P is for Postapocalypse

Judging by occurrences in popular culture, especially online, most people hear “Postapocalypse” and think of Mad Max or The Road. When they fantasize about the fall of civilization (and, when we’re honest, who doesn’t?) these people see themselves, clad in leather, metal, and 1970s hairdos, possibly riding a motorcycle, armed to the teeth defending themselves against the lawless hordes roaming the countryside. They have mottoes such as “Trust no one,” “Look out for yourself” or “Always know who’s behind you.” They follow the law of the road and believe that only the strong will survive. (And most of these stories, I’m afraid, involve a chauvinistic and heteronormative world where the strong also get all the chicks.)

But in a real fall-of-civilization scenario—be it due to a zombie outbreak, nuclear war or bio-engineered plague—it is not the strong who will survive. It is the social who will survive. People like to cluster together: we’re social animals (unless they’re psychopaths, but those can only thrive if they’re a tiny minority), especially in time of danger and uncertainty. Yes, there will be chaos: a real fall of civilization needs a period of chaos to be complete. But then people will start to form communities; first for defense and safety in numbers, but then to share resources and labour, exchange skills and learning, raise and teach children, try to preserve as much of our learning as possible; to save as much of the good of our civilization before it is lost.

As fun as it is to read or write about people riding around having adventures on motorcycles, fighting zombies and marauding gangs, surviving in a world with all morality and law gone, there are more interesting things to write about. When I see a postapocalyptic landscape, I try to imagine how people are surviving, not in the face of humanity mysteriously turned into prehistoric savages, but in the face of the loss of sanitation, energy infrastructure, organized food production and freight, clean water, light at night and heat in winter. And against marauding savages, of course, because there will always be those who don’t possess the imagination to see they can benefit without taking from others, and grouping together with others with some kind of social contract is the best way to keep the sociopaths at bay.

Even more interesting might be to imagine how these nascent communities of postapocalypse humans choose to organize themselves (or not): they could choose to repeat all the errors of the past, and set up a plutocratic corporate economy where the resources of the community end up concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller élite. Or they could not. There are so many other forms of government to experiment with, and no doubt some would choose to live in agrarian hippie communes; others would try to build a libertarian or anarchist utopia. Some would choose deliberate simplicity, living close to the land; others would try to build up a more technophilic home, with renewable power generation, computer networks, physical and virtual libraries, networks of expertise feeding into both education and R&D. Some would be isolationist, others would actively reach out to other communities and individuals in an attempt to rebuild.

If you’re writing a story in the socio-political speculative genre, there’s a lot of scope for such speculation in the postapocalyptic theme.

E is for Eco-SF

It is hard to write good ecological science fiction.

This may sound paradoxical, because environmental catastrophe is very much in our cultural attention right now, for obvious reasons, and we often argue that warnings about the future are one of the most valuable things science fiction can do. Surely a science fiction story that takes us to task for our current self-destructive trajectory—preferably without offering a magical cure that doesn’t involve proactively cleaning up our act—would be exactly what TFF is looking for.

And yes, it would. But it is more difficult to write great eco-SF. I mean, it could be very easy to write disaster adventure stories involving some of the many documented symptoms of climate change, or other environmental mishap, in which the white, male, heterosexual, rich, educated, possibly military, heroes save the day (if not the world) in ways that perpetuate the worst stereotypes and the laziest political attitudes we have. (You’ve all seen The Day After Tomorrow or 2012, or if you haven’t—and good for you—you’ve seen the trailers and the reviews and know what I’m talking about.) None of that would be what we want.

Interestingly enough, most of the eco-SF themed stories we’ve published over the years have not been about climate change or global scale catastrophe (the cynical and lovely ‘Ephemeral Love’ is an exception), so much as about smaller examples of humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with our planet. Some involve environmental problems on other planets (‘Silent Song’, ‘Drown or Die’), others show individuals dealing with the impact of our hubris (‘Neap Tide’), or deciding to do something about it (‘Maryann Saves the World’).

So although we’d love to see more eco-SF, and we do feel that environmental concerns are among the most pressing topics that social-political speculative fiction can and should address, a good story needs to do more than pay lip service to this subject matter. And it needs to be inclusive and progressive in all socio-political areas it covers, not just confounding the reader’s expectations in one while conforming to lazy assumptions in all others.