Babel Clash

It’s been a lot of fun writing about apocalypses for the last two weeks. It was a chance to survey that (sometimes blasted) terrain and talk about why so many of those mostly fatalistic visions for humanity have enjoyed continued popularity, as well as an opportunity to offer up some books and movies that I think have slipped under the radar.

It’s also afforded me an opportunity to organize my thoughts on the nature and appeal of postapocalyptic stories in general. These scenarios have fascinated me since I was a child, and have played a role in shaping a great deal of my own fiction.

I’ve enjoyed our exchanges in the post Comments as much as I’ve enjoyed writing the posts themselves, and I hope that my sometimes-playful, sometimes-academic takes on these themes will lead readers to check out my postapocalyptic fantasy novels Ariel and Elegy Beach.

Ariel posits a sudden, simple Change in which our present technology simply stops, and a new set of laws (let’s call them magic) takes its place. There was nothing quite like Ariel when it was published in 1983 — a combination of contemporary landscape and quest-fantasy archetypes — and I am enormously gratified at the cult status the novel has garnered over the years. That it is back in print and well-received (and with restored material and a nice long afterword, too) is just big moby kewl.

Elegy Beach is a more mature examination of the scenario in Ariel, taking place nearly 30 years after this Change and dealing with the sad and sometimes angry puzzlement of an older generation as it realizes that the newer generation feels no sense of loss toward a world they never experienced, nor any obligation to preserve it. Alien encampments regarding one another across a gulf.

For all this highfalutin’ talk it’s also a road movie up the California coast, with warrior-poet centaurs, resurrected Goodyear blimps and Amtrak sleeper cars, a postapocalyptic rave in the ruins of the Del Mar racetrack (much of it written in 4/4 time), and a lyric obsession with the poetry of decay.

You’re also invited to visit the Ariel website and the Elegy Beach website, where you can read chapters, listen to audiobook chapters, and even follow the route of the books with real-time satellite imagery using customized Google Earth maps. It’s all downloadable, too.

I want to thank Morgan Burns and Borders for inviting me to talk about one of my favorite subjects (and for two weeks!), and thank you all for your comments and for coming along on this journey into the stark, brilliant, disturbing, and sometimes funny terra incognita at world’s end. Perhaps if I come knocking at your bomb shelter one day, you’ll let me in.

Steve, thank you once again for all of the great posts and for spending time with us on Babel Clash.  Good luck with Elegy Beach and other books to come.  I’m looking forward to seeing what you try next.

Our next guest is John Joseph Adams, highly regarded editor and critic.  He has edited several highly successful anthologies, include Wastelands, Federations, By Blood We Live and the brand new Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Tune in tomorrow to learn our next topic.

photo by waldemar

I grew up in the shadow of mushroom clouds. If you’re under 30, it may be difficult to understand how inevitable nuclear annihilation seemed back then.  We were sleeping in the atomic bed our parents had made in World War II, our dreams invaded by visions of sudden light and inescapable heat. Social theorists and psychologists offered explanations and hypotheses, but the obvious one never seemed to be proffered: The bombs were real. The missiles in their silos were real. We weren’t making this crap up. They were aimed at us, and within them slept annihilation forged by our own minds yet paradoxically inconceivable.

Then the Cold War receded and the world went online. Geographic borders became less relevant; multiculturalism became the watchword of the nascent global village. Sudden light and inescapable heat no longer usurped our dreams.

Then began a series of events that worked their way into the public consciousness. The comet Shoemaker-Levy strafed Jupiter and the public was made viscerally aware that there but for the grace of god and an accident of orbital mechanics go us. Paleontologists and geologists began proving that extraterrestrial strikes hadn’t just wiped out the dinosaurs, they’d wiped out damn near everything — and more than a few times, too. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has catalogued some 5,500 proximate orbiting objects, 1,000 of which represent a genuine threat. We may have got this far by simple virtue of being sandwiched between falling rocks.

