Desolation, the final painting in Thomas Cole’s series “The Course of Empire”
The post-apocalyptic genre is a favorite of the viewing and reading public. Nuclear holocausts, zombie swarms, global pandemics, and a whole host of other disasters draw eyeballs to them. Protagonists have to think on their feet and fight with grit and bravery if they are to survive a world made harsh and unforgiving. Once civilized metropolises become dangerous and desolate, ripe with the possibility of adventure.
And I hate all of it.
But first, the good. The post-apocalypse has a lot going for it; namely, the elimination of social complexity.
Every second of every day, we are tracked, measured, and recorded in various ways. A complex web of laws, rules, and regulations restrict our actions, whether we live in the allegedly free West or the authoritarian East. If one uses violence to defend one’s person or community, the heavily armed forces of the state swoop in and arrest the would-be hero, for the state monopoly on force must be maintained.
Post-apocalyptic settings, on the other hand, dispense with all that. You aren’t tracked anymore. You can go where you need to and do whatever jobs you please. Using violence to defend your person will not be punished, and using violence to defend your small community will mark you as a hero. Despotic authority can be escaped. One can re-invent oneself, discarding an old life for good.
There’s also the sense of renewal. Old histories and outdated prejudices are swept away with the disaster. Everyone can be judged on their ability to survive, fight, and provide, with no written or unwritten social codes from ages past to burden them. That being said, some prior knowledge of past mistakes will remain in folk memory, allowing a new society to flourish that discards past thinking.
But why do I hate it? That’s easy: I see it as saying nothing.
Instead of imagining a new or different kind of society free of the problems of the modern day (as fantasy and some sci-fi do), post-apocalypses merely throw up their hands and give up, creating no society at all. Thete’s also the fact that a post-apocalypse isn’t a return to the savage or pastoral state, but a broken and defeated human race now living in an environment utterly destroyed, with loose nuclear waste everywhere. Implicit in the post-apocalypse is that human civilization as a concept is over, that all humanity can do is wait for its inevitable extinction.
In the face of something as bleak as that, I’ll take isekai or fantasy any day of the week. At least there, humanity can actually build something worth living in.
The only PA scenarios I really like focus on attempts to preserve and rebuild some sort of functional society. Things like “Lucifer’s Hammer” by Niven & Pournelle, or “Dies the Fire” by S.M. Sterling.
That said, I DO have a guilty pleasure of watching “Mad Max ripoff” 80s PA movies. I think the allure is as you said, the freedom from strict societal rules & control, and only the toughest and cleverest survive. Like in some Old West movies.
But like another genre about outsiders going their own amoral way, Sword & Sorcery, I don’t want to endlessly wallow in descriptions of unending misery and grime without anybody to root for. That way lies Grimdark.
I enjoyed Dies the Fire as well due to its interesting premise. But yes, it’s better if there’s an attempt to rebuild society.
I think that there is a specific sub-genre that is “Post Apocalyptic Literature” as opposed to SF that happens to be set on a future after some sort of global cataclysm.
Over on Twitter you described the genre as “misery porn”, but the kind of thing I am talking about is more of “guilt porn”. There is an assumption–often stately flatly, but sometimes only implied–that the cataclysm was deserved. A nuclear war caused by imperialist warmongers or an ecological disaster caused by greedy corporations, for example.
Those kinds of stories are anti-civilization. The villains are usually the ones trying to rebuild some kind of structure, usually military or religious (or both) in nature. The good guys (such as they are) tend to be parasitic scavengers fulfilling some version of a “all the bad rich people are dead and we get their stuff” fantasy.
Even if the “good guys” win, there is no sense that they intend to do anything other than root through the trash of the old world until all the canned beans are gone. It’s the juvenile nihilism of trust fund brats who can’t think past their next drink or their next screw.
Excellent insight. Perhaps that’s why the genre never appealed to me; it seemed misathropic and anti-civilization.
I was going to write a comment, but Misha said it far better than I could have.
There are many good stories that take place after a cataclysmic event of some kind, but they usually involve one of several important things to make it worth it.
A) An ignorant group begins to build from the ashes after finding something from the old culture to point their way forward, rebuilding civilization in the process.
B) The main character learns some truth about what caused the downfall of civilization and sets out to right the wrong.
C) A loner/savage discovers the importance of civilization and chooses it over barbarity.
Even Mad Max has the main point that humanity is what will pull us through the destruction. Civilization is presented as preferable in those movies, and the vicious wasteland is posited as an unambiguously terrible place.
One of the reason I like Wolf in Shadow by David Gemmell so much is because it’s all three of those things.
Good to know. Thanks for your comment.
There’s a lot of variation. Take Leigh Brackett’s Long Tomorrow, which definitely had a lot of society. Not the best, but society to the extent of being crushing, even.
There’s immediate wake of the disaster and when there’s been time to rebuild, of course.
I dislike “the immediate wake of the disaster” most of all.
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I love old school dystopias. 1984 and Brave New World are both bleak vision of the future dystopias that are very good even though they are both very depressing. Neither depends on a world in ruin/post-Armageddon setting. (Though you could argue that ’84 is a world caught in a slow-motion apocalypse.)
A Canticle for Leibowitz does depend on the rebuilding from a world-in-ruin trope and is my favorite of them all — but then again, I am Catholic.
The YA genre ruined dystopian fiction for me. Darn kids!
Yeah. In anime, there’s a similar divide between old-school isekai (trapped in another world stories) and newer isekai based on video game tropes and wish fulfillment. One curious detail is that for old and new, the sexes are reversed; the good, older stuff usually had female protagonists, and the bland, newer stuff usually has male protagonists.
Rawle,
I share your dislike. It’s antipulp. Most of the stories are bleak, hopeless like living in a North Korean gulag…forever.
I find the genre to be off putting and just ignore it in favour of the heroic, campy and thriller stories. The good win; the bad los; justice is upheld and the disaster averted.
xavier
Amen. That’s a good attitude to have.
Rawle,
Thanks! My time and beer money are just to precious to waste it on depressing never ending despair. With the Advent season and Christmas so near, it’s so hard to take this genre seriously
That’s a good perspective.