Hybrid Futures Beyond Collapse: Ecological and Posthuman Imaginaries in Veronica Rossi’s "Under the Never Sky" and Julianna Baggott’s "Pure"

This article examines how Veronica Rossi’s Under the Never Sky (2012) and Julianna Baggott’s Pure (2012) employ bodily hybridity to resist apocalyptic narratives and envision ecotopian futures. I argue that these novels portray environmental catastrophe not only as ecosystem collapse but as transformation of bodies and identities. Their protagonists, Aria and Pressia, resist ideologies of purity by inhabiting hybrid bodies that ground survival in environmental connection and interspecies openness. Drawing on ecofeminist, posthumanist and material ecocritical perspectives, I show how both texts refuse apocalyptic closure, staging instead what Haraway terms “staying with the trouble”. These YA texts offer young readers tools to imagine unfinished, vulnerable and ecologically entangled futures, in which hybridity itself constitutes an ecotopian horizon where survival is inseparable from care and coexistence.