Meantime epidemiologists realized humanity was overdue for a global pandemic, probably a mutated flu strain. The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed at least 50 million people (100 million, by some estimates) — in an age far less accustomed to readily available international travel.

And is it hot in here, or is it just us? The Northwest Passage opened up for the first time in recorded history. Sea levels rose. Species began migrating toward the equator. Extinction rates increased — not all of them due to climate change, either. Humanity’s very biomass was affecting the planet. The amount of grain it takes to feed the cows that feed us affects the food chain, the landscape, the atmosphere. People started buying electric cars as some kid of Band-Aid and blithely ignored the fact that most electricity is produced by burning coal (fossil fuel takes on a whole new meaning now, dunnit?).

And for the first time in human history more people lived in cities than out of them. Emergent digital infrastructures began migrating not only information but culture itself to a form that depended entirely upon an interdependent foundation of technological sophistication: Digital media and the Internet.

Things were looking kind of frail.

Only a generation ago our biggest worry was blowing ourselves up. Now we have evidence from a number of disparate sources that this fear is really a kind of hubris, a form of self importance. Because we can survive our technological and sociological adolescence and the universe can still  smoosh us like a tick at any time. Big rocks from space can smash our little anthill. Gamma radiation from a sun that went supernova about the time the Visigoths were knocking at Rome’s door can sleet through us and end our overpopulation worries in a couple of generations. Free-riding viruses treat us as public transportation and discard their vehicles when they’re done with them. Solar flares can swing for the centerfield wall. The planet itself can run a fever and send us packing.

And we might make such cosmic worries moot with our own two hands, because it’s possible we’ve gotten too smart for our own good — what a friend of mine calls Monkey with a Gun. One hiccup on a gene-slice alteration can uncoil a billion years of DNA. One glitch in a nanobot can run rampant through the species. The torch we pass now runs on electricity. Civilization is built on quicksand. Humanity is a house of cards. I believe its increasing interconnectedness and interdependence is almost entirely good for it (though ultimately worrisome for independent cultural survival), because it allows us to build up survivable resistance in ways far beyond those that defeat mere bacteria. I also think it’s gonna be a photo finish however it turns out.

Artists and opportunists, preachers and con men, futurists and fabulists, entertainers and infomercials have surveyed this ripe and artificed terrain and asked themselves, What if all this stops? Do we eat, drink, and make merry? Do we survive? How? Does our planet survive us even if we do? Or is the end of much of life on earth the price we pay for monomaniacal evolutionary success? How can we flourish without destroying what surrounds us? Because our very success is a kind of catastrophe in the making. A slow-motion apocalypse.

We are a worried people dreaming out loud. We buy our dreams of heat and light. We go to bookstores. We go to theaters. These are our training manuals. Our collective rehearsals. In silent witness we practice our emergency preparedness drills.  There is our reality-testing. There indeed may be our reality itself.

A Buddhist maxim says to live your life as if you are already dead. Perhaps our civilization is in the throes of learning that as well.

There is a subgenre of postapocalyptic scenarios that contains all of the elements I’ve previously discussed — societal breakdown, survivalism, moral quandary of looter/ predator vs. self sufficiency and altruism, questions of individual usefulness and the lengths to which you might go to in order to survive, entrenched technophiles vs. barbarians at the gate — and which implicitly contains all those elements’ fascination.  But this subgenre also contains an additional element that I believe accounts for its enormous popularity, outpacing all the other end-of-the-world scenarios combined:  The zombie apocalypse.

Zombie movies and books existed well before George Romero got hold of them and forever changed the iconography of the walking dead in the popular consciousness in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Plenty of earlier works featured zombies, usually as bastardized or misunderstood interpretations of the Vodoun zombi, a corpse reanimated by a possessing spirit. These were inevitably depicted as mindless shambling slaves, and the horror they contained for their audience was the fear of being a hypnotized acolyte, a helpless laborer.

