Confessions of a Post-Apocalyptic Novelist
I thought I knew why I wanted to write a post-apocalyptic novel. I was 29 and on my last semester of a masters program in sustainable development. For two years prior, I had been steeped in the most intractable problems facing modern civilization — environmental crises, overpopulation, racism, wealth inequality, corruption, etc. Data-driven projections all seemed to point toward an inevitable catastrophe. Only the uninformed could imagine a future without some sort of collapse of civilization. Needless to say, I was not a pleasant conversationalist at the time; I suppose I was suffering from a curse of knowledge. Writing a post-apocalyptic novel seemed like a healthy way to process all that I had learned — and here comes the first confession: I believed that my story might have an impact.
One take-away from my graduate studies was an understanding that the problems of modern society lie not in technology but in narrative. The story of who we think we are dictates what we are here to do. Change that and you might change humanity’s trajectory. At the core of who we are is the issue of good and evil. Are we self-serving, rational agents as economists suppose? Or are we social creatures with innate emotional drives such as compassion? A post-apocalyptic world seemed like an excellent setting to explore these questions.
Yet all the post-apocalyptic literature I had read presented a dark view on human nature, predominantly in some form of ‘every man for himself.’ What pushed me to start thinking outside that box was Rebecca Solnit’s nonfiction book, “A Paradise Built in Hell.” More than anything her argument challenges the traditional view of how humans respond to crisis. A great body of evidence shows that in the aftermath of hurricanes, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks, people reacted with surprising resilience and altruism. Old societal barriers came down. New communities formed. Individuals gravitated to unassigned roles. In Solnit’s words, “If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.”
Alternatives to conventional culture had been the underlying focus of my graduate thesis on sustainable communities. Combined with Solnit’s ideas and my sense of overwhelm around global crises, new questions arose that only fiction seemed able to answer: What if America collapsed? Which communities would survive? What would matter most in that aftermath?
For the cause of the collapse in my story, I chose to avoid the hackneyed trope of an inventive doomsday explanation. A perfect storm of war, disease, and climatic conditions seemed sufficient. Besides, myriad downfall scenarios have been explored by other writers. To take a slight tangent: Literary agents and publishers often opine that the market is oversaturated with dystopian literature. While that may be true, at the 2018 San Francisco Writers Conference I heard one major publishing house editor remark that buyer fatigue does not correlate with reader fatigue. To dismiss post-apocalyptic fiction as a passing fad is to ignore that the root causes of its popularity (which I’ll touch on later) show no signs of abatement. Yes, much has been written of the fall of empire, but so little of the rubble left behind. Instead, I became interested in what life would be like for the survivors years after such a collapse. Post-apocalyptic lifestyles and cultures seemed rife with compelling DIY challenges and anthropological implications — and, I must confess, sheer escapist pleasure.
Only later, during the revision process, did I learn that on the flip side of this ostensible playground for the imagination loomed a massive responsibility: By imagining the future of a post-collapse America, I would have to make implicit statements about the destiny of race and class. Even a fantasy scenario can have real-world consequences. But wasn’t that what I wanted?
As a white male, I was raised with the privilege of feeling a potential relevance in society. Grad school amplified that sense and underscored it with obligation and responsibility. I was aware of this and often joked that I had caught a case of ‘impact fever’. I’m still getting over it; hopefully this essay helps the nagging thought beneath my next confession: I often wonder whether my privilege allowed me to entertain the illusion that writing a novel would accomplish anything close to the degree of activism that our current system of oppression in America demands. My initial assumption about changing the cultural narrative may have actually served to justify my indirect approach and ensure that I remain insulated from the real problems facing our society.
So, there is a kind of nested irony in the fact that I chose to make the protagonist of my story an engineer who hopes to fix his broken world. As a novelist, I essentially want the same thing. Yet, I also had to comprehend the futility of this desire, the hubris involved, and the relation to my privilege as a white male. Here’s another confession: I never seemed to have learned my own protagonist’s lesson.
