Post-apocalyptic settings have been a big part of both SF and fantasy work for a long time—sometimes being used explicitly to blur the boundaries between the two.
Mostly when you think about post-apocalyptic fiction, you think of the dystopic or horrifying: Canticle for Leibowitz, The Stand, Station Eleven, the Mad Max movies. There’s a small sliver of post-apocalypse stories where life actually gets better locally if not globally, like the novel Alas Babylon. (The characters in a rural Florida community mutually support one another following a nuclear war that cuts them off from the rest of the country, racial divisions become less important, individuals grow up and become more responsible, people learn to flourish without all the complications of modern life.)
I have to admit I always had a soft spot for the kinds of stories where the characters roam through a post-apocalypse that’s basically just a fantasy setting for the usual kinds of quests and adventures—where the characters don’t know much about the world before, where the world is what it is—full of mutants who are effectively magical, forgotten or lost technologies that can change the balance of power, numerous small communities with a huge variety of ideologies and ways of living who trade with and fight one another, areas of radioactive or toxic danger have to be avoided. While nuclear war was the most frequent cause of these settings being the way they were, there were other disasters sometimes, and in any event, because all of them focused on adventure narratives full of fantastic elements (most of these stories featured sapient animals, many had telepathy, etc.) none of them really needed to have the urgent dread that we asked of “serious” portrayals of nuclear war and its consequences. You never felt on reading or viewing this kind of story that it was violating the doctrine of mutually assured destruction or suggesting with any earnestness that the world might be more fun or more interesting if we’d only just fire off the nukes and get it over with. Generally our world, our lives, our stories, are so far dead and gone in this kind of fiction that nobody feels particularly sad or haunted by what has happened, any more than we feel deep sadness for the people who once lived in abandoned cities of the Bronze Age. When there are surviving voices from the previous world (computers, people who’ve been in cryogenic storage, people who live in some kind of shelter who have maintained the culture of the old world) they’re usually kind of ridiculous or pitiable, as in the Fallout series of video games.
I’ve been re-reading these pretty steadily over the years. I can’t add much to Judith Tarr’s marvelous re-read of Andre Norton’s Daybreak 2250 AD. —she surfaces a significant racial subplot that I had absolutely no recollection of noticing when I first read the book as a teenager but that’s very visible as I re-read now.
Stewart Lanier’s Hiero’s Journey is maybe my favorite of these older books, though. If you ever played the tabletop RPG Gamma World, it’s more or less based directly on Lanier’s book: there’s a telepathic bear, there’s a quest for a computer, there’s an evil brotherhood, etc. What I noticed on a recent re-read is another element that’s fairly common to postapocalyptic adventure set in the former United States and Canada, which is a re-appearance or reinscription of Native American cultures. (Paul O. Williams’ The Pelbar Cycle series is another example of that.) It’s an interesting thematic element—both a recognition that Native American life after 1500 CE was post-apocalyptic (and not an adventure) and a sort of oddly hopeful thought that somehow with the destruction of the nations the settler colonists built the former world could arise again.
I suppose that’s the striking thing generally about these kinds of fictions. There’s settings that are horrible to us but banal or useful to the protagonists. Rather than sinking to their feet at the sight of the Statue of Liberty in ruins screaming about how the maniacs did it, they shrug and move on. Gaze on my works, ye mighty, and wonder if you might smelt their alloy into a powerclub. The animal world raised in sapience, the human world chastened for its pretentions and short-sightedness, the world newly alive in strange ways, the political possibilities of a world once again made not-a-world, where over the next hill there are strangers who have different ideas about how to live.
I once worked up a tabletop campaign using Gamma World for my kid with some of her friends. It imagined a village under the interstate underpass in a town just north of here full of a cosmopolitan community of humans, mutants and intelligent animals where the elite guards were warrior bipedal Boston Terriers defending against burrowing Bassett Hound mutants (a metacommentary on the fiercely adversarial relationship between our two dogs.) The idea held no terror for anyone, no sleepless nights, child or adult. Whatever that future world was, it was not a prediction about our own, it was an extension of our own self-image (the pluralist, accepting, self-imagined liberal community against the intolerant and violent who want to destroy it).
That’s what all of this kind of fiction—Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth, Thundarr the Barbarian, Hiero’s Journey, Daybreak 2250—is loosely, undogmatically playing around with: the possibility that the end of the world might be the beginning of a new one. Not in a serious, argumentative way, but it’s still significant that we could at one point in the Cold War and just after take the prospect of a nuclear war and use its distant future as a platform for fantastic entertainment.
I think it’s pretty striking so far that our fictions of the indefinite Anthropocene, of the future of a climate apocalypse, have never been adventurous fun, whether we’re talking Waterworld or The Water Knife. It may reflect the difference between a disaster that might be and a disaster that increasingly feels inevitable. It may also reflect the difference between a disaster where our calculus of helplessness and power is different—where we all feel responsible and we all feel helpless, as opposed to nuclear armaments where most of us felt (or feel: they’re all still there) outside the key decision loops but also believed it might be possible to disarm. A dwindling hope of responsibility vs. the choice to find some fleeting pleasure in what we think we cannot stop, perhaps?
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