What Romero brought to this party was global contagion, insatiable flesh-gnoshing, and the zombie equivalent of a vampire’s wooden stake or a werewolf’s silver bullet: The Bullet in the Head. Suddenly zombies weren’t isolated creepies a la The Mummy, they were everywhere, they were hard to stop, they wanted to eat you, and you could become one of them. All humanity was now Other, estranged, alienated, paranoid, susceptible.

This aspect wasn’t entirely original with Romero. Change “vampire” to “zombie” in Matheson’s classic I Am Legend and you pretty much have Dawn of the Dead, published in 1954. So what’s the difference? What made post-Romero zombies the mac daddy of apocalypse scenarios?

When the original Battlestar Galactica was in production, the network wouldn’t allow the depiction of wholesale slaughter of humanoid creatures, especially as the show’s demographic was considered to skew young. The solution was to create a race of robots: The Cylons. Because you can slag robots till your trigger finger just won’t pull anymore and no one will bat an eye. Not even the network standards & practices people.

Zombies are Cylons. They’re people you have permission to kill.  Because they ain’t people no more. And the standards & practices people of society at large not only won’t bat an eye when you slaughter them, they’ll cheer you on as a champion of the human race.

It’s no coincidence that zombie-hunting scenarios have long enjoyed videogame popularity. Here’s a first-person shooter that lets you make gnarly blue heads eat hot lead to your heart’s content and not feel a twinge of regret about it. Hell, you’re a hero.

The zombie apocalypse doesn’t just make you ask What would I do? It makes you say Hell yes I’d do it! Gimme a crowbar — I’m gonna bust into that gunshop. It’s no accident these books and movies emphasize variety and novelty — sometimes black-comedically — in the depiction of ways to whack deadheads. You get to act out your every free-floating hostility, every pent-up road-rage fantasy, every hell-with-all-of-you impulse. You have a free ticket to go postal. You get the hot babe and the Escape Chopper.

Zombies. The apocalypse we can all greet wtih open arms and loaded guns.

Steve,

Thank you for taking the time to join us on Babel Clash these past two weeks.  I’ve enjoyed the posts, and I’ve spoken to others who’ve really liked them, too.

Sometime before you go, in the next couple of days, is there anything more that you’d like to say about Ariel and Elegy Beach?  This is good stuff, and I’m hopeful that Babel Clash’s readers will give them a chance.  Both are available online and in all Borders stores.

Apart from the personal appeal or romance of apocalyptic fiction and movies (which I also hope we’ve demonstrated is markedly divorced from the actuality of any likely apocalypse itself), there’s a sociological, even anthropological take implicit in these scenarios — the good ones, anyhow — that I find much more interesting: Postapocalyptic entertainment (the fact that this isn’t an oxymoron is borderline terrifying, when you think about it) examines the question of who we are — as a society and as individuals — when the rules are suddenly gone. How much of people’s actions are thwarted, tempered, or abetted by fear of judgement, retribution, punishment, by innate morality, by necessity? How civilized are we in the absence of civilization?

(Curiously, though many books and movies feature characters who are predators, looters, or “barbarians at the gate,” I can’t recall encountering one that charts a character’s progression [maybe regression is a better word] from pre-disaster citizen to cannibal looter.  Hmm.)

These questions and themes are why I think of Lord of the Flies as a postapocalyptic novel, whereas Robinson Crusoe most certainly is not.

The bleaker, more fundamental, more nihilistic explorations of these scenarios go beyond asking How will you survive? to asking Why would you? To positing the irretrievable end of humanity, sometimes of all earthly life, and wondering if the instinct to survive is, by that point, a senseless acting-out of genetic instructions. (If you came here wanting one of them there feelgood kickass apocalypses, well — oopsy.)

The answer, of course, is hope. Hope springs eternal even where nature itself does not. Yay us.