Perhaps it was this hubris that led me to think I could elaborate on the heart-warming view of human nature presented in Solnit’s book. Perhaps I sacrificed the aspect that makes Solnit’s argument so convincing: reality. By exploring the idea of community solidarity in fiction, I inadvertently framed it as fantasy. I made the tragic error of depicting aspiring utopias and wounded people seeking a path of healing, while simultaneously mocking the paranoia of preppers and other solitary survivalists. Surely, I would be alienating my largest readership. Whereas a nonfiction writer can challenge our Hobbesian view of innate human savagery with facts, a fiction writer will instead be accused of jejune delusions. Several of my beta readers remarked that my story seemed curiously devoid of cannibals, anarchistic violence, and other barbarism.
The implicit message was: It’s more fun to break things than repair them. Joshua Rothman wrote an article for the New Yorker about a post-apocalyptic novel written by Emily St. John Mandel: “Station Eleven,” in other words, turns out not to be a genre novel so much as a novel about genre. Unlike Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” which asked what would remain after the collapse of culture, “Station Eleven” asks how culture gets put together again.” Although I’ve pitched my story as ‘The Road with a conscience’, my protagonist’s journey through the American West differs from “Station Eleven” in its focus on the socio-ecological concerns of communities isolated within a temporary power vacuum.
In 2015, Mandel was interviewed on Canadian television about the success of “Station Eleven.” Near the end of the interview, the question was posed: Why is post-apocalyptic literature so ‘hot’ right now. Mandel responded by saying that, at her book signings, she has heard a number of theories: widespread anxiety about our fraught time; a lingering fear of end times present in every generation; a panacea for economic inequality; fallout from divorced parents. But Mandel admitted that one theory in particular resonated with her the most: “We’re drawn to these narratives about the future because there are no more frontiers. Throughout almost all of human history, there has always been a place to go and start over. There’s really nowhere else you can go.”
Bingo! When I heard that it was like a key to unlock my subconscious. I could see that the allure of a fictional frontier had been underneath my impulse to write a post-apocalyptic story. Freedom, solitude, lack of technology, and straightforward challenges based in survival — these were my fantasies. I confess I would often mollify my own anxiety about employment, health insurance, and finance by telling myself that these modern problems might soon be replaced by more dire challenges. I found myself romanticizing the idea of living among ruins. No more parking meters, bills, rent, traffic, or debt. I, too, craved a place to start over. Perhaps the hardest confession to make is that I needed an imaginary place to remind myself what matters most — family, and community, and hope.
And just when I thought that confession was hard, I realized that the frontier fantasy is inextricably also a colonial fantasy. Oh dear, the meta layers were piling up in my psyche. Spoiler alert: The third act of my book explores the desire to escape history and start over.
Of course, part of me did want to see this whole modern mess collapse. As Haruki Murakami once wrote: “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.” But the more I meditated on this fantasy, the more I understood just how false and unimaginative it is. A collapse of civilization would be regression; nothing would be solved. The dilemmas we now face would be postponed until civilization built itself back up again. To paraphrase the philosopher Ken Wilbur, the problems of the oak cannot be cured by becoming an acorn again.
To reconcile my sense of being overwhelmed by modern society with the fact that there is no going back, I had to see my collapse fantasy for what it really was: a longing for nothing less than the age-old dream of a better tomorrow — the utopian impulse. Isn’t that what we’re all tacitly working for? Isn’t that the original purpose of society, a better life?
Whatever role fiction has in that shift, tomorrow will never be utopia — not because there is no such place, but because there is no such time. We live in the present. Striving for a better life in this moment is the only way we can achieve all the happiness and satisfaction and love that we associate with utopia. It’s a question of process vs. results. It may be overstatement but, in a way, every moment has the chance to be utopian or post-apocalyptic.
Fictional stories in themselves do not change the world, but they can change how we see ourselves within it. If the hero’s myth accomplishes anything, it holds up a mirror to the reader that frames our own challenge within a larger story, usually by invoking a sense of responsibility to the community or family. As I wrote and revised my book, I found my awareness of myself and my role changing. I became aware that I was no wastelander, no prophet of doom. The entire genre of post-apocalyptic fiction came to mean something entirely different to me. Underneath all the speculation, all the dystopian hang-ups, all the optimism and anthropological layers, lay the idea of care. I care deeply about this world and the people in it.
So my confession ends with this: I still believe that stories, even my own, might have an impact on how we see ourselves in this world before it’s too late.
