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The utopia of post-apocalyptic fiction

I will say, while some people certainly fetishize the 'lone badass' and so on type of survivors, at the same time, a post apocalyptic story should have rebuilding. Of, sure, things are much worse off than they are before, but that doesn't mean they can't be better, or that people in the scenario have to be depressed all the time (the Will Smith playing golf in I Am Legend is what people *would* do. Or the bit in zombie movies where the location is secure and people mess around because what else are you going to do?).

Stand Still, Stay Silent is one of my favorite post-apocs. 90 years after the world-killing plague, with the plague and dangerous plague-carrying trolls still around, society exists and has normalized the situation.
 
Reveen said:
Lol wut. There was no dumbass institutional effort that saved the world in the Road. The world is fucked in the Road as if rational governments never existed in the first place. The only thing that's left is basic human kindness that might save a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of humanity.
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I think he meant that Intestellar Subverts the Apocalypse trope in a different way than the Road but subverts it non the less. I don't know if I agree. Even solving for gravity I can't imagine NASA was able to save all or even most of the population. And self selection would favor people who were pro-science and pro-space exploraton. It doesn't dwell on it the same way a lot of post apocalypse fiction does but the themes are still there.

As for the Road, to be fair, this wasn't due to an outstanding failure of the government. The unspecified catastrophe fucked things so badly that no amount of plausible preparation or competence could have preserved the human race.

The people we see in the Road are not, for the most part, hard man survivors. They're, hollowed out husks, statistical outliers with the 'luck' to keep finding just enough meager crumbs in the bones of civilization to stagger on for a little bit longer.

Honestly, the catastrophe in the Road is pretty apolitical in a modern day setting. Mass catastrophe cuts off sunlight and kill the entire ecosystem. Human civilization starves to death. There's no realistic present day policy position to effectively counter that.
 
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Reveen said:
Lol wut. There was no dumbass institutional effort that saved the world in the Road. The world is fucked in the Road as if rational governments never existed in the first place. The only thing that's left is basic human kindness that might save a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of humanity.
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I didn't say that!
 
teslashark said:
I didn't say that!
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Why'd you directly compare it to theRroad then?

The Road is diametrically opposed to both the hard man making hard decisions and the modern liberal government coming down to save us all like Jesus. It's a story about all of us being fucked no matter what anyone does about it and the only thing giving us a sliver of hope is irrational, spontaneous compassion that may be wasted in the end but it doesn't matter because compassion exists for it's own sake.
 
Reveen said:
It's a story about all of us being fucked no matter what anyone does about it and the only thing giving us a sliver of hope is irrational, spontaneous compassion that may be wasted in the end but it doesn't matter because compassion exists for it's own sake.
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Not really?

I mean the man who saves the boy at the end makes no chops about the fact that he just sat their and watched the boys father slowly die. A compassionate person would have let him know that his boy was going to be alright for at least a little while longer.

The people at the end displayed the 'irrational compassion' that is the human races hard coded instinct to protect our offspring extended reluctantly to another survivor. That's not some special irrational hope, that's just not being a shit when you may all still die.

Edit : I mean, the man described at the end, while still obviously in bad shape didn't appear to be as desperate as some of the people who were observed over the course of the novel. So saying his kindness was some special virtue is iffy at best. We don't know why he was in a position to offer (brief) salvation, and we can't really guess, because the post apocalyptic devastation, while vividly done, was not written for its own sake.
 
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Reveen said:
Why'd you directly compare it to theRroad then?

The Road is diametrically opposed to both the hard man making hard decisions and the modern liberal government coming down to save us all like Jesus. It's a story about all of us being fucked no matter what anyone does about it and the only thing giving us a sliver of hope is irrational, spontaneous compassion that may be wasted in the end but it doesn't matter because compassion exists for it's own sake.
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Pair, not compare, and not even compair.
 
teslashark said:
Interstellar, while it may suck in other places, could be paired with The Road. It's still some institutional effort that saved the world instead of the hard men types.
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What? The earth DIED. Nearly everybody on it with them. Even a century later, so few people live in space that kids don't even believe that once there were billions of humans.

And survival is done by exactly the cliche excentric types (who think research to save the earth sucks anyway and space is better) - the succeed, a few choosen ones get to survive and the earth and all its animals and plants is doomed (but that is completely glossed over because the elite surviors can be in SPACE!. SPACE! - so much more sexy and cool than earth!).

