some awesome links about post-apocalyptic fiction

[intertribal]

This is why racism remains a "thing" in my novel, which is post-apocalyptic (and I don't even have the apocalypse coming from across borders - it's just part of social organization in Junction Rally, as it has been for all its years of existence).  The Yellow Plague: Asians and Asian Americans in Post-Apocalyptic and Zombie Fictions by Bao Phi:

But like many brands of American horror and action genres, popular post-apocalyptic and zombie fictions tend to veer towards straight American male fantasy - many of the fictions and films in the genre operate under the assumption that, if all hell breaks loose, all issues of race, class, and gender are (supposedly) irrelevant compared to basic human survival - and consciously or otherwise, most leaders that emerge in these imagined post-racial scenarios are straight, white alpha males. In the Western pop imagination, there seems to be a desire to wipe the difficult questions of co-existence off the table - and what better way to do that, then to imagine a situation where five to ten random (and mostly white) strangers must fight off mindless brain-hungry hoards while trying to divide the bullets, bacon, and fresh water into equal shares? Where the musings and philosophies of fancy pants artists and social commentators like myself are next to useless?

Let's say that North Korea or China suddenly launched an attack on present-day America, like in the video game Homefront or the upcoming remake of Red Dawn. The popular, traditional white male western narrative would then position a white hero leading a resistance of people against the invaders, and our race wouldn't matter - because we're all Americans right?

No. History has taught us is if that shit went down, and Asians in Asia attacked America, the first people who would be fucked would be Asian Americans. We'd be imprisoned without due process, called traitors, tortured and murdered in the street. And yet none of this is ever explored in post-apocalyptic scenarios where Asians bring about doom. I guarantee you, if a science-project-gone-wrong in North Korea causes zombie apocalypse tomorrow, you can bet it's the Asian Americans who won't be getting their share of beans at the survivalist pot luck.

I think this argument - on the emotional/psychological desire for an apocalypse to "wash away" people and structures you don't like - is perfectly applicable to post-apocalyptic fiction that isn't British and isn't even all that "cozy" (i.e., involves cannibals and zombies and killer flus).  Some of the comments imply it better fits the American model anyway.  Related: "AEnema" by Tool: "Some say we'll see Armageddon soon/ I certainly hope we will/ Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay." Who reads cosy catastrophes? by Jo Walton:

I argued that the cosy catastrophe was overwhelmingly written by middle-class British people who had lived through the upheavals and new settlement during and after World War II, and who found the radical idea that the working classes were people hard to deal with, and wished they would all just go away.

In the classic cosy catastrophe, the catastrophe doesn’t take long and isn’t lingered over, the people who survive are always middle class, and have rarely lost anyone significant to them. The working classes are wiped out in a way that removes guilt.

And from the comments (man, this is so why Zombieland did not work for me):

On a bad day, it could even be secretly, guiltily desirable: all those people who fit so well in the modern world, but didn't know how to deal with *real* change, would be swept away. And the people who knew how to prepare would be vindicated. The reader is implicitly in the category of people who can deal with change, of course, by virtue of having read the book.

The desire to be freed of social constraints and to get fat off humanity's detritus crosses the economic divide.  

Pop Agitprop from Cheap Truth #13, published in the 1980s, a series of scathing reviews by sci-fi authors, of sci-fi authors - I think this gets to the heart of the problem with a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction very well (and is related to that terrible Dodge Ram commercial as well, re: the sheer amount of self-stroking misanthropy that goes into crafting a post-apocalypse):

The gem of this collection is Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned," a sequel to his commercially successful novel THE PEACE WAR. In this ideologically correct effort, radical Libertarians defend their realm from an authoritarian army. Thanks to their innate cultural superiority and a series of fraudulent plot Maguffins, they send the baddies packing with a minimum of personal suffering and a maximum of enemy dead.

First, and very characteristically, it is post-apocalyptic, conveniently destroying modern society so that a lunatic-fringe ideology can be installed as if by magic. Vinge avoids extrapolating their effects on society, because society is in shambles.

John Dalmas contributes a decent male-adventure Western. Unfortunately this story pretends to be SF. It is set on yet another colonial planet lapsed into barbarism, a fictional convention that allows SF writers to espouse reactionary social values without a blush of shame.

Dean Ing's recent novel for Tor, WILD COUNTRY, takes a similar tack. This book, the last in a post-apocalypse trilogy, is a meandering series of shoot-'em-ups. Its hero is an assassin. The villain is a gay heroin-smuggler, as if an America devestated by nukes did not have enough problems. Ing's hasty depiction of future society is grossly inconsistent; ravaged and desperate when the plot requires desperadoes, yet rigidly organized when Ing suddenly remembers the existence of computers.

The book is a Western, set in a West Texas conveniently returned to the robust frontier values of Judge Roy Bean. Men hold their land, with lasers if possible, while women raise corn and keep the home fires burning.

The book is speckled with maps, diagrams, and lectures on the Second Amendment, which, one learns, "absolutely and positively, guarantees citizens their right to keep and bear arms."  Like his fellows, Ing treasures this amendment, the last remnant of the American policy that he is willing to respect. There isn't much mention of, say, voting, or separation of powers. Power resides in the barrel of a gun, preferably the largest and shiniest possible.

No We Can't by Hunter (this one is political, but I think it ties in nicely with the apocalyptic, and post-apocalyptic, vision, and the desire for this vision to actually happen - thanks to realthog for linking it):

Past-America could provide at least some modest layer of security to prevent its citizens from descending into destitution in old age; we in this day cannot. Past-America could pursue scientific discoveries as a matter of national pride, even land mankind on an entirely other world; we cannot. Past-America was a haven of invention and technology that shook the world and changed the course of history countless times: whatever attributes made it such a place we cannot quite determine now, much less replicate. Public art is decadent. Public education is an infringement. Public works are for other times, never now.

