First
an update: I’m still alive, I’m still writing, and the first draft of Bad Influences is almost complete and
still scheduled to begin posting in January, despite a few setbacks this
year. Otherwise, I’ve been reading
contemporary apocalyptic fiction and thinking about the place of Bad Influences in the genre as it
stands.
In
his introduction to Wastelands, John Joseph Adams notes a recent resurgence in
post-apocalyptic fiction, with a fallow period for the genre between the fall
of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. It seems to
make sense that we have a greater interest in the end of days in times of
heightened global conflict, until we look at global history and current events
a little more closely and realise that, from a global perspective, there’s
never really been a time without the
presence of some potential civilisation-levelling disaster, whether man-made or
natural or a combination of the two. Earthquakes,
volcanic eruptions, famines, plagues, tidal waves, hurricanes or the ever-escalating
disaster of war, at any given time some form of large-scale devastation is taking
place somewhere, or being awaited with helplessly inadequate preparation, or its
aftermath is being survived. What high
profile events like 9/11 spark in our apocalyptic imaginations is not the idea
of apocalyptic danger itself, but a different perspective on it, a new way to
articulate the ever-present anxiety that the fragile egg-shell of human civilisation
can be smashed at a moment’s notice.
Contemporary
apocalyptic fiction is ultimately, in its underlying anxieties, the same as
classic apocalyptic fiction. What
differs is the perspective and focus, whose anxieties are explored and how they
are expressed. Wells and Wyndham explored both the causes and effects of
disaster, with evident social critiques and dire warnings from what seemed, to
them, a fairly neutral viewpoint. Both War
of the Worlds and The Time Machine
were concerned with humanity’s decadence and complacency. Wyndham was interested not only in how his
Triffids worked and where they might have come from, but how a lack of social
cohesion could set the stage for their takeover.
Neither Wells nor Wyndham was excessively interested in the personal losses or
inner emotional lives of their protagonists. Their narrators were everyman
figures, excluding specific viewpoints (which, of course, means
excluding the viewpoints of anybody not in the demographic of the narrator and the writer.
Women cannot be everyman.) The
traditional apocalyptic narrator is white, male, middle class, practical and
knowledgeable on relevant issues, usually with no family of his own to
complicate his observations, experiencing disaster like a BBC reporter, choosing the shots and angles from which to portray the events while avoiding
visible sentiment or detectable bias where possible. He can explore the differing perspectives of
those he meets, he can even be persuaded by them and change his mind several
times, but ultimately he will occupy the middle ground. He is neither cowardly nor foolhardy, neither
aggressive nor weak, neither emotionally cold nor hysterical. It’s not that the classic disasters don’t
relate personal and harrowing stories, but they do so at a distance. The protagonist isn't made of stone, but in
the end it's not important how he feels
about the collapse of society, only that he records humanity’s reactions to it
in all their extremes without discrediting the account by doing or feeling anything
too extreme himself.
Contemporary
disaster fiction, when it focuses on the disaster at all, often does so through
a character who has some personal reason to be particularly affected by it, or
must make important decisions regarding it. Otherwise, it uses a range of
viewpoints, rather than attempting neutrality. Each viewpoint is specific, and
they differ in order to give equal weight to their differences. Conclusions may
be implicit in these experiences, but in contrast to the classic disasters it
is the experiences rather than the conclusions that are assumed to interest the
reader, so that the experiences are described in intimate detail, and the
conclusions are often left ambiguous. In
The Testament of Jessie Lamb, it's
not important whether or not Jessie becomes pregnant; it’s her
struggle to make that decision, and the responses of her friends and family,
that interest us.
Disasters
themselves can be specific or interchangeable.
The specific kind explores events and decisions prompted by a strong
central "what if" premise - what if the human race became infertile? (Children of Men) What if a virus wiped
out or otherwise endangered a specific group of people, such as men (Y: The Last Man), pregnant women (The Testament of Jessie Lamb) or adults
(Jeremiah)? These disasters explore a
targeted aspect of our present society by focusing on a specific cause. In the
Interchangeable kind of disaster, it's disaster itself – collapse, conflict,
societal breakdown – that is being explored. The nature of the disaster is
random and affects enough people to be considered untargeted: zombies (World War Z), pandemic (Contagion), nuclear war (The Road), environmental (Flood) or economic disaster (Player One) - it doesn't really matter,
as the effects on society are similar, if not exactly the same. These disasters
don't pose an original dilemma through their nature, but allow a more general
exploration of human nature in adversity. The
general nature of the disaster means that these stories need some other
specific point of interest to focus on.
