The 5-million-year epoch known as “March 2020” is behind us. What lies ahead? No one can say. One thing we do know, however, is that our editors can’t stop thinking about apocalypses, fictional and otherwise. Truth be told, we’ve been thinking about them—and writing about them—for a long time: apocalypse is a common theme in the speculative fiction we celebrate.
In the past, we’ve read apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories as imagined futures critiquing present discontents; as thought experiments asking what if it all comes crashing down?; as warnings that we must not let those futures come to pass; even, sometimes, as entertainment. Not entertainment in the ghastly sense of finding pleasure in the unfathomable suffering that must accompany the end of life as we know it, but in the peculiar, spine-shivering way that urban legends, horror stories, and street performers juggling fire on a tightrope evoke complicated thrills, equal parts fear and enchantment.
Now, our favorite apocalypse stories are cast in a different light. Gone is the psychic distance that softens the blow of immense tragedy. What if? has become What now?
And yet, in revisiting these stories, we’ve found something unexpected. Yes, they are more visceral, more immediate. But they are also strangely comforting. The feeling of warning has been supplanted by something more enduring: hope. Because any story in which humanity survives, no matter how dire the circumstances, is a story of hope; it is a promise of a future. In the crucible of catastrophe, survivors learn deeper truths about love, loyalty, and compassion.
This week, we open the Fiction Unbound archive to highlight a few of the books and authors that speak to the challenge before us. Reminders that in the midst of the storm, we can hold hands around our digital hearth and say to each other, “This too shall pass.”
Paolo Bacigalupi, photo © JT Thomas Photography
Interview with Paolo Bacigalupi 2016: Chilling Words of Warning
It’s the job of speculative writers to imagine the future. One that does this especially well is Paolo Bacigalupi. In this interview from 2016, he talks about his fascination with black swan events, that are defined by “the psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.” We’re experiencing just such an even right now.
“Characters in my books try to figure out the template for life now, what’s the actual narrative that is going on. In almost all my writing I’m interested in exploring the idea that we can think that the dominant narrative is going in one direction and then we get sideswiped by something else. I’m fascinated by black swans, the unanticipated event that changes everything. I’m particularly interested in the idea that we can get stuck thinking that we understand the world, barreling down these sort of strange narrative tunnels, not realizing that we’re missing important data.”
Pandemic Apocalypse, Pre and Post: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
We’ve written about Station Eleven a couple of times, here and here. This quiet book of grief and perseverance after the world has been turned upside down by an influenza pandemic has been haunting us since the video of quarantined citizens in Wuhan shouting encouragement to each other from their balconies made the rounds on the internet. Mandel wraps the page-turning plot in a meditation on letting go of one set of imagined futures to make room for another.
“Many worlds end on each page, not just pre- and post-pandemic apocalypse. The end of a marriage is an apocalypse, as is the end of childhood. The islands where the protagonists grew up and the islands of Station Eleven stand in for the worlds that exist and then collapse, connected by bridges of memory and art. All worlds end, that is given. The interesting thing is the survivors have a choice: to pine for the past or move forward.”
Hitting the Wrong Jackpot: The Peripheral and Agency, by William Gibson
While The Peripheral and its sequel, Agency, are about information-based time travel (a premise twice as cool as it sounds), both are haunted by the specter of a global apocalypse—a convergence event called “the Jackpot.” Ecological collapse, mass extinction, famine, civil unrest … and global contagion. Multiple pandemics, ravaging a species dependent on a complex network of systems, natural and manmade, that are revealed by the crisis to be more fragile than anyone thought possible. Technology saves us from extinction, but the true secret to survival isn’t time travel, molecular assemblers, or sentient AI—it’s cooperation.
Eco-Apocalypse Begets Human Apocalypse: Gold Fame Citrus, by Claire Vaye Watkins
Ah, yes, our other global crisis: climate change. It’s slower moving than a viral pandemic but no less real, because, you know, we’ve only got the one planet and the one ecosystem to sustain the complex web of life that sustains us. Watkins conjures a mesmerizing, slow-motion ecological apocalypse—a cataclysmic drought transforms the Mojave Desert into a sea of sand dunes that consumes whole swaths of the American Southwest. Civilization doesn’t collapse, but lots of other things do, including the State of California. When two lovers decide to escape California by crossing the dune sea, they find themselves tested by the environment in ways they don’t expect.
The World Will Never Be the Way It Was: The Book of M, by Peng Shepherd
In The Book of M, Peng Shepherd imagines a world devastated by a pandemic in which victims lose their shadows and with them, their memories. Aside from scenes of looted stores, war-zone cities, and the rampaging Statue of Liberty—which should emphasize that we really aren’t in any kind of apocalypse right now—The Book of M confronts a feeling all too real and immediate in this shock: the fear that things aren’t going to go back to easy after this. That we will be confronting fallouts and aftermaths for a long, long time. That our notions of hope, if they are to be resilient, have to incorporate a curiosity and courage around new ways of being.
Being in the World Is Justification Enough for Being: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Though it seems like a paradox, hope is never more resilient than in The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s bitter landscape of grief and ashes. When the Earth is a cold, dead place, why go on? Because the fact of being alive carries with it the promise of tomorrow—not a wishful future in which we are freed from all suffering and misfortune, but simply another day in which we are still alive:
“This is the most fundamental human hope, and perhaps the most optimistic. The hope that our existence matters and is meaningful in itself, even if the circumstances seem to negate that meaning. The hope that merely being in the world is justification enough for being.”
Postscript: Practical Advice for What to Hoard and What to Put in Your Bug Out Bag
What do you need when the apocalypse hits? Toilet paper, apparently. And a bug out bag may be good to keep in the trunk of the car if you live in an area prone to flood, fire, or battle. But when apocalypse that touches us all, where do we go?
We know the answer to that now: we stay home. The panic buying of N95 masks and toilet paper hasn’t helped the situation. Especially the masks, as health workers on the front lines are running out of personal protective equipment. Bacigalupi’s admonition is especially prescient in our tongue-in-cheek apocalypse-themed feature from 2016: “Bugging out is not a survival tactic. Solving the problem now is a survival tactic. Looking at our bad decisions now and not being dysfunctional is a survival tactic. We’re in this together.”
Hint: Ditch the bug out bag. Hoard social connections. Cooperate. Don’t be a cannibal.
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