Manufacturing Armageddon

This essay is a follow-up to two previous essays: The American Armageddon Factory and Another Product of the Armageddon Factory

Historian Betsy Hartmann’s book The America Syndrome identifies shared belief in imminent catastrophe as the underlying American public morality. From Puritan Christianity in the 17^th Century, to Utopian social engineering in the 19^th Century, to Global Warming in the 21^st Century, Americans have always believed the world will end tomorrow. Corollary to this belief, Americans—or anyway a subset of us—have always believed America will survive Armageddon.

Most important for Hartmann, this impending apocalypse always has a moral implication. This is obvious in Puritan Christianity, which believes a Triune God is preparing to distribute justice, in the form of payback to unbelievers. But even in the less aggressively religious 20^th and 21^st Centuries, this moralistic judgement never abates. The defining apocalypses of those eras (nuclear war, Malthusian overpopulation, and global warming) always reek somehow of karmic consequences.

Viewed thusly, the movie Leave the World Behind both does, and doesn’t, continue the “America Syndrome.” It similarly presents a secular present stretched to its limits, and a population that clothes its awareness of imminent collapse in a crazy quilt of misanthropy, denialism, and on-demand entertainment. This world requires only light pressure to snap. As Mahershala Ali explains in his culminating monologue, America has enemies willing to apply that pressure.

However, the movie lacks the moral component Hartmann identifies in prior apocalyptic predictions. Some characters attempt to retroactively construct an explanation which makes the events a payback for Americanism, but this is ramshackle and unconvincing. Ultimately, as Julia Roberts and Myha’la watch New York burn from across Long Island Sound, we’re left to conclude that sometimes, things happen because they happen; justifications are flimsy, selfish, and meaningless.

Thus far, I’ve attempted to avoid spoiling the movie’s irresolute resolution, like a faithful reviewer. But the movie’s closing three minutes color how we perceive everything that’s happened before. The story’s youngest character, 13-year-old Rosie, has abandoned the main house, where adults or near-adults squabble for control and explanation. The grown-ups want meaning; Rosie has spoken Delphicly about wanting something else, which she now pursues.

We find Rosie in a neighboring mansion, gorging herself on starchy processed snack foods and fizzy water. Hearing her mother’s panicked cries outside, Rosie instead flees deeper into the house, where she discovers a fully equipped luxury fallout shelter, including a massive home entertainment system. She activates the TV and scours the DVD racks to find the Holy Grail she’s pursued throughout the movie: the final episode of the sitcom Friends.

Rosie, the movie’s youngest character and therefore the one most definedly possessing a future, instead flees into a low-friction sitcom that ended nearly twenty years ago. In case the symbolism seems too subtle for streaming audiences, Myha’la’s character Ruth previously derided Friends as “nostalgia for a time that never really existed.” Facing the world-altering consequences of… well, something, Rosie flees from meaning and buries herself in mass-media anesthesia.

This movie’s moral backbone, to the extent it possesses one, certainly deserves criticism. It suggests that, deprived of our technology and entertainment, Americans will descend into base impulses, racism, and paranoia. Rather than moral payback, as Hartmann postulates, this movie suggests Armageddon will expose our near-complete moral vacuity. There’s no karmic retribution, this movie implies, when Americans don’t hold anything holy anymore anyway.

Yet as bad as this moral lesson is, the final takeaway, delivered by Rosie, feels worse. Given a blank slate to look forward and reinvent society on firmer moral footing, Rosie instead seeks resolution in a sitcom’s concise narrative arc. Not just any sitcom, either, but Friends. Sure, the show ended in 2005, during America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; but it began in 1995, the decade colored by America’s brightly-hued Cold War hangover.

Clear back in 2009, Mark Fisher wrote that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The pre-catastrophe world this movie depicts resembles ours: fashionably pessimistic but convinced we need one long family holiday to restore our morality. Yet we, like this movie, face an historical inflection point: some socioeconomic change must happen soon, or everything will break without a safety net.

But instead of moralistic challenge and opportunity, the defining traits of past apocalypses, this movie shrugs and retreats into nihilism. With no vision of the New Jerusalem, or something compatible, the creative team simply can’t imagine another future. Therefore, the narrative threads they introduce don’t deserve resolution. Everything is ultimately meaningless, and ordinary humans are too vacuous to deserve rescue.

Fuck it, let’s go watch TV.

Another Product of the Armageddon Factory

From left: Mahershala Ali, Myha’la, Jula Roberts, and Ethan Hawk

Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind is subdivided into six roughly equal parts by interstitial title cards, like TV episode titles. While many creators behind streaming “television” have tried to position their series as multi-episode movies, this film feels like a compressed treatment for a later TV serial. This comparison becomes extremely pointed by the indecisive cliffhanger ending which resolves nothing, as though punting to the next season.

Overworked preppies Amanda and Clay Sandford (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke), burned out in Manhattan, spontaneously book a Long Island holiday cottage. They’re somewhat distressed to find unreliable internet and cell service, but hey, it’s an adventure. Except, on the first night, G.H. Scott and his daughter Ruth (Mahershala Ali and Myha’la) arrive, claiming to own the cottage. New York’s under blackout, they explain; can they borrow their house back?

This movie has few speaking characters. Besides the Sandfords and Scotts, we see the Sandfords’ teenagers, Archie and Rosie (Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie). Archie’s defining characteristic is he checks out girls; Rosie obsesses over 1990s pop culture, especially the sitcom Friends. Very late, Kevin Bacon appears as a survivalist neighbor; besides a brief appearance by a Spanish-speaking hitchhiker, Bacon is the only evidence that working-class Long Islanders exist.

Writer-director Sam Esmail bases this movie on Rumaan Alam’s novel. Therefore I wonder who exactly, Esmail or Alam, dropped the ball so badly. This movie reads like a masterclass in how to alienate your audience. Though different plotlines frustrate in different ways, we could summarize the magnitude of disappointment thus: the creative team introduces interesting questions, then ignores them. They expect us, the audience, to do the heavy lifting.

First, we never know exactly what’s happening. Apart from isolated flashes of information dropped without context, all we know is that we know nothing. The Sandfords and Scotts are trapped inside the house, reliant on outdated information and a noncommunicative government. Every attempt to leave the house ends in one catastrophe or another. It’s impossible to read this separate from the COVID-19 lockdowns that ended shortly before principal photography began.

Both the Sandfords and the Scotts are relatively well-off. Throughout the movie, their cottage never loses electricity or running water. Their supplies of coffee and alcohol remain limitless. Yet living in proximity brings out prominent tensions, fueled substantially because the Sandfords are White, and the somewhat richer Scotts are Black. Amanda even engages in frustrated, self-pitying monologues that reveal her poorly sublimated racism.

Oh, and the monologues! This movie consists primarily of conversations, but they aren’t really conversations. Every character has a thesis statement, and apart from the occasional bread-n-butter dialog to move the story along, the characters mainly discourse at one another. This is a Very Important Message Movie, and the characters remind us of that constantly. They don’t even interrupt the action to discourse; they interrupt discourse with occasional action.

As we approach the movie’s culmination, both Amanda and G.H. offer up monologues that, in another movie, might’ve come before the climactic confrontation. Except there’s no climactic confrontation. We reach the moment where experienced genre authors would’ve brought the families’ braided narratives together to unlock the secrets, and… the movie stops. Rather than resolving the manifold threads it’s introduced, the movie halts. Sad trombone noises.

I already anticipate counterarguments. Life is frequently disappointing, and lacking in resolution. In the technocratic apocalypse depicted herein, most people would never receive meaningful explanations. But this isn’t real life. Novelists and screenwriters make decisions—or, in this case, don’t make decisions. I’m reminded of “deep literature” I read in college, and wrote chin-pulling considerations of moral themes, when I really wanted to ask: “Why did the author stop mid-story?”

One suspects that Esmail and/or Alam raised interesting questions, then thought their responsibility done. This often happens in self-consciously “literary” writing, which often treats resolute answers as facile. The author ends with a discordant note, sometimes mid-action (as here), and expects the audience to contemplate the unresolved questions. I suspect the creative team wants us to ask ourselves: “What’s left when our machines, entertainments, and busywork disappear?”