Sometimes
it is the medium or format of the story that determines its focus - the Fallout series tells a post-apocalyptic
story interactively in the form of computer games. It could be that the nature of the disaster
is a premise for a hard science plotline, while the characters’ actions are
driven by the jeopardy it creates (Contagion,
Flood). It could be that a particular character or
character type is explored, with a significant role in the disaster or the
society that follows, or an interesting reason for surviving (When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, Oryx andCrake). Sometimes the focus is the intimate story of one person who,
through their ordinariness, tells a story tragic and plausible enough to
signify the entire societal breakdown (TheRoad, Then), not through their
detachment (as in the older tradition) but through the intimate portrayal of
their personal apocalypse. This is the
most disturbing kind of apocalypse story, because it is so easy to identify with. In the Wastelandsintroduction to his story The End of theWorld As We Know It, Dave Bailey says:
“We
don’t need the destruction of entire cities to know what it’s like to survive a
catastrophe. Whenever we lose someone we love deeply we experience the end of
the world as we know it. The central
idea of the story is not merely that the apocalypse is coming, but that it’s
coming for you. And there’s nothing you
can do to avoid it.”
We’re
no better equipped to take on board and deal with the deaths of a hundred strangers
than a million. We can’t imagine such
numbers. It’s only when death touches
us, personally, that we feel loss. If we
lose somebody close to us, even if they were one death in thousands, that one
death means more than all the others.
Disaster gives us the sense that we should be drawn together by a shared
loss, but all loss is personal, and it sends us into scattered, isolated
disasters of our own. Every survivor
experiences their own personal apocalypse, every bereavement entails the
personal decision to come out fighting or retreat into solitude, to rebuild the
world or leave it to rot.
Bad Influences will be the Interchangeable,
format-driven type of apocalypse: the nature of the disaster is not important,
what's important is how the characters respond to it, and to each other, as
their societies collapse. It uses a multiple viewpoint
format to give a global perspective on events, but it uses just four
blogger-narrators. My aim isn't to
provide every perspective and scenario but to explore the contradictions
inherent in publicly blogged experience, in online relationships, and in
personal experiences of global disaster.
Blog
Fiction allows for multiple perspectives that are both geographically distant
and strongly connected, a re-imagining of the survival-group microcosm. An apocalypse seems the perfect scenario
through which to explore the group dynamics of online relationships, the
ambiguous intimacies and antagonisms that the medium provokes. The blog seems,
initially, like a diary, or a memoir, but blogs are more public than diaries,
more disputable than memoirs. The writer of a blog may be writing a personal,
honest testimony, but unlike Jessie Lamb
they know that what they write will be instantly viewable by friends and
strangers, who will be in a position to respond, and they will have to deal
with those responses. Blogs are a
contradictory social phenomenon: at once intimate and self-conscious, personal
and public, revealing and concealing. They look like diaries, but act like
newspaper columns. The characters use
them to desperately reach out and connect with people, while constructing
personas that hold back the part of themselves capable of doing so, and getting
defensive and possessive of their words when somebody tries to break through
that barrier to what they’re hiding, the deepest fears that they’re desperate
to communicate and unable to express, until such time as they believe they
could be writing their final post. Then,
the walls come down. Then there are
connections, and the influences can break through. The characters are all, at various points,
self-quarantined, and their blogs are both their connection to the outside
world and the barrier that separates them from it, their emotional quarantine.
Their apocalypses are personal, except for the moments when they can
break through the self-conscious nature of the medium to truly influence one
another.
If
recent disaster fiction has broken out of the traditional, generalised, neutral
perspective to concentrate on the personal, then the next step is to break
through the seclusion and atomisation of the personal perspective in search of common
experience. Douglas Copeland’s Player One, dealing with a group of
survivors trapped in their own viewpoints and failing to connect, broaches the idea of how an apocalypse
shatters post-modern individualism:
“Information
overload triggered a crisis in the way people saw their lives. [...]
The crux seems to be that our lives stopped being stories. And if
we are no longer to have lives that are stories, what will our lives have
become? Yet seeing one’s life as a story seems like nostalgic residue
from an era when energy was cheap and the notion of the super-special,
ultra-important individual with blogs and Google hits and a killer résumé was a
conceit the planet was still able to materially support. In the New
Normal, we need to strip ourselves of notions of individual importance.
Something new is arising that has neither interest in nor pity for souls
trapped in twentieth-century solipsism. Nonlinear stories? Multiple
endings? No loading times? It’s called life on earth. Life
need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.”
Blog
Fiction seems like a good medium from which to explore this premise. Of course, the characters’ lives are stories, but they do not write about
them as if they expect them to be.
Narrative tension comes from anxiety about present and future, not mystery
awaiting revelation (though there will be revelations). While stories imply conclusion, the blog
format implies endless continuation.
Since the characters can neither be certain of their futures nor blog
their own deaths, their individual stories must be inconclusive, but their
interactions can have conclusions, and the reader can extract the resolutions
they’re looking for from these.
