Sweat, Tears and Digital Ink

What is it that fascinates us as people so much about the end of humanity? What is it about the end of humanity, or the end of the world, that entices science fiction writers so much? For an answer to the first question you are best off asking a psychologist, for an answer to the second I will answer from my own experiences.

For me, it is about speculation on two things: 1) how it happens and 2) what happens next. And as science fiction is speculative with a limitless ways of how the end might come about and an equally limitless number of “what happens next” scenarios. It can be quite a fascinating idea just thinking about the potential disasters we face and how we might react. Will we have a complete breakdown of all social norms fighting in a dog-eat-dog world for resources? Or would we seek to form communities founded on what went before or something entirely new? Would we be able to survive? There may be obstacles – giant man eating plants like Triffids in a world where most people are blind; the land might be poisoned where nothing can grow, as in The Road; a population reduced to less than 1% having to learn to do so much just to grow enough food in Survivors, or a population suffering the ravages of nuclear war in Threads.

I’m sure I don’t need a comprehensive list but in the last ten years we’ve had (in film and TV): The Day After Tomorrow; 2012; 28 Days/Weeks Later; I Am Legend; Dawn of the Dead; The Road; Aeon Flux; The Book of Eli; Daybreakers; Doomsday; Terminator: Salvation; Children of Men; The Road; Knowing; Survivors. Some of these were based on books but all had the theme of the end of civilisation and what happened next.

I have used the scenario in three of my short stories: A New Age Exodus; Crimson Sands; Forlorn and of course, my novel and each explores a different theme.

The best known recent example of post-apocalypse novel is Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” which was made into a film a couple of years ago. I know I’ve discussed it before and I still haven’t read it (though I have seen the film). It deals with a complete collapse of society as people struggle to survive. The ground is poisoned and the environment is locked in a permanent winter. Like the TV film Threads before it it is an utterly horrific existence, so what possesses people to write something so bleak let alone read it? Beats me, and though I’ve not written anything as bleak as The Road, I have every intention of reading it. I used to think that it was a secret desire on the part of all of us to wipe the slate clean and start again… and to get it right this time. If so, are we that deluded? Even in fiction things are never that simple. If any reader here would like to hazard another guess then please comment on this issue.

There is arguably no more prolific apocalypse scenario than a world over-run by zombies, and even more arguably it is possibly the worst possible outcome to be walled into a fortress unable to leave for the threat of the undead outside. From the first Night of the Living Dead in 1968 to last year’s The Walking Dead, walking rotten corpses have never been very far from popular imagination. And when you think about it, we never seem to grow bored with the same recycled storyline. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much as fascinated with them as I ever was and I’ve recently bought a booked called Zombie Apocalypse! by Stephen Jones. It isn’t really a novel in the traditional sense, it is put together more as a collection of personal e-mails, newspaper cuttings and telephone conversations. But anyway, when you think about it most zombie films are the same… a group; of desperate humans walled in somewhere suffer cabin fever and end up being swamped by zombies in their once safe fortress after somebody goes mad, gets desperate, spiteful or negligent. Yet we never grow tired of it and I guess the zombie genre is the one where we might forgive repetition.