So I’ve dipped my toe in the postapocalyptic water over the last week to offer a brief survey of books and movies that I think are important in the After-the-Fall canon. Of necessity I’ve left out a bunch that I’d love to discuss because they’re just plain fun (Night of the Comet, the Resident Evil movies, “A Boy and His Dog,” a ton more). But as a foundation for talking about what in the world could be so appealing about the end of the world, I think we’ve got a broad spectrum of approaches and scenarios here.

So what’s the appeal of the apocalypse?

Generally, and most obviously, is the What Would I Do? question. What steps would I take and to what lengths would I go to flee the nukes, ward off zombies, quarantine myself from plague, fight the aliens, hide from the comet strike (good luck with that one)? Could I beat this rap? And if I did, how would I stay alive in the aftermath? Avoid starvation, radiation, enslavement, being eaten, freezing/ burning/being raygunned to death? Am I a loner, a predator, a rebuilder?

A necessary component question that, revealingly, people seldom seem to ask themselves is, Why should someone let me in his bomb shelter? In other words, what do I have to offer the immediate situation and the long-term process of survival and rebuilding? It’s like a big-budget version of that ruthless, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? party-game gigglefest and marriage-ender, “Lifeboat.”

When I wrote my first novel, Ariel, at the ripe old age of 19, I set out to write a Boys’ Adventure Story about the coolness of getting by in the postapocalyptic world. As I researched and thought about what it would really be like, the book itself began to show me that my initial instincts were misguided:

Because we lived away from the city, I sometimes walked down the street to the canal, and it was easy, with no cars coming and no city noises, to pretend something had wiped everybody out. Everybody but me. I think I wanted it that way. I thought up endless scenarios: the typical and clichéd ones of nuclear annihilation, others involving humankind wiped out by mutant viruses, bacteriological warfare, invading aliens, or disappearance in some great exodus I’d somehow missed out on.

But I’d never figured on anything like the Change. And when it happened it turned out to be nothing like what I’d wanted all along. It wasn’t some grand and glorious heroic struggle, One Man’s Fight for Survival. It was work, and it hurt — emotionally and physically. I never found out what happened to some people I cared for very much. The end of the world turned out to be something I preferred to fantasize about rather than experience. In that wandering time before I met Ariel there was one thought that often ran through my head: I’d always wanted to be alone like this, but I’d never realized it would be so lonely.

That was about when I realized that the writer in me wanted to subvert the notion of survival as somehow romantic. The vast majority of postapocalyptic movies and books contain an element (if not an outright assumption) of “Wouldn’t it be cool if this happened?” (Ariel is certainly guilty of this.) Even the more dour ones mine the huge pathos of “love at the end of time,” or at least laud the human spirit in the face of cosmic indifference. I believe one of the reasons McCarthy’s The Road has generated such interest is precisely because it is one of the few such works that contains not an ounce of romanticisim whatsoever.

Next time we’ll go from personal to anthropological. Woo hoo!

What’s your choice for a potential 8th sign of the apocalypse, referring to sci-fi and fantasy?

My pick:  George R. R. Martin releases A Dance With Dragons and then surprises us with the next volume one year later.

Don’t worry, I’m just kidding around here.  I love that series.   I miss it, but it will be worth the wait.  Can’t wait to see the TV show come to HBO.

Today I conclude my brief look at movies I think have made significant contributions to Apocalypse Cinema.

The Omega Man. Based on Richad Matheson’s classic I Am Legend, Charlton Heston chows down on scenery as the last man on earth after a weaponized disease wipes out most of humanity, leaving behind only demented survivors bent on killing Heston’s Robert Neville. The 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders were still very much on Hollywood’s mind when The Omega Man was released (1971), and Anthony Zerbe’s terrific take on a charismatic Manson-esque leader of “the Family” of silver-eyed mutant technophobe survivors who pursue Neville is a perfect foil for Heston’s declamatory style. An allegory of the hippie back-to-nature movement vs. Heston’s usurping Modern Machine Man, The Omega Man also manages to reflect many other movements that were shaping the culture (counter- and otherwise) at the time — Woodstock, Easy Rider, civil rights — in a cheapo backlot film that manages to work in spite of itself. Featuring a great score by Ron Grainer that was unavailable for decades, The Omega Man is admittedly dated and reaching, but somehow it still works for me — maybe because it was my favorite movie in the whole wide world when I was eleven.

