Spoiler Alert

As will probably surprise not a single person, I am a bit of a geek. While I’ve dabbled in gaming and anime, among other geek pursuits, since I was old enough to use a library card, my drug of choice has been science fiction books. I have read libraries of the stuff: good, bad, memorable, forgettable, epic, pulp-you name it. The sheer volume of my consumption scares me to consider, now that I think about it.

I could go in depth about how each of these stories is basically the same exact one, but I’ll save that diatribe for another time and place. In almost every story, though, there is a relatively happy (at least locally) conclusion. Foundation ends with Terminus happily following its destiny into the future. Ender’s Game ends with averted genocide and the assumption of a lifelong quest. Fahrenheit 451 ends among a community of well intentioned scholars. The poignancy of loss or tragedy is in each story, but only to define the happiness and goodness of the actual conclusion.

This pisses me off to no end.

It’s such an easy out. There is no reason that any of these situations would naturally resolve themselves in such positive ways. It takes a metric fuckton of deus ex machina (that is the unit, I checked) to get the happy ending: the redefined natural laws, the mysterious ancient secrets unlocked just in time, the last second uncharacterisic change of heart of the rogue. I hate each and every one. Just because we can travel the stars, or redefine our shape or harness the energy of black holes does not change our essential humanity. Humans are imperfect creatures. We are defined by our passions, our weaknesses, and our evolutionary heritage. It’s not the end of those stories that show us who we are, it’s the middle. And that anger brought me to post-apocalyptic science fiction. These stories generally had the same “happily ever after” situation going on, but the stresses of the journey showed a more realistic view of humanity.

One of the first books of this sort recommended to me was Swan Song by Robert McCammon, and I still think it epitomizes the “reality of the middle”. The book opens with a tense US-Soviet relationship finally pushed to the breaking point and after crying havoc, they let slip the nuclear dogs of war. After following characters through the wastelands of a post-nuclear war America, the heroine comes into her power and destiny and sets out to bring the land back to life. Ya, right. More human is the part in the middle, where each character has to deal with life in the nuclear aftermath. One character is forced to compete with escaped psychopaths for his life. One is forced into sexual slavery in exchange for pills and safety, until PTSD leads to her mental unraveling. There are battles in destroyed shopping malls, villages devolving into disease and starvation and people holding off on suicide only as long as a set of AA batteries will last.

Books like this consumed me. I spent months thinking and planning and plotting what I would do in the event of some disaster. I had contingencies in the event that the apocalypse was some sort of nuclear war scenario, a plague situation (a la The Stand), a zombie outbreak, or even some Biblical occurrence (Lord knows I’m not going up). I was young enough to still be in my parents’ house, so I couldn’t put together all my supplies. Instead I had a mental list of all the items I would need and where to find them: the water bottles, the canned food, the knives, the crowbar, etc. I knew how long it would take me to get them, which neighbors would likely be gone if I needed more supplies and which direction would take me out of the city fastest. I gloried in the thoughts of the things I would do, the stuff I would take, and how I would hold my own against other survivors. Make no mistake, when the chips are down, people will always revert to the law of the jungle. In the event of a zombie panic, another survivor would have no problem throwing me in front of the undead horde. In the event of a nuclear attack, even former friends would slit my throat to steal my food. And I would probably do the same. No matter how far we go, we’re still scared little animals. To paraphrase Herbert in a later Dune book (I know, I know, we try not to acknowledge them), each person ever alive is the descendant of those who survived. Survival requires horrible things of us; our true legacy as humans is every vice, every barbarism, every unspeakable horror that was done to survive and prosper.

We ignore our base instincts and needs at our own peril. Try and build an empire, and some barbarian will inevitably come a-knocking. Focus on the stars and someone will pick your pocket. While we aspire to be better than we are, that we exist in this world imposes essential constraints and necessities on us. I imagine if you could inoculate them from the future shock, someone from the Wild West or the Renaissance or the Roman Empire or the Stone Age would easily recognize who we are today. The toys and knowledge that we have change the specifics of our conflicts, but we can never truly rise above our material selves. All we can be, in the end, is what we are- not gods, not devils, just men.

Every two weeks, a group of hardy creative sorts compiles blog entries on a single topic. For further (and better) reading about “What we might become if”, check out Creative Collective.