Instead, I ask: “What screenwriting workshop did these guys drop out of?” Esmail made his reputation on similar morally ambiguous TV series, like Mr. Robot and Homecoming. TV audiences accept unresolved themes, expecting they’ll resume next episode or next season. In feature films, it simply feels like the creative team expects the audience to finish what the writers started. That’s a disappointing, rage-inducing conclusion to a good start abandoned.

One Man's Walk Through Armageddon

Zack Hunt, Unraptured: How End Times Theology Gets It Wrong

You ever notice how it seems some people really, really want the world to end a week from next Tuesday? Pastor Zack Hunt used to be one of them. A youth spent studying end-times theology convinced him that Jesus would return promptly, if you read the signs. He admits having been one of those eschatological enthusiasts who steered every discussion to Christ’s imminent return. And he apologizes for that.

This book is half memoir, half deep-dive into Biblical literacy. Pastor Hunt unpacks the moral certainties that defined his youth, and the growing complexity that forced him to amend his beliefs. For a time, he apparently questioned whether he could remain a Christian without the absolute conviction of end-times theology. It took time and growth before Pastor Hunt realized faith is about the here and now, not the great hereafter.

Starting in his teenage years, Hunt found himself torn between two religious extremes. He grew up in the Church of the Nazarene, part of the Holiness tradition in American Christianity, a faith that requires “total sanctification.” In theory, this means that relationship with Jesus makes your soul as spotless as new Victorian lace. In practice, it often means that you spend your life tallying your own sins to make sure you haven’t strayed from God’s path. Hunt describes himself answering lots of altar calls and getting saved every Sunday.

Such constant soul scrutiny led, Hunt describes, to embracing a theology of vindication. The end-times eschatology described by theologians like Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye let Hunt rest calmly on the expectation that, when Jesus returns quickly, He’ll exonerate the righteous. In order to “win,” he needed only to memorize the right prooftexts, perform the prescribed rituals, and evangelize to anyone and everyone.

Hunt walks us through his spiritual journey, one he admits remains incomplete. Like many young Christians, he accepted his parents’ religion, not only without question, but also without restraint. He became a more absolute, more performative version of whatever his parents told him to believe, to the point where, in his telling, his own pastors and spiritual mentors rolled their eyes at his extreme certainties.

Zack Hunt

His encounters with Scripture as a young adult, however, forced him into impossible situations. He attended college to become a “youth pastor,” a title often associated with the worst excesses of populist Christianity. But his exegetical professors and Bible mentors showed him a scriptural reading that didn’t accord with his moral absolutes. He found himself backed into a corner: change his beliefs, or admit he favored preachers over Christ.

Although Hunt does use extensive personal narrative, and centers his own spiritual journey, he doesn’t pooh-pooh scholarship. He quotes extensively from prior theologians on topics like eschatology, exegesis, and homiletics. Augustine and Origen, C.S. Lewis and Barbara Rossing, all serve to bolster Hunt’s position. He passed through his crisis of faith and became a pastor, obviously, bringing all the scholarship that title implies.

But simultaneously, he realizes most people don’t believe in end-times theology for scholarly, scriptural purposes. They believe because it satisfies a need in their personal spiritual journey. Facts seldom persuade people from their religious or philosophical beliefs; if they did, most people would be paralyzed by the doubt stemming from conflicting facts and moral ambiguity. True Believers need a vision, and that’s what Hunt’s memoir provides.

As an adult, Hunt basically believes that end-times theology provides adherents a fast pass out of life. By believing the world will end soon, and one’s only solution is to individually get right with God, Left Behind readers are exempted from boring old requirements to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Why band together to relieve this world’s suffering, when this world won’t exist next week?

Jesus Christ, though, doesn’t support this position. Hunt notes that Jesus ties the Parable of the Sheep and Goats to his “Little Apocalypse,” his only direct end-times narrative. Jesus’ own explication of how to face the eschaton directly ties to how we live this life. Salvation, Hunt writes as an adult, isn’t an escape from this life. It’s a new life, a new kingdom, a new way of living in this physical world.

Not everyone will appreciate such conclusions. Hunt admits his teenage self would’ve hated them. But they’re no less real despite some believers’ resistance. Salvation and grace, Hunt believes now, are about being more fully alive right now. And we can’t find that, Hunt now insists, by fleeing from the real and messy life God gave us.

 

See also: The End Is Nigh (Again)

The End Of the End Of the World

The TV series Doomsday Preppers ran four seasons on the National Geographic Channel, and while I never looked for it, I somehow always found it. The series aired during the years I worked third shift at a local car-parts factory, and when I staggered home, too tired and unfocused to read, second-run episodes always seemed right there on cable. Like a bloody car wreck, I couldn’t look away.

Though that series gave apocalyptic survivalists a national platform, the movement predated the show. Back in the 1990s, when I was significantly more conservative, I received the Loompanics catalog, that pre-Amazon shopping extravaganza of violent Libertarian paranoia. Mixed in with guidebooks for home gunsmithing and paperwork-free tax dodging, the catalog always included topics like building your own bomb shelter, canning veggies without electricity, and how to raise and slaughter goats.

I’ve read claims that apocalyptic survivalism gained mainstream traction with the movie Red Dawn, in which plucky teenagers armed with assault rifles and camping gear staved off a Soviet invasion. But while that perhaps made many people aware of survivalism, it certainly didn’t invent the field. We could arguably trace survivalism to the Essenes, the isolated Jewish sect most famous today for preserving the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran.

These preppers, and other doomsday narratives like LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind, share an important prior supposition: Somebody is going to survive Doomsday. It might as well be me. The exact nature of Doomsday keeps shifting, of course. Nuclear war, pandemic, the Mayan calendar, and malignant AL will hasten the Final Judgement. But the end of the world isn’t really an end, but a pause, a societal bottleneck.

The post-apocalyptic theme goes back generations. The science fiction narrative dates back to Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, though surviving the cataclysm is older than that. Even Noah, in the Hebrew Bible, is arguably a post-apocalyptic narrative, and that story is even older. Like much of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the Noah narrative was probably repurposed from Sumerian myth, wherein Earth has been destroyed and recreated multiple times.

Both the Christian Apocalypse and secular doomsdays share an agreement that Earth is not eternal. It had a beginning; it must therefore also have an end. The only difference lies in what different sources consider that end—meaning end both in the sense of “conclusion,” and in the sense of “ultimate purpose.” In theological terms, we consider this dual end “eschatology,” though that term serves equally well for secular considerations.

Perhaps it helps to consider the actual meaning of the word “Apocalypse.” Because of its Biblical usage, we’ve grown accustomed to considering the meaning as Doomsday, the end of the world, the final cataclysm. But in Greek, “Apocalypse” literally means removing a shroud, making visible that which was previously concealed. Apocalypses, like the Hebrew Daniel or the Christian revelation, promise to reveal the true forces driving our world.

Such thinking gets a bad rap. “Conspiracy theorists” peddle everything from the Blood Libel to QAnon, moonshine narratives describing a world beset by constant wickedness. The only solution, these theories claim, is to huddle together under the protection of a unitary king (or pope or president) who will protect against that wickedness. The enemy is supposedly both pervasive, and so entrenched that only a strongman can actually kill it.

But another version of that narrative exists. The Biblical Revelation describes a faithful remnant surrounded by an Empire which appears both powerful and eternal. Appeasing the Empire’s injustice sometimes looks like the only way to survive. But the Empire, the Bible tells us, is transitory, and will ultimately destroy itself through infighting. In the First Century CE, that might’ve appeared impossible, but history has proven it true.

Therefore the question becomes: What truth does your Apocalypse reveal? What force does your Revelation glorify? The apocalyptic thinking behind QAnon sees a world beset by evil which is distinctly female, non-White, and religiously other. QAnon can only propose one solution: bestowing god-king authority onto a unitary President. The occasional Ashli Babbitt is a small price to protect that White Supremacist truth.

All doomsday narratives assume, on some level, that somebody will survive. They also assume that some people have to die because their eyes are so clouded that they’ll never see the truth. Though QAnon is particularly visible, this willingness to let the ignorant die (or even hasten their deaths) isn’t unique or partisan. Whenever anybody embraces an apocalyptic narrative, they tacitly admit whom they’d willingly let die.

