Re: 2012, Zombies & The Singularity
by paolobacigalupi on Sep.10, 2009, under Paolo Bacigalupi
You know, Morgan, you’re probably asking the wrong person about this stuff.
But off the cuff, I’d point out that all of the disasters you cite are simply not going to happen. They’re storytelling tools of fantasy. They’re broadly designed to disengage a reader from the here and now and carry them far away. Which is great. And it’s also why stories of this type, and apocalypses and disasters of these types, will remain highly popular. Zombies/Machines that Take Over/The Oncoming Prophecy of Doooooom! They’ve been popular for decades now, though the zombie increase recently has been rather astonishing. Read someone like John Joseph Adams zombie anthology The Living Dead to get a good taste of brains, er, treatments of zombies in literature.
But I have to think that even though we can point to a few environmentally-related collapse stories, we aren’t very serious about it, and it doesn’t gain much ground in literature precisely because it’s a little too real. To the extent that environmental stories become absurd action stories (what was that global warming movie a few years ago? I’ve already forgotten, and the ebola-like outbreak movie? bleh.) you see environmental topics showing up as a factor, but mostly it’s to provide an action set-piece (Water World. ugh.)
The extent to which the environmental aspects of a story are relevant and uniquely connected to the plot makes for a much smaller subset of books. Mostly, it comes across as the old science fiction cliche where a the trusty six-shooter becomes a ray gun and the white horse becomes a star fighter. If you could do the story with the environmental components flipped to something else, then it’s not really an environment story. It’s just another action thriller.
And really, I doubt that more genuine stories of environmental collapse will gain much ground. The more relevant they are to our present, the more disturbing they are, which destroys their function as escapist literature. I’m sure we’ll be telling stories about zombies around our campfires while we ride camels through the desert of whatever real apocalypse we actually encounter, but we won’t tell stories about how our daughter got H1N1 and died miserably.
So books that I’d recommend? They’re all non-fiction. Read something like David Quammen’s astonishingly good exploration of speciation and extinction in Song of the Dodo. Read Jared Diamond’s fascinating Collapse. James Howard Kuntzler’s worst case scenario meditations on peak oil. Read Alan Weisman’s end of the world examination in The World Without Us. Those books do what good science fiction does. They will change the way you look at the world.
And as horror goes, they aren’t bad, either.
Related posts:
- 2012, Zombies & the Singularity Three trendy cataclysms in current speculative fiction disaster stories are zombie invasion, the 2012 “Mayan Prophecy” and the singularity (when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, which theoretically translates into Terminator-style Doomsday). Each has been turned into some very cool books. Max Brooks’ World War Z, Brian D’Amato’s In the Courts...
- Dramatic Utopia Paolo, we’d all like to predict a better future. The Grand Society or New Golden Age. Environmental problems are fixed. Diseases are cured. Wars have ended. I’m not sure if it is a realistic vision for some far future day or not. My question is how does a predictive Science...
- Re: The Windup Girl Thanks for having me here, Morgan. I really enjoyed it. “For those that haven’t read your work yet, what would you tell them to encourage checking out Windup Girl?” Bottom line, The Windup Girl is a GMO thriller/political intrigue set in a future Bangkok. And it’s pretty much guaranteed to...
- Greetings Hi Everyone, I’m Paolo Bacigalupi, and I’ll be hanging out here for the next couple weeks or until Morgan throws me off. I write science fiction almost exclusively, and mostly I focus on environmental topics–things like peak oil, global warming, chemical pollution, drought, GM foods… cheery stuff. No seriously, it’s...
6 Comments for this entry
Leave a Reply
Featured Book
From the author of the "New York Times"-bestselling Night Huntress series comes a sexy spinoff, in which Cat's and Bones' closest confidants are confronted with heart-stopping lust, love, and danger of their own.
September 10th, 2009 on 2:03 pm
I don’t know if I can readily agree that SF/F must be accessible as escapist literature. To do so destroys, or at the very least cheapens, a lot of very valuable, very highly acclaimed SF/F work that has come out in the past century, and relegates the role of SF/F as some form of under-genre, or a genre-that’s-not-quite-as-good-as-real-literature. It’s an attitude I find distasteful, because even to the extent that evident truths are masked or disguised in the form of cliches throughout speculative fiction, the fact remains that the speculative nature itself is more boldly and readily challenging to the world than any number of melodramatic, autobiographies of whoever recently overcame a drug addiction or troubled childhood or whatever the recent relevant political/social backdrop may be for Oprah’s book club this week.
That all may sound rambling, but I have very strong beliefs about the nature of SF/F and how it CAN be used, as opposed to how it is used, or sold, or packaged. All I think we need is something really different and really compelling that can bust down that old standby opinion of Men in Country Clubs that SF/F is a genre that can’t be taken seriously, packaged as it is as “escapist” literature.
