Ending the World

This week’s recreational reading was The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette. Seven people in and around an otherwise completely depopulated Boston manage to find each other. They speculate they were alien abductees, though they don’t remember the experience, because they woke up 100 years after their last memories only to find a city overgrown by nature and with a mixed breed of wolf-coyotes roaming the streets. It is not bad, by the standard of such novels but is not destined to be a classic. It is more snack food of the type mentioned in last week’s blog.

It brought to mind however just how much fiction of this type there is. The post-apocalyptic novel is a genre with so many entries that one has to assume the prospect of ending civilization is a rampantly common fantasy. (It is not the same as dystopian fiction. They can in principle be both but usually are not. JG Ballard’s dystopias, for example, typically are over-civilized.) The earliest examples are thousands of years old, are found all over the world, and are (hence the very name) religious. The elements are the same as later secular fiction though: human farms and cities are destroyed but for a handful of survivors. The prototype modern scifi version is probably Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, published in 1826 but set in the 21^st century; in it, a man with natural immunity to a devastating plague may be the last human alive.
 
What is the appeal of the genre? Whatever it is, I’m not immune to it, not only reading such books but having written a short story and a novella of my own. The answer may lie with Freud and Jung. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud argues that the cost of civilization is unhappiness. He says it is a trade-off worth making, but that there is no doubt much thwarting of the id is unavoidable. Jung similarly spoke of the shadow self: the dark side of one’s character that each of us has. (Integrating the shadow self into one’s complete personality without actually handing it the chainsaw is a key to Jungian psychic health.) Our shadow selves chuckle at shedding civilization’s chains. The out-there author who goes by the penname Delicious Tacos went so far as to title his post-apocalyptic novel Finally, Some Good News. In Tacos’ book roving gangs of survivors are plainly having destructive fun, but just as plainly their victims are not. Doucette’s survivors are a kinder bunch, but perhaps that is because there are only seven of them. As a practical matter they need each other. What if there were seventy? Would Lord of the Flies style divisions then happen? I’ll leave any answer to the reader.
 
To be sure, civilization is annoying. Sigmund had that right. There are jobs, electric bills, taxes, busybody neighbors, hostile coworkers, regulators, and speed traps. It is fun to contemplate disposing of them. It is one way to get rid of credit card debt. However, on a cold night like tonight (5 degrees F [-15 C] outside my window) it is also very nice indeed to have a working furnace and electric lights. So, if the proverbial red button ever is left in my care for some bizarre reason, there is no risk I will push it. The cat (who knocked over a fern just a moment ago) might step on it though, so there is that.
 

Alice Cooper – Last Man on Earth