The Dark Kentucky Horror That Almost Was

Christopher Rowe, These Prisoning Hills

In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky, a military dropship has just landed. Weird, since the Federals have ignored the countryside since the war. Marcia (no last name), war veteran, county agent, and the closest her area has to a government, doesn’t want these soldiers infiltrating her genetically engineered, overmanaged hills; she’s built an uneasy peace here, thanks. But apparently an unfinished battle from the war remains in the countryside.

This novella postulates a world transformed by violent technology, where the dead don’t stay buried, because they’re never really dead. Author Christopher Rowe, a highly esteemed but little-known short story specialist always on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough, has crafted a masterpiece of dark foreboding and grim atmospherics. Unfortunately, in the final pages, it appears he’s written checks he doesn’t quite know how to cash.

The nameless Federal captain conscripts Marcia for a rescue mission into the hills. Problem is, the hills are lifeless and desolate, following the war’s nanoware devastation, and the government’s ill-considered attempts to reseed with genetically engineered sludge. But there are lives at stake, and possible unexploded ordnance in vital areas. So Marcia walks with them into the mouth of the holler, knowing they’ll never leave the hills alive.

Much of Rowe’s storytelling will feel familiar to veteran genre audiences, though with a twist. The invasive mosses, the vast deathless enemies, even the culminating cosmic horror of communion with an amoral higher intelligence, all mirror patterns HP Lovecraft perfected nearly a century ago. Human pride, which in this case means military precision, must ultimately bow before a meaningless, uncaring universe.

In Rowe’s telling, however, these horrors don’t arise from the primordial sludge; they’re the aftereffects of a high-tech war between a government with no conscience, and the artificial intelligence they couldn’t control. For Rowe, the horror arises, not from humanity’s meaningless place in the universe, but from our tendency to create systems intended to serve us, but which we ultimately wind up having to serve. Lovecraft as Marxism, perhaps.

Christopher Rowe

As Marcia leads the military through a rural landscape transformed by war’s aftereffects, her viewpoint alternates with the war. Flashbacks to forced marches through similar hills, formerly beautiful landscapes forever blighted with bombs and nanoware pollution. We witness Marcia fighting the old war as a young woman, and revisiting its scars in her age. The war exerts an eternal pull on her consciousness, and Marcia knows what she’ll do to survive.

One suspects, reading this novella, that Rowe wanted to write something longer. He introduces a grand sweep of social forces which drive nations into violence, and the different narratives people use to justify taking sides during war. But Rowe never delves deeply into anything. Like William Goldman, who used an intrusive narrator to scrub the parts he didn’t feel like telling in The Princess Bride, Rowe uses nonsequential storytelling to minimize backstory and exposition.

Worse, though he introduces darkly complex atmospherics, he does almost nothing with them. He introduces nanoware-driven invasive foliage, for instance, that human soldiers must constantly expunge, lest they take over everything; or airborne nanoware that causes hallucinations and permanent psychological trauma. But, having mentioned them, he walks away again, never expanding on the consequences for his characters. Once introduced, he loses interest.

Then, in the final scenes, Rowe drops the ball entirely. Rowe spends so much time describing massive, almost indestructible, Cthulhu-like technological terrors, that when we finally see one, it isn’t as shocking for us as it is for the characters. We know Marcia will have a moment of transcendent communion with the cosmic monstrosity that’s haunted her dreams for thirty years. But Rowe does nothing with it; the story just ends.

Rowe clearly wants to retell a Lovecraft-like story, but for our modern era. Like Cthulhu, Rowe’s cosmic terror lies buried, awaiting human intervention to be reborn. Where Lovecraft’s monsters were sweaty, fish-like, and organic, Rowe’s stainless-steel monster emerges from technology so vast and powerful that it consumes its builders. But fundamentally, both monsters emerge from the same primal fear that, deep down, nothing humans do can ever matter.

Unfortunately, one gets the feeling that Rowe hasn’t finished thinking through his monster. Instead of primal cosmic horror, Rowe offers us the first shreds of discomfort, then flinches. I wanted a deeper taste of whatever bitter brew his characters are drinking. I got fleeting whiffs of something profound and unsettling, but never enough to truly feel much. This should’ve been longer, slower, more detailed than the abridgement we got.

(Acknowledgements to Darrell Scott)

The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”
—Matthew 24:36 (KJV)

As a Christian, I believe apocalyptic thinking is heretical. Claiming to have unique eschatalogical knowledge that the Bible explicitly says no human possesses, is essentially claiming to be God. Sure, we can speculate generously on what ends Christianity serves, both “ends” as purposes, and “ends” as prophesied conclusions. But God has reserved true knowledge of apocalypse for God’s self singularly, not for humans.

But perhaps we’d profit from considering what “apocalypse” means. The word itself derives from two Greek roots: apo-, a combining verb form meaning “to lift” or “to remove,” and kaluptein, “a shroud.” Apocalypse means lifting a concealing cover to disclose the truth hidden beneath. In Latin, the same construction gives us “Revelation,” removing a veil. In both cases, it means exposing hidden realities.

Under current conditions, it’s difficult to avoid believing we’re witnessing secular eschatology. As huge swaths of America burn, discharging toxic smoke into Earth’s upper atmosphere; as several of humanity’s largest democracies fail to grapple with COVID-19; as the world’s major nuclear-armed power descends into autocracy, I’m tempted to think the world is ending. I’m falling victim to my own despised heresy.

Yet watching events unfold, I’ve begun realizing apocalyptic thinking isn’t necessarily heretical. If we believe, as LaHaye and Jenkins do, that we’ve uniquely unlocked future events, found ourselves justified, and now expect God’s favor, yes, that’s heretical. But pausing such messianic dribble, there’s still the sense of apocalypse as revealing the truth. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what our generation is living to witness.

Nearly a decade ago, science fiction opened my eyes to something stained-glass religious language had clouded. Reading several end-of-the world novels in quick succession, I noticed contrasting patterns. Most such novels featured beleaguered protagonists who understood society’s innate corruption, stood fast, and were vindicated. We were expected to laud their countercultural heroism. Not all these novels were religious, but many were.

Opposite these novels, one book, China Miéville’s Embassytown, featured many references to the world ending. However, not once did anyone imply the planet would die, humanity would face purgation, or some theological (or quasi-theological) force would separate the sheep from the goats. Instead, Miéville states, the world ends when our accumulated illusions die. “The world” ends when truth begins, or at least is revealed.

That, I propose, is happening right now. Truth, long concealed, has made its presence known again. But what truth do we witness, and what lessons do we learn? That’s our real test.

For nearly three centuries, industrialized Western civilization has used our oceans as a toilet, our skies as an ashtray, and money as a shield. We’ve conquered distant nations and enslaved populations as tools to ensure constant supplies of cheap labor and natural resources. We’ve assured ourselves that we’re morally justified in these actions because they create aggregate wealth and  physical comfort.

But, like the rich man in Christ’s parable, we’ve built high walls to keep poor Lazarus invisible. Often literal walls, from medieval castles to contemporary gated communities. Sometimes we’ve created fortresses to keep the unclean and impoverished inside, as with lepers’ colonies and tubercular hospitals. Mostly, though, we’ve kept the disenfranchised outside, while heaping up feasts inside, which poor Lazarus helped harvest.

Biblical Sodom is so associated with sexual immorality that we say “Sodomy” to describe certain sexual acts. But the Hebrew prophets disagreed. Ezekiel wrote: “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” This, too, is probably why God destroyed Jericho, because it barred its gates against the wandering Israelites.

America has barred its gates against refugees. We’ve stolen our neighbors’ harvests, shit in their houses, fucked their daughters, then turned around and locked the gates. In consequence, our house is now literally on fire. Like Jonah’s Ninevah, we have one opportunity to recognize our sins, repent, and set our feet on the right course. Sadly, it appears a powerful minority is refusing the opportunity.

Writing this essay, I’ve used God-language and Biblical references. But one needn’t believe in a literal God to understand the message; many Jews today consider “God” strictly metaphorical. Even without God, we have an opportunity to open our eyes, witness the truth we’ve previously concealed from ourselves, and act appropriately. We’re witnessing a secular apocalypse. Will we take this opportunity to make it right?