America of the past could build highways and railroads and a robust electrical grid. We cannot even keep them running. Of course we cannot keep them running: that was past-America. That past America had a magic that we modern Americans cannot match. Perhaps it was beholden to Satan, or to socialism, or merely to some grandiose vision of a better future, one with flying cars or diseases that could actually be cured, with proper application of effort. Whatever the case, past-America was wrong and stupid, and we know better.

We are told all the things America cannot do. We have yet to be told any vision of what we might still be able to do, or what hopes we should still retain, or why our children will be better off than we were, or why we ourselves will be better off than we were a scant few decades ago. Perhaps the very climate of the world will have changed, and the sky will be hotter, or the storms will be bigger, but none of those are things we can do anything about. Perhaps there will be nuclear disasters, or oil spills, or epidemics, or perhaps a city here or a city there will be leveled by some unforeseen catastrophe; we can be assured of it, in fact, but none of those things are things we can expect to respond to better next time than this time. Those are not, we are told, the tasks of a nation.

Comments

[wendigomountain.livejournal.com]

See, I was the opposite with Carriers. I knew who was going to croak from about 20 minutes in. The end was surprising though because of the sheer nihilism of it all. Usually a helicopter shows up or Mila Jovovich starts cloning herself or something.

It reminded me of a Sandra Oh movie, Last Night, where people are all going to die and spend the last 24 hours of their lives doing crazy stuff. It's like a frantic, fatalistic New Years Eve party where no one survives after they count down to zero.

For me, post-apoc is something of an equalizer, and maybe the source material for this is every-day disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes and floods. Nature kills indescriminately, rich, poor, or middle class. Often the conflict is derived from those class structures being challenged. Rich people might discover that poor and middle class have a lot to offer that they didn't know about before. Poor people might not be oppressed the way they were before because the social hierarchy isn't against someone with practical experience in survival.

But yeah, there's still a lot of focus on class in most of it. A shining example of a total equalizer disater with Dawn of the Dead, where Sarah Polley turns out to be the total badass.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

It's something of an equalizer, but if you look at the stats of who died in Hurricane Katrina, it was overwhelmingly poor people simply because they had less ability to leave. Nature doesn't care who it kills, but the people with the resources and the information are the ones who are going to be able to get out of its way, provided they have advance warning (and sometimes they're more likely to survive just because they have better protection). On the other hand, if an F5 tornado suddenly demolishes a major city, yeah, everyone's fucked. Have you read The Unthinkable (http://www.amazon.com/Unthinkable-Survives-When-Disaster-Strikes/dp/0307352897) by Amanda Ripley? It's really good, and one of the cases she talks about is a fire at a country club. The patrons did not react to save themselves, but had to wait for the staff to lead them to exits, and even afterwards they just stood around on the lawn while the staff kept going inside to save more people - because people default to their organizational roles during a crisis.

So I don't buy that everybody's equal after a disaster, which is the point of the first link in my post. Especially not an entire town. For one, you'd still have the original social structure at the time of the apocalypse. For two, power and grouping isn't something that I think goes out of fashion, so to speak, and neither does fear of the other. And of course it's all situational. If 10 people survive and only 1 is a woman, it sure sucks to be her, and while I don't think it would be as extreme if the odd person out was of a different class or race, birds of a feather still flock together.

[wendigomountain.livejournal.com]

The Titanic is a classic example of rich beating out the poor. But with the tsunami in Japan, I don't think wealth has played much into survivability yet. I guess it all depends.

Was The Unthinkable about the Coconut Grove fire?

Maybe it's an influence of where I work, but I know plenty of tenured professors who wouldn't know how to change a tire if they had to. Maybe in that case, it's less of a case of wealth and more of independence. Growing up, sixty miles from anything, if you didn't know how to think on your feet, you were screwed. I think for me, this whole preparedness strikes a nerve by saying "See! I knew this shit would come in handy!"

But yeah, those folks hunkered down in their bomb shelters waiting for Y2K to happen scare the shit out of me. But again, Y2K was a fine example of the hubris of the wealthy. At a time when computers were affordable mostly by the affluent or folks with a disposable income, it would have been those without that had the last laugh. At least until the systems running the water treatment plants went offline and started pumping cholera into everyone's water supply.

Thank you for this thread, Nadia. I've been stalled with my own post-apoc work and you've given me lots of food for thought!

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, no, because the tsunami was so sudden, but on the other hand, I don't know how much wealth was in those prefectures to begin with. And of course, part of what you learn in sustainable development courses is that there's a reason poor countries are all along the equator - it's the most environmentally violent, turbulent, un-tamable latitude on Earth. Economies have a tough time developing with any consistency there. Even within an equatorial country, people aren't dumb - the most powerful cities don't get built where the likelihood of a natural disaster is high; let poor people live in the danger zones. And another important thing to consider is density and architecture. The average tornado would kill more people in Bangladesh than Kansas because the people in Bangladesh are living in slums with no basements. And related to that is the trend of nuclear waste dumping zones being wherever the poorest people are, because they have less power to wave around at the government to protect themselves than the rich.

I think that chapter was about the Coconut Grove fire, but she goes into a lot of disasters, natural and manmade. It's all about how people respond in crisis ("who survives and why").

Well, I don't know how to change a tire either, and neither do my friends who have less money than I do (although we'd be good at making do with less and rationing). I think that's more a factor of rurality. And yeah, vindication, as mentioned above. The problem is when vindication becomes justification for actively desiring a massive disaster, just so you (general you) can say "I told you so!" Which is what creeps me out about survivalists.

No problem!