly,” London Review of Books , April 26, 2012, 3–13 (8).
    2 . Brian Stableford, “Man-Made Catastrophes,” in The End of the World , ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 126.
    3 . Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 160.
    4 . China Miéville, Kraken (London: Pan, 2010), 78.
    5 . Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Avon Books, 1997).
    6 . Thanks to Rachel Ellis for discussions about Coupland.
    7 . Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 63. Additional references to this work in this section will be provided by parenthetical citation.
    8 . Ibid., 267–68.
    9 . Linus asks Richard what is the difference between the afterlife and the future:
    â€œThe difference,” I said, “is that the afterworld is all about infinity; the future is only about changes on this world—fashion and machines and architecture.” We were working on a TV movie about angels coming down to Earth to help housewives. (92)
    10 . Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 27 and throughout. Future references to this work in this section will be given in parenthetical citation.
    11 . See Veronica Hollinger, “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition,” Science Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (2006): 452–72. Hollinger suggests that it is almost as if Snowman is the only “real