This Bright and Shining Apocalypse

Abandoned commercial boats on the floor of Russia's Aral Sea, which is nearly dry
from human overconsumption. Photos like these have been used by Hollywood to
design what Earth might look like in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

About seventeen years ago, I wrote a playscript and accompanying novel set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Writing in 2003, my work was one among a flood of pop-culture apocalypses in the aftermath of 9/11 and, discouraged by the overwhelming force of the cultural moment, I gave up before writing the final draft. What, I wondered, would make mine matter when professional writers were addressing the topic with such vigor?

I postulated a world ravaged by contagion. The receding tide of humanity left the surviving rump population scared, defenseless, and desperate for answers. I divided humanity into two camps, those who opted to create autonomous settled communities and rebuild society, and nomadic hordes living out Nietzschean power fantasies. Not surprisingly, for those who know me, I intended to write a character study, and instead drifted into religion and faith.

This season’s slide into uncertainty and plague has reawakened my interest in this work. I’m reluctant to return to something written that long ago, as I’m in a different place, as both a human being and a writer, than in 2003. Yet looking around, at a situation where reality has impinged upon my fictional creation, perhaps it’s important to return to old haunts, if only to balance what I got right, versus what I got wrong.

A world brought low by disease seems timely. When I first took stumbling steps into writing my own stories, we assumed civilization would collapse from nuclear war. Since then we’ve stumbled through robot rebellions, contagions, environmental devastation, and the Aztec calendar as reasons why humanity might end. Somehow, we persistently survive. Yet we remain aware that humanity can only destroy itself once, and it could happen soon.

Yet watching the world actually struggling with pandemic, I realize my most important mistake: I distilled human impulses into a Manichean dualism. On one side, I placed my protagonists, a sympathetic band who wanted to rebuild civilization from the moldering remains. They didn’t know how to accomplish this goal with the available tools, however. One plot point turned on whether a guitar was worth more as music, or as firewood.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, engraving
by Albrecht Dürer (click to enlarge)

Opposite my protagonists, I placed a mysterious outside force, which within the playscript was only implied. Our heroes viewed the outside world with distrust, because anybody not geographically rooted must, perforce, need something. And some people who need something would take it forcefully. Having faced this challenge once, our heroes feared and disbelieved outsiders—even while acknowledging they needed help, which strangers might provide.

Watching an actual pandemic unfold, this dualism seems remarkably short-sighted. Yes, a certain segment of our body politic seems willing to forfeit the elderly, the chronically ill, and the disabled to appease the gods of economics. But the majority of humanity has banded together. Large arts institutions, which aren’t exactly wealthy, are streaming their content online. Stores are reserving valuable shopping hours for seniors.

Farbeit from me to ever praise corporations hastily, but even Disney, the commercial juggernaut that currently owns your dreams, has shown remarkable humanity. During times of isolation, they could withhold their lucrative content until desperate parents paid handsomely to quiet their stir-crazy children. Yet they’ve willingly released their most valuable current property, Frozen II, to housebound families who need something to make time go away.

Seventeen years ago, I envisioned a split between ordinary citizens who wanted civilization to continue, and ordinary citizens giving rein to their gut-level appetites and aggression. That isn’t what we’re seeing. Instead, I look around and witness a government controlled by plutocrats, who assign monetary prices to human values, who regard survival as negotiation leverage, and want to maximize their self-centered outcomes and calcify their power hierarchy.

Arrayed against this mercenary social stratum, we have ordinary people who, to greater or lesser degrees, acknowledge that humanity survives because we don’t assign prices to everything. Humans, the broader society currently agrees, are natural collaborators, who persist against unequal odds because we have one another. Sure, some people break quarantine or demand Spring Break. But looking around, this appears, from my perspective, like a small and venal minority.

Apparently I have to re-evaluate what the end of civilization will mean. Like countless armchair futurists before me, I’ve always assumed that halting the status quo will unleash some level of human barbarism. Yet outside a few arrogant, self-centered corners, that isn’t what I see. I’ve implicitly internalized the neoliberal argument that, when the chips are down, we’re all on our own. Yet it looks like we’re braving this together.

Rebecca Roanhorse's Bloody Homeland Blues

Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning: the Sixth World

Maggie Hoskie lives in a trailer on the margins of the  Diné (Navajo) homeland, nursing her hurts while awaiting… something. A former apprentice of her people’s most respected monster hunter, she lives at the dawning of the Sixth World, when gods and monsters of Diné myth return in force, so yeah, there’s plenty of monsters to hunt. She just doesn't feel ready. But duty calls, she steps forth, and she faces something all her training never prepared her for.

Native American myths occur frequently in urban fantasy, but usually as a side plot, driving themes of anti-modernism. Indians live in a supernatural time warp, unaffected by technology or, y’know, changing social mores. New Mexico author Rebecca Roanhorse takes a different tack: rather than the past, her characters occupy the near future, a dystopian hellscape familiar from recent novels and movies. Yet it also feels unfamiliar, because mose white readers don’t know Diné tradition.

Jolted from her maundering, Maggie confronts a monster that doesn’t resemble the past. It looks human. So she consults her people’s greatest medicine man. He saddles her with his grandson and apprentice, Kai, a handsome, urbane gentleman as alienated from Diné mainstream as herself. She doesn't want the partnership. But the monsters come from somewhere, and are clearly man-made, so she needs the help. So he holds her nose and proceeds.

Though this is her first novel, Rebecca Roanhorse is already an award-winning writer for her short works. That experience shows. She creates a fully realized alternate reality, which she describes to readers without that shopworn trope, the Respected Sage Explaining Reality To Everyone. Roanhorse eases us into the Sixth World, providing as much information as readers need, when we need it. it feels like we step into a story already happening, rather than getting the introductory data dump.

Dinétah, the Navajo homeland, didn’t rise against its subjugation so much as survive while the United States fell. When the Big Water happened, washing away North America’s major population centers, white government was unprepared, and billions drowned. Dinétah stepped into the vacuum, defended its people, and became a nation. Except then, the monsters came. The Diné found themselves thrust into a world of mythology, magic, and divine chess. Maggie is just another pawn.

Rebecca Roanhorse

Maggie doesn’t want to fight monsters anymore. But something has to pay the bills. So she commences a quest that takes her from Dinétah’s biggest city (which uncannily resembles Mos Eisley), to the fringes of her homeland, including regions she’s never seen before. Her journey has a Philip K. Dick-like quality of passage through dreamland, where ordinary rules of physics and society are suspended. Anything can happen, and often does. And Maggie bears awestruck witness.

Roanhorse does something I really appreciate. Before page thirty, she backs her heroine into a corner, where Maggie must do something desperate: she kills a child. Sounds bad when I say it, right? It’s even worse when it happens. Too many writers follow the advice to establish their characters’ heroism by doing something selfless, like saving a puppy, in early chapters. Roanhorse demonstrates her protagonist’s lack of heroic qualifications. Maggie doesn’t have virtues, only guilt.

This guilt motivates Maggie’s continuing journey, though. She clearly hopes to expiate her guilt through accomplishment, and possibly regain the attention of her former mentor, the immortal Neizghání. Maggie remains vague what that attention means. She isn’t the little girl who once waited patiently on her mentor’s teachings anymore, after all. Yet somehow, she remains fearful about the commitments that adulthood would entail. Like her people, she occupies a liminal space between freedom and colonialism.

Maggie attempts to discard Westernized standards of Good vs. Evil, and live her people’s traditional morality, but she can’t. She admits her language remains inflected with the vestiges of Treaties and other compromises with power. That makes Kai’s intrusion into her world especially confounding. He’s a medicine man, versed in his people’s tradition, but he’s also Westernized in his values. He represents admixture that Maggie, and the Diné generally, try to purge. They just can’t.

This combination of ancestry and modernism, of oral tradition and technological progress, characterizes the immersive reality Roanhorse has created. Her characters live the conflicts, and they invite us to join them. By the end, little is resolved; even the monsters prove less important than the human influences that let them into our world. Yet even without some pat resolution, we feel like we’ve undertaken a hard journey. Roanhorse’s characters brought us somewhere. But where, exactly?

The First Time the World Ended

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 90
Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

The Late Bronze Age dominated the eastern Mediterranean for over three centuries. Extensive trade routes criss-crossed from Babylon to Greece, from Afghanistan to Egypt. It was a time of globalized trade, of epic warfare and timeless art. Then, in the early 13th Century BCE, it ended abruptly in violence, destruction, and dirt. Empires collapsed, and cities were vacated. Technology, government, and culture skidded backward. What, exactly, happened?

