Ruins are what remains when anthropocentric dreams of ultimate power over space come to an abrupt end.

Ruins sing of radical hope in end times, suggesting an end to humankind, but also to species extinction, while opening spaces for finally “making kin”.

The Ruins series draws inspiration from two countercultural concepts, whose contrasting views speak to the ambivalences embodied by ruins.

The Solarpunk genre considers  “infrastructure as a form of resistance” and expresses a  commitment to  “counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.”

In contrast, the Dark Mountain Project aligns with collapsology and anticivilization when stating

“Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.  […]
There is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that Western civilisation – which has set the terms for global civilisation—was never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of that civilisation. Something upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and which they have all trained themselves not to see.”

Influenced by these mindsets, the Ruins series embraces the joys and despairs of collapsology, abyssal thinking, and postapocalyptic thought. Moving between nihilism and radical hope this series invites manuscripts that move across and beyond the limitations of academic writing. Comics and graphic novels express a desire to redesign space, agency and temporality and this is just what this series aims to explore. Likewise, genres like postapocalyptic science fiction, speculative fiction, weird fiction, or Afrikan futurism create pathways to envisioning near-future utopias, often taking ruins as breeding grounds for future-making.

The book series is curated by  Franziska Müller, who will review proposals. Please fill out the Rupture Press book proposal form and send an expressions of interest to rupturepress[AT]proton.me. In the email subject heading please write: RUINS: [Proposed manuscript title].

References:

Dark Mountain Project: Dark Mountain Manifesto https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/

Regenerative Design: A Solarpunk Manifesto https://www.re-des.org/es/a-solarpunk-manifesto/

Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto: https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/

Waldow, V., Bargués, P., & Chandler, D. (Eds.). (2024). Hope in the Anthropocene: Agency, governance and negation. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.