I Am Legend. The Big Hollywood production of Matheson’s classic novel had a storied and problematic gestation — at one point it was slated to star Arnold Schwarzenegger and be directed by Ridley Scott — but the final result starring Will Smith is surprisingly good and contains some setpieces that are absolute classics, if you can get past the unacceptably fake CG rave-style zombies. (To its credit, the production tried using madeup actors, but they were shooting in Manhattan in November with nearly nude extras and the whole thing got just plain dangerous.) Dead Manhattan has held a glorious poetry of decay for apocalyptic fiction at least as far back as Stephen Vincent Benet’s seminal 1937 “By the Waters of Babylon” (aka “The Place of the Gods,” shamelessly cadged by Andre Norton for Star Man’s Son [1953], aka Daybreak 2250 A.D., and an early influence on me), and this is the first movie to get it right. Subtly featuring grass growng through the pavement and the unnerving wrongness of pervasive cricket chirps throughout the cityscape — clearly someone did his homework and read Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us — the imagery of urban desolation should have gotten costar billing.

To my mind, I Am Legend’s dirty little secret is that it is clearly a remake of The Omega Man; I’d be willing to bet no one involved in the production ever read the Matheson novel (or, if they did, it was decided to ignore it in favor of the remake). I highly recommend watching the DVD with the unreleased alternate ending.

Testament. An unforgettable 1983 film about a mother (Jane Alexander) trying to keep her family together in a small Bay Area community in the wake of a limited-exchange nuclear war that likely has claimed the life of her husband (William Devane), there are moments of unbelievable raw emotion here (or, if you didn’t like it, moments of painfully inept sentiment). For me it works but it’s too “clean,” in that it deals with emotional issues but shies away from the gritty truth that would follow such devastation. It’s a bit as if Oxygen channel had made a post-apocalypse movie. The performances are powerful (and Lucas Haas is about three minutes old in this movie!). For the unflinching version, see the next entry.

Threads. About the time America was up in arms over the supposedly controversial Nicholas Meyer-directed 1983 TV movie The Day After (a laughably unsubtle piece of hamhanded clumsiness), Britain was staggering around in mute numb horror produced by watching the mockumentary Threads, which (for 1984) was an unflinching Grand Guignol of life — such as it is — after the Big One. Relentlessly depressing (the handheld-camera jaunt through a critically massed ER trying to operate without power is worth the movie by itself), Threads takes a more extreme stand than most of its ilk in order to make its point, and features the most feel-good movie ending since Sophie’s Choice and Requiem for a Dream left ‘em giggling in the aisles. The mockumentary style and scope work against the film a bit, distancing viewers from more direct personal attachment to any characters. Then again, this may be a blessing.

Having covered some novels I think have been important contributors to the Literature of Last Things, let’s turn our attention for the next few entries to movies that have given us some Technicolor insight into the end of the world.

Dawn of the Dead. A postapocalypse film so iconic it’s hard to say anything new about it, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has been completely absorbed into the cultural landscape (Bonus Geek Points if you recognized the Robot Chicken end title theme as the mall music from Dawn of the Dead originally performed by The Goblins). This one has it all, because it invented most of it: Shambling zombies who are comical alone but terrifying en masse, shockingly rapid societal breakdown, the Escape Chopper, the abandoned shopping mall (I totally stole this for a scene in Ariel), the foraging & hoarding, the Funny Good Guy Getting Infected, the Bullet In The Head is All That Will Stop Them. Placed in historical context, it’s worth remembering that DotD was released unrated due to its unprecedented graphic grossness (setting off a makeup-effects arms race in the process) — a level of goosh that’s pretty much standard videogame fare nowadays; few have considered that the apocalypse may already be happening in slow motion.