According to GWU classicist Eric Cline, a scholarly consensus existed not long ago. Archaeologists blamed the Sea Peoples, a consortium of migratory refugee groups who attacked Egypt in 1177 BCE. Though Pharaoh Ramses III beat these invaders back, his victory came at massive cost. Egypt didn't regain its regional dominance for three centuries. Classicists assumed the Sea Peoples sacked the entire region, particularly since many archaeological sites were found riddled with bronze arrowheads.

New evidence since the 1990s, however,questions this assumption.  The collapse apparently proceeded over several decades, and not every site shows signs of sacking. Cline writes that current evidence suggests a perfect confluence of climate change, refugee crisis, resource scarcity, and international anarchy, among other influences, created a “perfect storm of calamities” that shattered the foundation of globalized civilization. Cline doesn't comment on today's parallels. He doesn't need to.

Cline starts by reconstructing what we know about Late Bronze Age (LBA) civilization. Given that this era saw the first keeping of widespread records, we know an astonishingly detailed amount about this period. New rising powers like Mycenaean Greece offset dwindling influences of once-magnificent empires like Mittani. States once regarded as almost mythological, like the Hittite Empire, not only really existed, they left copious records… once we knew where to look.

There are limitations to this history. Most record-keepers were state officials and court scribes; some were prosperous merchants. Thus we know the “great doings of great men,” as Thucydides put it. And, after over three millennia, large quantities of important artifacts just rotted away, like food, textiles, and other perishable goods. We must reconstruct how ordinary people lived from court records and metal artifacts, a limitation Cline openly acknowledges.

Professor Eric H. Cline

But that leaves extensive documentation nevertheless. Cline quotes most extensively from Egyptian stelae and temple inscriptions, as Egypt clearly left the most detailed literary record. Yet other sources also exist. Under a century ago, for instance, Ugaritic records were completely unknown; Ugarit was a forgotten minor city-state, its location lost. But now its rediscovered written records provide Cline’s most specific sources on the LBA’s final decades.

The world Cline reconstructs (he admits making occasional leaps of logic where facts are scanty) is both fantastically complex, and hauntingly familiar. Extensive trade routes made LBA society possible, moving uncountable quantities of goods from where they naturally existed, to where humans lived. Civilization in Egypt, Greece, and Anatolia was only possible using bronze, made from Cyprus copper and Afghanistan tin, so peaceful trade was absolutely necessary.

Mercantile culture survives for readers because LBA record-keepers described their trade in extensive bills and receipts. We know as much about certain prosperous merchants as about some kings. Besides land-based archaeological sites, Cline dedicates probably his longest description to an underwater dig, the Uluburun Shipwreck, with has yielded science’s most extensive trove of information about the interconnected, downright globalized, nature of LBA society.

Cline spends almost as much time describing the scientists of the last two centuries who have reconstructed LBA history, as on the history. Since Near Eastern civilization just stopped, leaving huge gaps in historical records, Cline considers how we know that history equally important to what we know. LBA history is modern history, because the rediscovery says as much about ourselves as about the civilization which scientists have painstakingly reconstructed.

Then, after three centuries of almost uninterrupted prosperity, LBA civilization stopped. Historians once simply assumed barbarian invasions destroyed civilization, because Egyptian records mentioned barbarians, and hey, similar invasions destroyed Rome, so why not? But as Cline reconstructs the final, poorly documented decades, it becomes increasingly clear that no single explanation suffices. The end of LBA civilization was as complex, and as fraught with possibilities, as its beginning.

Places and cultures Cline describes are as familiar as today’s post-Arab Spring headlines: Egypt, Syria, Megiddo, Anatolia. Aleppo. And possible causes of collapse, including climate change, refugee crisis, and war, should make thoughtful readers pause. Like all great literature, Cline’s history isn’t only about its subjects, it’s also about us, its readers. It challenges us to consider how we resemble, or don’t, LBA history. The parallels are chilling.

Selling Armageddon By the Yard

Rebecca Belliston, Life (Citizens of Logan Pond, Volume 1)

After the banks collapsed and President Rigsby seized absolute authority, the families around Logan Pond banded together. Five years on, Carrie Ashworth, only twenty-three, is raising her orphaned siblings, growing her people’s garden, and running interference with patrolman (read: stormtrooper) Oliver Simmons. But two new members, in a clan that’s been steady for five years, causes friction, made only worse when a government raid jeopardizes the community.

Rebecca Belliston’s third thriller starts well. (The second volume, already published, is entitled Liberty. Guess where we’re headed.) Belliston avoids stock Tea Party clichés about government overreach, preferring to present engaging characters enacting a complex story. But problems arise as the story progresses. Important story elements begin feeling uncomfortably familiar, and the narrative becomes distinctly preachy. Then, in a sudden Blaze, I realized where my concerns originated.

Carrie and the Logan Pond clan have established their outlaw clan around a suburban cul-de-sac outside Auburn, Illinois. This premise uncomfortably resembles NBC’s ill-fated series Revolution, but Belliston avoids showrunner Eric Kripke’s swinging machismo. Carrie’s extended clan has established an equilibrium of domestic tranquility, growing crops and stealthily evading government involvement. They enjoy a pleasant semi-libertarian balance despite America’s suspended Constitution.

One rainy evening, Mariah Pierce and her son Greg suddenly appear, disrupting the balance. Mariah wants to live peaceably with this extended clan, but handsome, bitter Greg has powerful anti-establishment desires. Notwithstanding his relentlessly bad attitude, Logan Pond evidently wants to decorate the chapel for Greg and Carrie, since they haven’t seen a marriage-aged bachelor in years. Sadly, the young adults get along like gasoline and matches.

I enjoyed the first hundred pages or so. Despite the enforced Edward-and-Bella dynamic between the leads, I found the premise and characters engaging, and wanted to like them. Okay, characters occasionally start unnecessary debates about whether to receive society’s collapse with stoicism or radical rebellion, and the government Belliston proposes seems profoundly impractical. But her engaging characters and sophisticated story make forgiving such lapses comparatively easy.

Rebecca Belliston

Then, somewhere after page 100, things change. Local patrolmen raid Logan Pond, seeking undocumented residents for the work camps. Yes, work camps; Belliston’s World War II metaphors aren’t subtle. Though everyone escapes, they lose property, crops, and sense of security. Suddenly, the once-peaceful community starts talking Greg’s radical language, while shy, moonstruck Patrolman Oliver desperately scrambles to repair his patched relationship with Carrie. The novel’s tone abruptly shifts.

Besides becoming more confrontational, Belliston’s characters begin a sudden tendency toward monologues. Both spoken and internal, these monologues turn on how Logan Pond should confront an intrusive government that disregards rule of law. These diatribes and debates seemed remarkably familiar. Desperate to understand where I’d heard these arguments before, I Googled Rebecca Belliston. Turns out she’s a prominent Mormon with a parallel career composing LDS worship music.

And I realized: the White Horse Prophecy.

Current LDS leadership considers the White Horse Prophecy apocryphal and doesn’t accord it Scriptural legitimacy. However, it remains influential in Mormon political circles. Supposedly, Joseph Smith received a prophecy correlating his nascent church with the White Horse of the Revelation, and foretelling that, one day, the US Constitution would hang “as by a thread.” (Mormons consider the Constitution divinely inspired.) Then the White Horse will ride in, heroically restoring order.

Several public Mormons, Glenn Beck chief among them, embrace the White Horse Prophecy as instrumental to their political and social mores. They see change as corruption, activism as Godlessness, and the Democratic Party as forerunner to biblical Armageddon. This dynamic lionizes outsidership as proof of integrity, and positions religious conservatives as bulwarks against overwhelming secularized rot. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more marginalized you are, the more right you are.

Like Stephanie Meyer, Rebecca Belliston uses little or no religious language in her writing. Yet her spiritual heritage shines through her prose, from the chaste romance and studiously mild language, to the sanctification of outsider status, to the belief in the despised community restoring Nineteenth Century values. Belliston starts well, but quickly becomes predictable. What starts as an engaging character-driven dystopian story quickly unwinds into a semi-religious Libertarian political tract.