September 10th, 2009 on 2:10 pm
As someone who is writing a zombiepocalypse novel (albeit from a fantastical perspective), this is a fascinating and useful conversation to follow.
I think Paolo has hit the mark with his observation that the closer to relevance a catastrophe is, the more unsettling it is to the reader. What makes movies like The Day After Tomorrow work (and I use that term loosely), is that the disaster is fairly far-fetched and functions as a context for adventure, making it as probable in a movie-goer’s mind as a quest for the Ark of the Covenant. There are a number of story and character elements that, when added to that, make disaster movies a form of escape, rather than a cautionary tale. They aren’t really about environmental collapse, but are tales of entertainment, and are both palatable and enjoyable to the viewer.
The same definitely goes for science fiction. Worlds of nuclear and environmental desolation have served as Adventurelands for quite a long time. I vividly remember devouring the Traveler series of post-apocalyptic shoot-’em-ups as a teenager, despite my paralyzing fear of nuclear war. Disaster was a pretext for the rise of a hero, and that’s what the novels were really about. Once they have submitted to that action-hero formula, those stories become digestable and uneasy questions are subsumed by the rush of conflict.
I would love to see less of that, and more tackling of the issues and possibilities that make us squirm, and maybe think harder about where we’re going. I think that both Diamond’s Collapse (despite some problems I have with it), and Weisman’s The World Without Us (which is one of the best non-fiction works I have read in the past few years) are challenging discussions of environmental & civilizational endpoints. I wish that more writers would step up and try to give us a sounder, more provocative picture of such possible endings, so that we aren’t just telling zombie stories around campfires in the future.
I have to write one of those now, I think :-).
September 10th, 2009 on 2:53 pm
Adam,
I’m not trying to say that Science Fiction is escapist literature, or that it must only be that. *Not at all.* That’s not why I write it, and it’s not why I love it.
What I am trying to say is that the way certain disaster concepts are contrived is inherently escapist (robots/zombies/random apocalypse takes over) either because of the fanciful scenario or because the “big idea” component becomes a reduced tool for the purpose of fulfilling cliche action plots. This is particularly true in cinema, where you see a lot of “big idea” stories actually turn out to be small on ideas, but big on explosions.
This is not what SF does, but what it’s been reduced to, in many cases. And I see this all the time with environmental topics. Once they get turned into story, they also get turned into vapid entertainments.
Again, I don’t mean to disparage Science Fiction, or the many excellent writers who use its tools. But please, save me from the zombies.
September 10th, 2009 on 6:19 pm
Ah, gotcha. I must have read that oppositely, and when my nerd-rage gets going, it’s hard to stop it.
September 10th, 2009 on 8:59 pm
Nerd-rage. lol. I love it.
September 10th, 2009 on 9:34 pm
But please, save me from the zombies.
Weirdly enough, I agree with you.
Seeing new movies such as Zombieland coming out make me shudder, mostly because of the glorification of slaughter and the comedic de-sensitization that the preview gives us. One thing zombies are good for is violence without consequence, for a heroic scenario where your protagonist can commit cool and interesting acts of butchery on human-like objects that are no longer considered persons. Whether virally infected or necropotently-animated, they stop being people (except when a scene can milk that for a few seconds for some sort of “poignancy”) and become animate punching bags. Sometimes there’s a message behind this, but not often.
Zombies have sometimes been used for a level of social commentary, but that’s often a gloss over a core of horror or scifi-ish action. In some stories they are a part of the changed world’s environment (I’m thinking off Kirkman’s The Walking Dead here), and function less as objects to be shot or cudgled than as obstacles to the restoration of order and comfort. They are still de-humanized, but serve a somewhat more interesting story function.
I think there is some potential left in zombies, for two reasons. One is the topic discussed earlier, the fact that, if I wrote a detailed environmental catastrophe story that was too realistic, people might not read it. But if instead it’s rendered more fantastical, in this case a shift in the global ecosystem that among other problems turns sick and dying humans into predators on the rest of the human poopulation, I can use a lot of the points made by writers like Diamond in a more allegorical fashion, using a familiar trope that gets turned on its head.
What you can do with that is the second reason I find zombies potentially compelling. Once you start to establish the ground rules (and all zombie stories have ground rules), there is a lot of space for subversion. Because they are so easy to use, so recognizable as a trope, I believe they have a lot of potential to shake a reader’s expectations if you come up with a consistent, developing subversion of accepted ideas about them. What if people infected with zombism eventually recover? What if they develop into something worse? If they are one sign of a changed ecosystem, what other changes are there? Is there more to worry about than shambling corpses? And what can you say about people’s perceptions, motivations, and actions through that? Properly done, it could be a rich territory to explore.
I agree that SF, particularly in cinema and TV, has been greatly reduced by backgrounding “big ideas” as contexts for gunfights and brawls. I think that we have more of an opportunity to recapture SF in fiction, although given current conditions that is sadly becoming more difficult.