Apocalypse… now?
26th February 2016
So, the end of the world. There’s a thing. I’ve published a fair amount of books on the very subject – Abaddon’s Afterblight series, the Task Force Ombra novels by Weston Ochse, Eric Brown’s bleak Guardians of the Phoenix and James Lovegrove’s Age of Aztec, all stand as a few notable examples.
Fictional apocalypses have been a large part of genre for a good amount of time, no doubt becoming more firmly entrenched with the rise of the atomic age and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. The Fallout series of video games have shown us the lure of the myth of the lone hero bringing justice to a broken world, and apocalyptic thinking feels very much part of the present cultural zeitgeist.
But in fiction, where the end is often the beginning of the story, in reality the ‘end’, the oncoming apocalypse is the end of imagination.
Perhaps, ever since the Twin Towers fell in September 2001, and rolling twenty-four hour news became a thing, we’ve been expecting the apocalypse, or anticipating our end on a more regular basis. There’s always the possibility of a massive rock obliterating all life on earth, a super virus decimating the population, or a devastating war ruining our world for ever more. And maybe if we do find aliens they won’t be friendly and they’ll come and blast our planet to dust? Cheery, huh?
On social media you regularly see a lot of doomy pronouncement along the lines that we’re all f**ked, but if the reality is that things could get a lot worse, why accept that? Why sit back and think, well that about wraps it up for the human race, pass me another beer would you? If the response to climate change is, well that’s the end of us, instead of, how can we tackle this, prevent it, or change how we live with the world, then you’ve already ended the story right there.
I won’t deny that the future often frightens the shit out of me. As the father of two girls I’m constantly worried about what sort of world we’ve brought them into. And as one who suffers from depression I can sometimes slip into the why bother mindset. But a surety of future doom, and a persistent helplessness in the face of that, is a shutting down of some of humanity’s finest assets – our ingenuity and imagination. The response to such a challenging future should not just be an instinct to roll over and take it, but to constantly fight for change and to make things better. Living in misery and fear is not living, nor is it the best of us.
Our fictional apocalypses tell of what may come, of what the world would look like if the worst comes to the worst, but they also serve as a warning and an assurance that as story-telling animals our imaginations can picture better worlds and better outcomes, and our ingenuity can lead us to think how those things can be achieved.