I suppose, in writing socially engaged fiction, the author’s beliefs will unconsciously inform the story. Should I write a post-apocalyptic dystopia (hey agents, I have a manuscript), it would reflect my Distributist values. I just wish Belliston had permitted her characters to drive her story, rather than yoking them to her beliefs. Because I really enjoyed this story, right up until the moment the author got in her own way.

Suburban Decay and the Zombie Insurgency

Shana Festa, Time of Death: Induction

Nursing student Emma Rossi thinks her world’s been turned upside down when she loses her first patient. But that’s nothing: when that patient awakens and attacks others, it’s the beginning of South Florida Armageddon. Soon Emma, her husband Jake, and dog Daphne find themselves manning the barricades against advancing hordes of rotting flesh. Turns out, the zombie invasion smells really, really bad in Gulf Coast humidity.

In reviewing this book, I must immediately acknowledge: it isn’t for me. I’m not Shana Festa’s target audience. I’m the analytical Puritan focused on issues like zombie epidemiology. C’mon, folks, this ain’t Captain Tripps moving silently on sneeze vapors; since zombies are loud, violent, and must physically contact victims to spread contagion, wouldn’t infection move according to geometric patterns? I’m constantly three pages behind Festa, scrutinizing something she wrote previously.

Festa, rather, lavishes in sensory detail and psychological dislocation. Her story, like the best Zombie Apocalypse fiction, invests normal situations with dark implications. Emma’s transition from nurse and suburban wife to guerrilla insurgent reveals the lingering savagery repressed under society’s learned limitations. Festa combines chase horror, family drama, military action, and gallows comedy into a remarkably engaging, stomach-churning tale… for the correct audience.

Following a brief explanatory prologue and some snapshots of domestic bliss, Festa plunges readers into a world bereft of common expectations. Emma, our first-person narrator, and her family face a zombie epidemic that coincidentally hits during a hurricane, meaning literary critics can butter their bread with Festa’s symbolism. Humanity, apparently taking nature’s cue, turns on itself, eating that which it has created. The Rossis abandon everything they know and run.

One suspects Festa injects herself into the story. Emma lives in Festa’s Florida hometown, is training for Festa’s job (registered nurse), and even has Festa’s dog. As Emma flees into Cape Coral’s spaghetti-like suburban streets, struggling to survive both weather and humanity’s devolutionary turn, her fears quickly become our fears. Who hasn’t gotten lost amid cul-de-sacs, wondering whether humanity will die finding its way out of our interchangeable built environment?

The popularity of zombie fiction isn’t as straightforward as Clinton-era vampire mania. I’ve often wondered why zombies enthrall America’s current imagination. Shana Festa clarifies it: we fear we’ve become undead ourselves, shambling through lives we didn’t create, reduced to creatures of mere appetite. We must resist, but one touch spreads the contagion. No wonder zombie mania has, ahem, heated up just as global warming has become imminent and inarguable.

How blatant Festa meant that message, we could debate. Surely it cannot be coincidental that one of her most horrifically affecting images features the Rossis crashing into a car sporting a “Baby On Board” placard. Investigating further, they find a zombie mama consuming her own infant. Festa’s best images, rife with sensory detail, feature such violent disruptions of ordinariness. Zombies don’t just kill; they shatter our market-tested illusions of stability.

I wish Festa had lingered over certain concepts longer. Early chapters imply the Stephen King School of Domestic Horror, the aesthetic that family and community have potential for shocking dread. Y’know, how Jack Torrance terrorizes his family, or how Margaret White’s controlling intolerance nurtures Carrie’s resentment. We get something similar here when an infection begins with the youngest daughter, then eats its way backward up the family tree.

However, by the one-third mark, Festa largely abandons this premise, favoring the survivors’ resistance movement over the initial upheaval. She doesn’t treat it badly, just briefly. Though critics disparage Stephen King’s wordiness, admit it, his domestic dramas wouldn’t feel nearly so horrifying if he didn’t linger over the details. Herein, protagonist Emma shoots her best friend, while a previously polite, bookish teen turns carnivorous, but once they’re over, they’re over.

But that’s my priggishly analytical side intruding again. Festa’s best work—and it’s remarkably good—happens in the present, not in maundering reminiscence nor impending dread. In her longest section, survivors re-enact the Siege of Rorke’s Drift in a suburban big-box discount store. Festa details the indignity of life without amenities, privacy, or imminent rescue, so thoroughly, I can imagine serving “toilet duty” while the soulless clamor outside the walls.

Shana Festa rewards active, engaged readers, but not over-analytical ones. She favors moments of shock and revulsion over creeping Lovecraftian dread, reflecting her extreme brevity: the story itself barely cracks 160 pages. Dedicated readers could devour this book in one rainy Saturday, but Festa’s grim, episodic, often surprisingly funny images will linger longer. She doesn’t transform popular zombie literature, but she certainly advances it.

California's Valley of Dry Bones

Sheldon Greene, After the Parch

When an aggressive mining company threatens Bran’s bucolic Central California community, his people muster every dollar they have and send him to Irvine to register their claim. But Bran, who’s never ventured far from home, finds a drought-ravaged dystopian terror. Picking his way among high-tech ruins, Bran discovers one inescapable truth in the California Republic of 2075: if rejecting corporate rule makes us revolutionaries, only revolutionaries will reject our corporate overlords.

Indie author Sheldon Greene’s fifth novel distinctly reminds me of Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three, probably the most influential book from my childhood. The sheltered foundling makes a journey, meets an enigmatic prince and mysteriously vivacious girl, and begins discovering his untapped inward reserves. Though Greene shifts settings from ancient Wales to post-apocalyptic California, the Joseph Campbell-esque mythic import remains excitingly, dangerously intact. Before Bran’s journey ends, his world will be forever transformed.

Almost immediately outside his village, Bran encounters trouble. A journey that should take three days becomes a massive overland slog because roads are impassible and technology is unreliable. Bran relies on help from a traveling illusionist and a feral child, equivalent to Alexander’s Fflewddur Fflam and Gurgi, while realizing he cannot wholly rely on them. Yet he also discovers the painful lie his rural community taught him: despite his expectations, most strangers can be trusted.

Greene, an activist attorney by day, presents a California plagued with violent inequalities. Rural poverty forces farmers to revert to horse-drawn technology, and much of the Central Valley has become salinated and infertile through overuse. Fresno and Los Angeles are criminal cesspits; natural disasters and poverty have reduced the San Fernando Valley to a graveyard. Yet massive corporations, with government connivance, would steal what little California’s poor still have. It’s the One Percent gone mad.

One could read Greene’s novel as allegory for contemporary social issues, and one back-cover quote suggests he certainly intends that. Bran rescues lovely June from indentured servitude, revealing that, without meaningful laws, nothing prevents slavery. (Or with them. June echoes recent news stories of global sex trafficking.) Bran’s company falls in with Nikanor, an itinerant musician who doesn’t share his secrets lightly, but teaches Bran, via hard experience, that life is worth living because some causes are worth dying for.

But Bran’s journey also reflects heroes, from Telemachos to Buddha to Frodo Baggins to Luke Skywalker, who ventured outside their provincial lives and discover life’s grand, terrifying scope. Like Buddha, Bran discovers suffering and death, and cannot sit mute; like Frodo, he discovers that tyranny won’t ignore his village if he remains quiet. Awareness of the world brings responsibilities. Thus Bran risks jail, death, and his community’s existence, to fight California’s oppressive, powerful Standard Corporation.

This book reflects positive trends I’ve seen in recent young adult fiction. Besides Alexander, I also see shades of Moira Young’s Blood Red Road and Maureen McGowan’s The Dust Chronicles. All deal with issues of adulthood, especially the wide gap between real life and grown-ups’ sincere but misguided attempts to keep youth innocent. We expect children to turn eighteen, Bran’s age herein, and magically have the coping tools we’ve persistently denied them their entire childhoods.

Bran understands some truths remarkably well: he’s both industrious and sexually aware. (Greene treats sex frankly, but not gratuitously, using the dictionary to call things what they’re called.) Yet his adults keep him ignorant of history, politics, and basic social literacy; he doesn’t grasp outlanders’ ordinary ways. Bilingualism is perhaps Bran’s best lesson in this book. He discovers he cannot effectively resist the Standard Corporation if he cannot speak their own language back to them.