Every zombie trope in existence owes a debt to Romero’s tightly directed film. Even the inventive 28 Days Later is basically DotD with overcaffeinated brainmunchers. Also noteworthy as another in the “technnophiles defending themselves against the barbarians at the gate” theme common in postapocalyptic movies. If you think you can substitute seeing the remake instead, save yourself two hours of your life you’ll never get back and avoid it like the plague it clumsily depicts. The original is a true landmark.

The Road Warrior. George Miller’s reductionist Campbellian (anti)hero myth is a true classic of kinetic roadpunk poetry whose striking imagery and energy continue to be ripped off by lesser talents to this day. This and Bladerunner shaped the feel of movies for a solid decade and more. Mel Gibson became an international star playing Max, a damaged former cop who Just Doesn’t Give A Damn Anymore as he cruises desolate highway stretches in “the last of the V8 Interceptors” across a wasted world in search of more fuel so he can keep on keeping on. Archetypally and structurally identical to Star Wars (Georges Miller and Lucas benefitted hugely from reading their Joseph Campbell, specifically Hero with a Thousand Faces), the film’s lean energy and simple drama played out against bleak landscapes go a long way in elevating the story to the level of myth. A “whiteclad technocrats keeping the fire alight” vs. “barbarians at the gate” storyline helped a lot.

I freaked out when The Road Warrior was released because it looked exactly like the image I’d had for my first novel, Ariel, which was right about to be released. Apparently a very similar thing happened to William Gibson regarding Neuromancer when Bladerunner was released. Zeitgeist, indeed.

The Quiet Earth. This largely unknown 1985 New Zealand film deserves a wider audience. Modest in budget, personal in focus, and quirky in approach, this movie’s premise is that a government energy-grid project throws the world into a parallel universe, killing everybody except those who were right at the moment of their death when the event occurred. The first part focuses on a lone man’s increasing disaffection as he tries to cope; the remainder focuses on three survivors’ efforts to affect another fundamental change as they realize that the universe into which they’ve been thrust is unstable. Also one of the most striking final images of any movie ever.

Miracle Mile. You answer a payphone outside a coffeeshop and it’s a scared private in a missile silo who has accidentally called the wrong number and thinks he’s telling his parents that the nukes are flying and they’ve got about an hour to live. What do you do? You set out on a mini odyssey across the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles to find that girl you’ve just met and get hold of an Escape Chopper, what else? Hampered by budget cuts and containing possibly the most uplifting depressing ending this side of The Road, Miracle Mile still manages to convey a sense of urgency and escalation as people find their own ways to fight the inevitable. Also notable for being Tangerine Dream’s best film score.

12 Monkeys. For my money the best time-travel movie ever made, Terry Gilliam’s fatalistic expansion of the classic French short “La Jete” stars Bruce Willis, never better as a prisoner forced by the desperate leaders of a remnant humanity gone underground to travel back in time in an effort to learn the source of the plague that has decimated the global population. Willis’ James Cole is haunted by a dreamlike childhood memory of a man being shot to death at an airport security checkpoint. Everything Cole does in the past (our present) to learn about or avert the coming plague only brings that dream image closer to reality.

Unlike the Terminator series, 12 Monkeys does not play fast and loose with violations and paradoxes, but adheres strictly to the logic that any attempt to change the past becomes by definition part of that very past, and every frame of 12 Monkeys is geared toward achievement and explanation of Cole’s opening dream/memory sequence, filling the viewer with an almost unbearable sense of tragic inevitably. And shame on you if you didn’t realize that it has a happy ending. One of my favorite movies.