Fun with Apocalypse

Pulp fiction has a long tradition of disaster and apocalypse and post-apocalypse stories, and today novels and television series about zombies and other plagues of various sorts may be the dominant strain, but there was an explosion of EMP-related books too over the last couple of decades, and before that there was a slew of post-nuclear war holocaust novels. I’m sure that there are academic articles that explore the reasons behind the rise of such stories, and I hope articles especially focused on zombies because I am darn curious. Not that I don’t like zombies more than most. It is a secret pleasure of mine, although mostly in terms of movies and television shows, where part of my enjoyment often rests with the appreciation of the ludicrousness or stupidity of the storyline or character or production values or any and all such combinations thereof.

These days, there is a growing category of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories using climate disaster as its premise.

I’ve been a wide reader of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels from way back when, and within the Wikipedia list of 100-plus post-nuclear holocaust novels, there are a number of excellent works ranging from  early classics such as Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and On the Beach, by Nevil Shute and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.,  to Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, although there is no specific reference to nuclear war in this book). These examples are largely from early works written in the late 1950s or early 1960s, with the exception of Ridley Walker published in 1980) and The Road (published in 2006). The earlier books may suffer from less sophisticated concepts of the effects of nuclear weapons, but a common trait shared by all these titles is a moving human element. 

These days, there is a growing category of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories using climate disaster as its premise.

While this list of good “post-nuclear holocaust” novels is far from exhaustive, there are far too many post-nuclear holocaust novels that are populated by characters who seem largely unaffected by the scope of the mega-annihilation and all too ready to jump into action, whoo-hoo! I call this sort “guy gets guns and girl” stories, and, ferocious ex-Catholic that I am, this type always felt disrespectful in relation to the fictional loss of millions or billions of people.

Hey, I guess I’m just a grouch.

I like a survival story as much as anyone. I’m less sanguine about taking on fundamental catastrophes for shallow entertainment, however. It strikes me as unseemly as well as potentially unhelpful or even dangerous by suggesting—as inadvertent as such suggestion might be—that nuclear war or climate change or even a zombie plague is just another of those sort of things that could happen, and boy, they can have an element of fun!

Or, alternately, it may be that killing off millions or billions of people—even fictional people—demands respectful consideration. In recent years I again find myself again disturbed by the number of writers using serious matters—in this case, climate change—to create apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories to entertain without acknowledging the existential human elements of the premise. Call me a nut, but I’m pretty sure that global disasters like nuclear war or climate change are traumatic, as in, like, top of the list traumatic. Still, however indecorous as these novels that ignore human reactions to such trauma may be, my central complaint is that these works do little to help readers gain effective sense of the seriousness of climate change in the lives of the selfsame readers. Far-future extrapolations and post-apocalyptic joyrides seem to me to miss an opportunity to help make climate change real to present-day people.

I like a survival story as much as anyone. I’m less sanguine about taking on fundamental catastrophes for

shallow entertainment, however.

Climate change being perceived as real by the largest number of people as possible is, I’m pretty sure, a pre-condition for effective climate change remediation efforts against the very worse consequences of global warming. Given the power of the fossil fuel industry and other capitalism-based interests, even widespread activism may be insufficient for timely action, but without such pervasive intent, improvement will be that much slower and far too incremental.

My first novel-length work—The Wall–was a collection of inter-related stories—sometimes called a short story cycle or story sequence or composite novel—that presented snapshots of a post-nuclear apocalypse across time ranging from one month post-event to eight years post-event, each taking place in the same location, mainly with different characters per story, although there were some re-occurring characters, too. One impetus for that work was to counter the absurdist post-nuclear apocalypse works that had authors killing off millions merely to serve up a premise for survivalist fantasies. There was a rash of such survivalist works in the Reagan years, inspired, I imagine, by the increase in the nuclear threat of that time, not to mention the shifting focus and strength of the NRA.

I wrote stories about a scenario of a large exchange nuclear weapons that was realistic in terms of likely effects to the environment and societal infrastructure. I had a library of mostly GPO (Government Printing Office) books and reports on the effects of nuclear weapons and the explorations of varying attack scale scenarios and the consequences. I studied these hard. Somewhere in one or another file box I still have reams of notes describing the numbers of detonations and their locations and characteristics (i.e., yield and whether airburst or groundburst and the area of over-pressure), all mapped out and including prevailing winds and prospects for firestorms, fallout, and on and on and so forth.

While I am pretty sure that I’ve forgotten three-quarters of what I’d learned over the many years working on The Wall, but that learning was important to my effort to extrapolate as accurately as possible the realistic consequences to better imagine what it might be like for people in that situation. I was particularly interested in how different characters might actually feel, which is to say their psychological and emotional states. Imagining characters’ feelings, I believe, was essential for understanding the conditions of their survival or whatever one might call such existence. And getting details right makes for a better story, too.

I worked on The Wall for decades, fitting in new revisions and drafts periodically as family and career permitted. This passage of time was helpful, especially since advances in understanding the effects of nuclear weapons came to include the concept of nuclear winter. I also developed as a better writer through my work as a trade journalist and editor, following the old maxim that practice makes perfect. Not that I’m suggesting The Wall is perfect, but it is gratifying to see that it was improved again and again over the decades. Whether The Wall is improved to

the point of being an acceptable and captivating work is up to others to decide, not that the work is even published.

Writing The Steep Climes Quartet requires a similar effort to mount the learning curve, although now in terms of climate change, not nuclear bombs. One thing that remains the same between my earlier writing and the work I’m currently engaged in is the effort toward realism.  An important part of the subject of the series is the all-too-often hidden yet very real impact the climate crisis is already having on us lucky Americans, including on our wallets. It is easy to ignore the prospect of a future drowned world when your feet are still dry, but when you realize, for instance, the cost of climate change for you today, you just might pay more attention.

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