As an indie author, Greene’s prose sometimes runs rocky. He needs a copy checker to cover his tense shifts, misplaced apostrophe’s, and comma splices; but indie publishers often cannot afford such luxuries. Also Greene, a Bay-area resident, garbles California geography: why would a trip from Templeton to Irvine pass through Fresno? One suspects Greene’s never been that far south. Such hiccups take readers out of the moment, reminding us we’re reading words on a page.

Yet despite momentary glitches, Greene crafts a taut, energetic all-ages thriller. Socially engaged readers and newshounds can appreciate Greene’s allegorical treatment of contemporary issues; science fiction fans can enjoy enjoy a meaty mythic journey. Greene’s conclusion suggests, like Alexander, that more adventures remain for this cadre, because more fights remain worth fighting. If so, I look forward eagerly to Bran’s continuing journey; his unvarnished mythic honesty offers lessons both kids and adults could profitably learn.

Hell On the Tundra Moss

Don Rearden, The Raven's Gift

John Morgan and his wife, Anne thought teaching in Alaska’s rural tundra would be an adventure. But when a mutant flu decimates their Yup’ik village, John loses everything he loves. When he can’t bring himself to die, he chooses his only remaining option: walk out, across hundreds of trackless miles, in search of civilization. But he finds something far worse than disease: primal man, bloody and savage, hunting his trail.

Advance press compares Don Rearden’s debut novel to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but I’d go further: hints of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket permeate the narrative. It also provides a companion to Camus’ The Plague, a sort of answer volume, but not a direct refutation. Readers can enjoy this as a character thriller, or a dialogue with recent Western philosophy.

Trekking over Alaska’s vast tundra, John must confront creeping nihilism emerging within himself. Like Homer or Jack London before him, Rearden realizes an important truth: humans cannot beat nature. Oceans or deserts or Arctic flatland abolish all human pretense. Yet we share an innate need to build something. When John encounters a blind, starving girl amid burned-out ruins, he knows a logical man would leave her, but he abandons logic.

Rearden’s non-linear narrative pits John, the Modern Man, against a range of iconic characters: the Wise Native Woman and the Children With No Past, the Men Gone Savage and the Bastion of Civilization. When everything that came before proves founded on lies, different people face this collapse in wildly different ways. Facing such diverse allies and foes, though, John and “the girl” have only one overriding motivation: to survive.

In some ways, such stories have a fatalistic inevitability. From medieval quest romances and Grimm’s fairy tales to modern apocalyptic thrillers, we expect certain necessary components. We know the hero will lose everything, undergoing trials and humiliations; he’ll uncover secrets, both his own and his people’s; and he’ll energe transformed, putatively improved. Readers could sit with a copy of Joseph Campbell and plot Rearden’s story arc with graph paper.

But simultaneously, Rearden customizes his narrative to suit his location. Alaskans love to call their home ‘the last frontier,” and like Owen Wister or Louis L’amour, Rearden knows that people discover their true core selves beyond civilization’s borders. Frontiers overthrow self-importance and learned behaviors. Only when forced to support ourselves, moment by moment, do we discover the identity lingering beneath our pretensions.

Alaska, in Rearden’s telling, completely demolishes everything people from the Lower 48 think they know. Not only does it lack roads and conurbations, city trappings which bring the illusion of control; Alaska also lacks trees, grasses, and other familiar natural landmarks. Sure, miners and tourists and other white folks think they can “modernize” Alaska. But Rearden says the flat tundra moss and thrusting mountains expose such fashionable rhetorical lies.

Staggering across time, Rearden unfolds John’s story in three parallel tracks. As an outsider teacher, John struggles with local mistrust, but finds surprising allies by rejecting traditional white narratives in his Yup’ik classroom. Fleeing his ruined village, he struggles to survive with a blind, questioning orphan in tow. And with possible civilization in sight, he must hold his new family together while fleeing a faceless enemy who hunts humans for sport.

John’s quest exposes his inmost fears, testing whether his worries matter in the larger landscape. As a mixed-race outsider, he stands with his feet in both white and Yup’ik culture—making him part of neither. Lacking either Yup’ik tradition or white scientific certainty, he manages to avoid the pitfalls plaguing many other survivors. But he doesn’t understand most people he encounters. Like Jonah, John sees, but he doesn’t know.

Rearden’s ending comes rather abruptly. Like Golding, he cannot quite let his characters embrace the Absurd, providing rescue when things seem bleakest. One almost wishes Rearden, like Camus, had let his characters surrender all hope. Ten more pages might have been revealing. What new humans might have emerged on the other side? Surely something different, darker, more visceral than Camus’ subtopical plague survivors.

But like Golding, Rearden’s minor epic will resonate with audiences not for its ending, but for its locomotive-like mass. He pushes his characters, and us with them, through the pits of human despair and casual savagery. And if he doesn’t necessarily take the final step himself, he invites readers to do so. Though he admits: you may not like what you see over there.

Twilight of the Godlings

Jason M. Hough, The Darwin Elevator

The Space Elevator rises 40,000 kilometers above Darwin, Australia, humanity’s last city. Its strange alien technology lets humans farm the reaches of space, though nobody understands how it arrived, or why. And nobody understands why its coming corresponded with SUBS, a plague that turns infected humans into ravenous zombies. The Elevator’s Aura protects the city, while Earth beyond has fallen. But something worse may be coming.

Purists may grouse that Jason Hough’s debut novel doesn’t break new ground. The fetish for originality, beloved by writing textbooks, colors many readers’ awareness. But Hough shines new light on science fiction fundamentals, and uses them to bolster a complex, braided narrative. The result resembles the paperbacks I grew up reading thirty years ago, brought laughing and exulting into the Twenty-First Century, where we need such straightforward excitement.

Skyler Luiken lives on the surface and commands a crew of rare “immunes,” people who can breathe beyond the Aura without becoming plague carriers. He commands a salvage crew who haven’t turned a profit in months. A mysterious benefactor contracts Skyler to retrieve stored data that may unlock humanity’s redemption. To find it, he merely needs to venture through the dragon’s teeth, risking his entire crew’s life in the process.

Neil Platz got rich when the aliens planted the Darwin Space Elevator on his property. Only he knows that it wasn’t coincidence. Now in deep orbit, Platz and his chief researcher, Tania Sharma, have a drop-dead deadline. The Builders are returning, their purposes seem less than benign, and humanity’s twilight may be imminent. Here’s hoping human technology has the power to fend off this strange alien twilight.

Russell Blackfield controls the strait between Earth and orbit. The Elevator needs him to replenish their air and water; Darwin needs him to disburse orbital agriculture and manufactures. He’s parlayed this power into a feudal domain. If humanity dies, Blackfield will die last, a godling guarding the road to heaven. But when he discovers Neil Platz’s deal with Skyler Luiken, his ambition shifts, and Earth goes to war with orbit.

As the title implies, this novel posits humanity at evolution’s bottleneck. Anonymous aliens, yclept “Builders” by survivors, force humanity to weed its line. The human race may be as low as one million. But reading, we wonder whether we’ve made defensible evolutionary choices. The learned, pretty, and most important, rich live on the Darwin Elevator. Poor and unconnected, but crafty, groundlings eke out livings, but die in random subhuman attacks.

Arthur C. Clarke’s influence animates this book, which Hough obliquely acknowledges. It even has monoliths, folks! This novel brims with sidelong nods to prior science fiction, because Hough borrows liberally from the genre’s high points. But don’t assume he justs recycles formulae; Hough approaches classic narrative components with brio, telling a story that feels familiar to old genre hands, yet repeatedly hits us with brisk, unexpected slants.

Hough’s characters dare us to trust somebody, but laugh when we dare pick a side. His world brims with antiheroes, concealing vendettas behind bureaucratic handshakes. Seemingly noble pioneers have deeply buried secrets, and not everybody earns the comeuppance they receive. Skyler Luiken seems downright heroic because he doesn’t conceal his motivations: on a dying Earth, he just wants to make a living. Very Mal Reynolds.

Every time we think surely, now, Hough cannot push events any higher, he finds new ways to escalate. Skyler has a particular knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Each chapter we think, surely Hough cannot punish our heroes any more, or reward Blackfield’s ignominy. But rest assured, at nearly 500 pages, Hough has generous opportunities to push characters to new depths and make his readers cringe.

