'Is this the promised end?': Shakespeare and Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

In more optimistic scenarios, his works are performed on other planets (Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (1992) and Green Mars (1993)), are a pervasive presence in Star Trek (Lanier 2003: 65), and have delighted more than one alien audience and helped convince them that humans have some worth after all (compare Edith Friesner's 'Titus' (1994) with Dan Simmons' Muse of Fire (2007).) The long-running BBC radio show Desert Island Discs offers a familiar coupling of DeCook's two 'ideal archives', in which the works of Shakespeare, alongside the Bible, are granted to every guest castaway, who must then choose just one further favourite book. [...]there is a still a supernatural frisson when we see flickering images of high-tech warfare on their screens. The actors gaze at this scene through glass doors, and a few lines later this bubble of unreality is replicated when Kirsten, a child actor, is given a paperweight which had once been Leander's: 'It was a lump of glass with a storm cloud trapped inside' (15) This echoes Jeevan's sense of the snowy park possessing 'the underwater shine of a glass greenhouse dome' (11).