Thinking About Fiction

Ever wonder about the genre of fiction called "apocalyptic" or "post apocalyptic"?  I read a bit of it.  I'm especially fond of S.M. Sterling's Cangeverse books, and his Peshwar Lancers novel and novella.  They're great stories.

But what the heck is an apocalypse, anyway?  According to thefreedictinary.com it's defined as this:

  a·poc·a·lypse  (-pk-lps)

n.

1.

a. Apocalypse Abbr. Apoc. Bible The Book of Revelation.

b. Any of a number of anonymous Jewish or Christian texts from around the second century b.c. to the second century a.d. containing prophetic or symbolic visions, especially of the imminent destruction of the world and the salvation of the righteous.

2. Great or total devastation; doom: the apocalypse of nuclear war.

3. A prophetic disclosure; a revelation.

Definition 2 seems to be synonymous with catastrophe or cataclysm.  Definitions 1,b and 3 are more interesting.

I doesn't matter too much which post apocalytic book you read, elements of both these definitions are present. 

In the first, there are the elements of both destruction and the "salvation of the righteous".   If you read this stuff that is the unifying theme of the genre.  The details of who, exactly, is accounted righteous and who gets destroyed seems to hing on the world view of the author, but those who survive and grow strong, leaving a legacy for future generations are the ones whom the author feels the most affinity for.  I haven't read one where the bad guys inherit the earth. 

But definition 3, well, it's implicit in the genre.  The revelation is the growing desire to do away with the current order, the current lifestyles and social structures of contemporary society on the part of so many people that this kind of literature is in vogue.  Another thing that is revealed is the very secular nature of these longing in the modern world.  We have a large body of literature produced by Evangelical and Charismatic Christians that simply postulate an interpretation of St. Johns Apocalypse, and they sell well in their cultural milieu, but the larger selling, more widely read examples tend toward the secular very strongly, with some having "spiritual" overtones, as the protagonists wrestle with ethical issues, a theological or ontological basis is either absent of just assumed and un-expounded.  Very few are blatantly religious.

Yet the very existence of the genre--thinking about the unthinkable--points to a vacuity in modern society and culture, a sense of fulfillment and pointlessness.  This is present in books like Lucifer's Hammer, or Dies the Fire .  Over and over again we see the theme of the highly complex, networked and interdependent way we live, the compact density of urban life being essentially alienating and repressive of individual potential--for good or evil.  This genre shows clearly we know our culture is sick, our lives unnatural.   In Alas Babylon, Pat Frank managed to convey both loss, and a finding of new meaning in the apocalyptic situation.  Even in Lucifer's Hammer, the book in the genre that I feel to be most sympathetic to modern society, the replacement of institutional structure with personality shines brightly.

There is another genre that casts light as well--Alternative History.  A lot of it is pretty straight forward, such as Harry Turtledoves The War that Came Early (which, BTW, I think gets a lot wrong) that wonders what would have happened in the United Kingdom and France had called Hitler's bluff in '38 (and in '38, it was bluff.)  Some of it crosses into science fiction--situations like an alien invasion during the height of WWII.  Some of it asks some pretty deep questions about freedom and governance.  All of them ask "what if we had done it differently?  Is our current situation really so inevitable, and could relatively minor changes have given us a different, perhaps better world?  S.M. Sterling's Conquistador is both a science fiction and alternative history novel that wonders both what the world would look like if Alexander the Great had not died young and established a stable empire and what a society established by the Southern Agrarians might look like.  Fun stuff, but thoughtful.

Finally, there is a third body of fiction emerging, that I do not have a name for:  novels concerning our next civil war.  Perhaps the best of these is Tom Kratman's State of Disobedience that looks at a continuing drive by the Federal Government for a progressive, statist system, and where the American people would draw the line.  In it he examines both regional differences, and the differences between urban and rural areas, constitutional issues and possible resolutions, and what the heck happens to the losers.  One of the worst of these books is J.W. Rowles' Patriots, which stipulates a disintegration of social order and the economy due to the actions of the Federal government, the emergence of faction, and the idea that there are only two kinds of people in the world--individualists and dependents, with the latter cheerfully surrendering freedom and responsibility for the illusion of security and governance.  What all of the books I have read in this grouping (Is it actually a genre?  If so, does it have a name?) have in common is the theme that we can no longer rely on the government to efficiently manage the nation, safeguard individual liberties or keep the economy going in a way that benefits the population as a whole.  These books exist on the left and the right of the political spectrum  (Callenbach's  Ecotopia  and  Ed Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang are both early examples from the left).  More than anything else, their rising popularity points up a growing dissatisfaction with the American Political Process. 

Judging from what's going on in fiction, we're in a scary place now.  I say this because so many books in these genres seem to be looking forwards to, rather than seeking to avoid, a period of conflict and trouble that would erase our current social order.  The indicate a growing loss of faith in our ability, and a nation, to govern ourselves without bloodshed and violence on a large scale, and a growing sense that perhaps we should get on with it.  From the deus ex machina of post-apocalyptic fiction to the calls to action in the last grouping, there seems to be a longing for a new upheaval, a new time of strife and striving and a new order that displaces our mass culture.  We seem to have lost faith in ourselves as a nation, and in our fellows as reasonable, ethical beings.