I grew up reading books like this, paperbacks populated by oversized personalities, shifting loyalties, and surprise revelations. Heroes prove themselves by decisive actions, salted with judicious violence; villains marinate in their own venality until they prove their own undoing. Say what you like about John W. Campbell and Alfred Bester, but my Golden Age of Science Fiction was the 1980s, when SF was popular, but still boldly countercultural.

Hough writes in that beloved sci-fi format, the trilogy, and while this novel has a satisfying conclusion, it asks tantalizing questions for future volumes. Del Rey so loves this series that it’s launching the whole trilogy this summer: three novels in three months. Who can blame them? In a crowded, noisy genre, Hough claims territory that deserves our attention. It’s enough to revive my flagging faith in science fiction.

Hell Beneath the Utopian Dome

Maureen McGowan, Compliance (The Dust Chronicles)

Young Glory, a teenager who can kill strangers telepathically, knows the bitter secret that the government would conceal from the domed city of Haven: the outside world isn’t so bad. The Dust that nearly obliterated humanity has dissipated, and with caution, the air is safe. Haven’s constant push through media, school, and every aspect of tightly controlled culture, is a lie. But breaking the silence could merit Glory her death.

Maureen McGowan’s second dystopian thriller covers similar ground as Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, while telling an entirely separate story. McGowan focuses not on how the hierarchy exploits massive poverty, but on how the leadership preserves its feudal privilege by cultivating fear and ignorance. It’s essentially a primer in how bloated post-industrial civilization must court fascism to prevent sweeping social chaos.

Glory studies to become a Compliance Officer, a paramilitary enforcer charged with weeding out Deviants. In her technologically disrupted world, Deviants are rogue mutants whose advanced physical and mental capabilities threaten Haven’s bureaucratic stability. But while training to root out Deviants, Glory also runs secret night missions smuggling Deviants out of the city, while trying to conceal her own Deviant superpower from her commanders.

Readers will undoubtedly recognize McGowan’s historic parallels. Glory serves as a sort of teenage Raoul Wallenberg, using her official standing to subvert the regime that employs her. But the Resistance she assists begins proffering orders Glory finds unethical. When an enigmatic government functionary reveals that not everything Glory knows about the city is necessarily true, she begins questioning her already divided loyalties. Sound familiar?

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

But McGowan doesn’t just exploit the obvious historic themes. She populates Glory’s world with a collusion between immense wealth and a government that maintains the status quo. Citizens can’t speak truth when media, government, and every available source of information recycles the same set of preapproved lies. Even when reality apparently contradicts the official story, the familiar lie has sticking power. Koch Brothers, anyone?

Critic Richard Mathews claims that the best fiction written for youth is only truly comprehensible to adults. By this, he means that while youth may feel deeply the truths underlying books like this one, and understand that this says something about the world they live in. But only adults have enough knowledge, enough experience, enough accumulated wisdom to explain exactly why these books speak to us. And speak this does.

Books like this, The Hunger Games, and Moira Young’s Blood Red Road bespeak a broad gap between the life adults promise to children—hard work will pay off in material rewards later, we can trust authority figures to do right, grown-ups promises are worth the air it takes to speak them—and the reality they see around themselves daily. It must seem to teens that adults lie for practice. As a former teacher, I’m not sure they’re wrong.

McGowan explicitly presents education, or schooling at any rate, as a tool for indoctrination and for squelching the imagination. She depicts one eager student answering a classroom question: “Deviants are different and difference is dangerous.” My fellow public school graduates will recognize the underlying ethos in this statement, as overworked teachers and mocking peers colluded (consciously or not) to silence ambitious or nonconforming students.

Despite their youth, McGowan’s target audience aren’t ignorant. They know their teachers preach a gospel of studiousness and bookish accomplishment, but they face a world where schoolroom performance has less and less to do with their careers. Ain’t no poor kids gonna become hedge fund managers. And with the increasing digitization of white-collar work, college has become a tedious holding pattern, not a key to success.

American society pays homage to values like democracy, capitalism, and initiative, but youth can see this has devolved into lip service. They’re forced to choose between two political parties who agree on too many crucial issues, and care little for society’s poorest. The people working the longest hours are not the people driving the biggest cars. Too often, material success depends your personal network; shade-tree mechanics, not learned geniuses, run the world.

Works like this matter, not just because youth find them entertaining, but because rebellious characters like Glory or Katniss empower readers to resist the blatant lies around them. The essential conservatism of canonical literature classes encourage students to keep quiet and honor the past. McGowan, Collins, and Young enable teens, and adult readers with stifled rebellious youth in their hearts, to believe their ideals have real-world merit.

Paolo Bacigalupi's Carbon-Soaked Apocalypse

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part Seven
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl

When the rest of the world drowned in carbon and rising seas, Thailand stood strong, held off the tide, and kept producing its own crops. But genetically customized diseases threaten to overwhelm this last bastion of purity. American companies jockey for position, nativist troops fight to keep the round-eyes out, and one desperate, scared, abandoned woman, grown in a vat as a toy for rich men, struggles to stay alive in the face of world-smashing hostility.

Science fiction, despite its reputation for novelty and experimentation, largely has a history of extreme distrust of technology. While a few authors, like Isaac Asimov, place great trust in human invention, most believe the law of unintended consequences has been openly proved by history, and will obtain in the future. Paolo Bacigalupi's award-winning short fiction has shown ways in which humanity risks destroying this world by our own unfettered greed.

His debut novel goes even further in depth, providing a grim and frightening glimpse of post-apocalyptic world-building. As one group, blind to the lessons of the past, tries to recapture what they think of as lost glory, another stands for control, fighting against the coming of a bleak post-human world. Bacigalupi stands out from the mass of dystopian science fiction writers in his intricate attention to the human element in his narrative.

Many polemic writers find it easy to lapse into white hats versus black hats. No such trap here. Bacigalupi's characters are so fully defined that, in reading, I found my loyalties sliding back and forth. The guy I hated a moment ago suddenly becomes the hero of the next chapter; the virtuous victim goes on a rampage and suddenly I'm hoping she gets her own. This is a complex novel that does not permit the audience to cling to easy answers or snap judgments.

The technology is also eye-opening. One moment, it seems Bacigalupi has his eyes on the future (this year's genetically optimized crops fight last year's genetically optimized blights), and in the next, he looks over his shoulder at the past (treadle-driven appliances and clockwork springs). This is a possible future very different from any I recall reading recently, and so minutely realized that it's easy to think we may actually be headed in just this direction.

Paolo Bacigalupi

Yet in this difference, many important components remain the same. A world devastated by climatic malpractice, in which environmental ministries have the armed authority once reserved to foil murderers and thieves, sees the conflict between environment and trade persevere. But in this new world, where so much more is at stake because so much less exists, the trade/environment conflict resembles less diplomatic wrangling, more open civil war.

On the surface, humans remain human. Our vices and, too infrequently, our virtues, remain intact, even as the playing field in which we utilize them changes. Which is worth more, making a living or breathing clean air? While cold logic suggests there is no conflict—money isn’t worth much to the dead—logic has little to do with how we live our lives, and yes, sometimes we do have to make that choice. Virtue seldom pays its own bills.

But if humans remain human, that apparent truism founders when technology forces the question: what is a human? The titular windup girl, a vat-grown bodyguard and sex toy, can be abandoned without a backward glance because she is property. Lechers can mistreat her, handlers profit from her misery, and strangers beat her in public, because she isn’t legally human. When her desperation boils into violence, though, she knows deep within that she has a soul.

Science fiction, like other literature, has its traditions. The dystopian apocalyptic future has, ironically, a storied past. But as the circumstances we fear will kill us continually evolve, so do the consequences we fear await those who survive. We cannot accept the idea that everything could end. But we cannot deny that the status quo cannot stand. Whether nuclear war, alien invasion, or biological catastrophe, sci-fi collapse says as much about present society as the future we depict.

This is high-tension fiction in a complex and plausible scientific future. It's a dire warning of what we may face if we don't mend our ways and start looking after our earth. And it's a gripping story of politics, high-stakes finance, and science struggling for dominance in a world that has been transformed beyond repair. I've been looking for well-written hard science fiction for a long time. Here I've finally found it.