Civilization and/or Barbarism in Magnason, Atwood and Houellebecq

Andri Snær Magnason’s LoveStar (2002), Margaret Atwood’s Maddadam trilogy (2003-2013) and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005) propose three hypotheses for the future of humanity. While Magnason imagines the consequences of a series of technological breakthroughs, Atwood and Houellebecq dramatize the aftermath of, respectively, health and environmental crises. All of them emphasize the dominance of not only technology, but also capitalism and consumerism.
The types of humans and societies resulting from unrestrained technological breakthrough or genetic engineering – Magnason’s ‘wireless men’, Atwood’s ‘crakers’ and Houellebecq’s ‘neohumans’ – may differ greatly. Yet, each in they own way, these three authors question the notions of civilization and barbarism and the relevance of this dichotomy. Some characters oscillate between them; others seem to be their archetypes (e.g. Houellebecq’s post-apocalyptic primitive humans); others allow associating this dichotomy with – and therefore question – other ones: humanity and cruelty, reason and passion, masculine and feminine, light and darkness, good and evil, etc.
The way in which each author imagines the future of our race and situates it on the civilization/barbarism spectrum will be the object of this study, which will rely on the reading of the three aforementioned novels as well as theoretical works about the civilization and barbarism and the posthuman.