Dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction
This subgenre of sci-fi (or set of key words to describe a plot) waxes and wanes and generally reflects the pessimism in society. Often a reaction to a real or perceived threat, books described by one or both these key words have attracted readers. I’d read all the classics before I entered high school. Maybe this is unusual for a lad who was supposed to be more curious about those strange creatures called girls, but it was the Cold War. Reading pessimistic books about my possible future seemed natural. Boring drills when we hid under our desks to “protect us from the Russian bombs” didn’t help, especially when I was punished for telling teachers they were stupid to believe the drills would save anyone.
Huxley’s Brave New World and Ape and Essence, Wells’s The Time Machine, Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and a few others I can’t remember interested me much more than the assigned books on our class reading lists. I suppose I raised a few eyebrows when I’d make book reports on “elective reading” I’d done, although dystopian and post-apocalyptic books seemed safer than some other books I read (notes to my parents would have been forthcoming for Tom Jones and Fanny Hill, I’m sure—teachers and parents like to think they can control a child’s reading habits!).
I graduated to books like Bradley’s Fahrenheit 451, Kornbluth’s Not This August, and Christopher’s No Blade of Grass that were seminal for some of my own stories, not in plot but in structure: the world goes to hell, but there are a few individuals who can make it a wee bit better. While pure dystopian and post-apocalyptic books still exist—Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is an example (a book she calls speculative fiction is post-apocalyptic sci-fi, of course)—making readers want to slash their wrists or suck on a shotgun seems less fulfilling than leaving them with some optimism. The best books of this type do just that, like Not this August and No Blade of Grass, while even famous ones like Fahrenheit 451 fail.
Consider Howey’s Wool and Redling’s Flowertown, both bleak but ending on a high note. They also exhibit another positive trend: there are many events that can throw a group of humans or all of humanity into a post-apocalyptic setting. Nuclear (common in the 1950s), biological, chemical, climate and genetic engineering disasters, or just nasty demagogues and totalitarian regimes—the possibilities are endless, especially in today’s world. Maybe that just means that there are a lot more things we’re concerned with, but every one of these stories contains a strong warning for someone who might want to bury her or his head in the sand. And an author can turn a disaster situation upside down, as Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn did for global warming in Fallen Angels (maybe trumping Trump?).
You can’t have dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction without humans around, of course (or ETs who exhibit enough commonality with human beings readers can empathize with their plight). There has to be people who suffer through the disasters and perhaps their aftermath, or there’s no story. They might finally die off by the end of the book—pessimism wins—or they survive and their demise is postponed—optimism remains. The standard storytelling formula of having a few, good women and men face terrible odds and hardships is satisfied whether they make it at the end or not.
Probably the better choice is to leave their survival an open question: at the end of the novel, the survivors or their offspring still slog on. Some of these stories are a bit like the flood story in the Bible. The world is “cleansed” (which can mean near destruction, of course, if you consider the victims of God’s wrath!) and Noah and his family survive. That flood story is the model for many post-apocalyptic stories, in fact. Aldiss’s Starship is a prime example. I’ll probably be criticized for calling Noah’s flood story post-apocalyptic sci-fi and considering religious influences in Aldiss’s classic novel, or even calling that novel post-apocalyptic, but both stories are similar.
I’m working on a new post-apocalyptic novel. I’m still in a quandary about whether to make it a wrist-slasher (no one survives), a cliffhanger (but only in the good sense that the reader won’t know if anyone survives), or a bit uplifting (a few survive to carry on). I’m almost of a mind to let the reader choose her or his own ending, but that would be a cop-out, right?
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[Many of my sci-fi books have a dystopian or post-apocalyptic flavor. Survivors of the Chaos, #1 in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” is an example, but it offers a glimmer of hope at the end. In the trilogy, Humans come close to extinction several times. Soldiers of God, new to Smashwords and also available in all ebook formats, including Amazon’s, is a logical bridge between that trilogy and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy.” The first part of More than Human: The Mensa Contagion takes humanity right to the brink of the apocalypse. You can check out my entire catalog in the “Books and Short Stories” webpage of this website. Don’t look for a description of the new book mentioned in the last paragraph, though. I’m keeping that a secret for the time being!]
In libris libertas!
