In a recent New York Times blog entry entitled “Waiting for the Bomb to Drop,” Paul Saint-Amour writes what amounts to an addendum to his new book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, and Encyclopedic Form. In this short piece, he outlines the difficult realities of readying oneself for inevitable doom in the twenty-first century, tracing the affective state of constant and incessant worry from drone warfare to ecological collapse. He writes, for instance, that the immanent threat presented by drones produces Pakistani civilians who suffer from “sleeplessness, bad dreams, loss of appetite, fainting, amplified startle reactions, outbursts of anger and emotional breakdowns” (2015). But even when drones are not attacking, he asserts, the potential for violence and surveillance has become a part of everyday life.

Turning to the ecological, Saint-Amour articulates a crucial connection between drone warfare and climate change: like the costs of warfare, the geographical effects of...

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