In Herman Melville’s whale-obsessed novel Moby-Dick; or, the Whale, whales exist within the conjunction of the transcendental and the material to embody something comparable to an apocalyptic end of human history, imagination, and industry. Suitably, “Moby-Dick’s Eschatological Animal Apocalypse" situates itself within religious and ecological Melvillean criticism to rethink the whale’s symbolic allness as symptomatizing anthropocentric or human-centered discourses surrounding extinction and extraction. I argue that these approaches are simultaneously correct and incomplete insofar as Moby-Dick textualizes the whale’s multivalent status as religious symbol, agential animal, and economic product. Whales, instead, are a fleshly noneness of violently dismembered, dismembering bodies in what I view as an animalized apocalypse. By deploying a materialist reading of messianic eschatology, this essay demonstrates that Melville critiques anthropocentric abstraction with three biblical tropes. Through disembodied prophecy, anthropogenic violence on unseen whale bodies returns. Through an industrialized Book of Nature, whales as embodied fragments cannibalize anthropocentric taxonomies. And through Moby Dick as a vengeful God, whales parallel antagonisms with nature to efface human bodies and co-opt the text. This analysis contrasts the novel with illustrations by Matt Kish to exposit how whales’ abstracted physicality simultaneously enfleshes and complicates cultural discourses. Moby-Dick’s apocalypse references mass cetacean slaughter and the constructedness of how history is told. I define Melville’s animal apocalypse, therefore, as the revelation that human conceptions of the nonhuman world are fictions based in human mastery. But rather than salvation, the novel envisions a deanthropocentric if limited future based in textual and material salvage.

Often in speculative fiction (sf), the Earth is imagined as animate or elements of the natural world exhibit supernatural forms of agency. The idea of planetary animacy in American environmentalism is linked to Gaia theory, which poses that Earth is an agential, feeling, and holistic planetary synecdoche. What is missing from the history of Gaia theory, however, is an account of racialization. "The Broken Earth" suggests that the vexed history of Gaia theory helps us think about what The Broken Earth is doing and how magic estranges our imagination of Earth. I argue that N. K. Jemisin uses magic as an sf motif for planetary animacy, but complicates ideas of ecological interconnection associated with seeing the planet as a synecdoche. By darkening Gaia, in what I define as a speculative history of magic, the trilogy exposes the raced violence of the human as an ontological category in Western thought. Ambiguous magic is a heuristic of planetary animacy, symptom of racialized dehumanization, and metonymic articulation of apocalypse associated with black nihilist thought and indigenous science. Yet this study offers that Jemisin revises Gaia by enchanting its racialized history to theorize inhuman, intercultural planetary animacy in the Anthropocene.