I mean, the biggest failing of Interstellar that it hamfistedly forces "Space Travel= Pro Science. Trying to save earth= Moon hoax idiots!" on the viewer. Genetic engineering or athmospheric chemistry or whatever to solve the problem happening on earth is more science than building a rocket to go look elsewhere.

In particular, as in the end, space magic and not science solved the day - all the efforts of ex-NASA pretty much sucked and failed.
 
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47elf said:
Even a century later, so few people live in space that kids don't even believe that once there were billions of humans.
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Uhm. What? Don't remember that in the movie. At all. People were pretty well aware of what happened. What with the fact that there were still people alive who had lived on Earth. (Basically anyone over 40.)

I mean, the biggest failing of Interstellar that it hamfistedly forces "Space Travel= Pro Science. Trying to save earth= Moon hoax idiots!" on the viewer. Genetic engineering or athmospheric chemistry or whatever to solve the problem happening on earth is more science than building a rocket to go look elsewhere.
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First off, it's a work of speculative fiction, and while all disciplines of science are important and interesting, a movie about heroically engineering a blight resistant strain of wheat was not going to be nearly as interesting as a love letter to that old SF heart throb, space travel.

Nevermind that Coops message was only decipherable rather than the meaningless gibberish heard by a crazy, bitter, middle aged lady because his daughter was a trained mathematical prodigy only lacking the final pieces to bring the puzzle together.

Or that she only got that last piece because her father overrode Brand when she made her cringe worthy appeal to love. Brand was using love as an irrational metaphor for her desire to rescue the man she had romantic feelings for. Coop was using it when he was delirious with joy over the fact that he might manage to save his family.

Neither of them were asserting any special metaphysical insight into the cosmos, they were just being human. And that's kind of where Insterstellar really failed. At the interface of its speculative science and human aspects. Actually I think Interstellar is weaker for the fact that it can't stick with one or the other and intstead fumbles both.

(Also, stable timeloops are the worst brain rotting plot candy in sci-fi. Please stop.)

I mean, interstellar is basically the apocalypse scenario, more tactfully done than most, for pro-science pro-space travel people and I agree. But its flaws are a little more nuanced than just that.
 
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illusivepunk said:
There's that scene in I Am Legend where Will Smith is playing golf on that Aircraft Carrier, and even when I was younger watching that seemed really cool - the idea of an abandoned New York City being your entire playground.

Post-apocalypse when framed as a selfish utopia seems like it'd perfectly appeal to the crazy right-wingers and nutcases who want to "rebuild" or "build their perfect society". Thoughts, SV?
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There's a huge difference between the feeling you've just described and what the article is talking about, though. Post-apocalyptic settings are popular because they ask questions like 'what would this giant city be like without the people', and that is interesting in part because the events that bring it about would be so catastrophic. It doesn't also necessarily involve a political commentary, which the 'zombie apocalypse' narratives clearly do. Fallout 3 (as an example) dealt pretty heavily on the voyeurism of looking into a society on the eve of the bombs falling, and even with the obvious flaws of American society I don't think you walk away thinking 'wow sure am glad the bombs dropped'.
 
The thing about Post-apocalyptic fiction that always gets me is how people never seem to understand how they are not Mad Max, and they aren't Lord Humongous. They're that guy who gets his shit ruined by a bladed boomerang who nobody knew the name of. At best. More likely they're part of the 99% of people who just starved to death because modern agriculture can't function without a stable state and a high level of technology.
 
Memphet'ran said:
Yeah, I don't think this is a phenomenon at all exclusive to the right; I see plenty of distastefully gleeful looking forward to the collapse of present civilization on the left too. The fantasy is of the present order collapsing under (what you think are) its own flaws, clearing the way for (your idea of) a better society to be built on the ruins. The revealing thing is how in such fantasies the apocalypse is imagined as catalyzing the sort of changes you like, so conservatives imagine it catalyzing a return to hardy frontier values, deep greens imagine it catalyzing a return to a more rural and less consumerist existence more in harmony with nature, and SDN types imagine it catalyzing the rise of a rationalist technocratic state which will implement left-technocrat-collectivist solutions at gunpoint.
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Well, yes, butttt....

With militia type post apoc fiction, it isn't just the aspect of a social order they don't like being gone. The image I get is that for them, the apocalypse isn't just the catalyzator, it's the point. If you want your "left-technocrat-collectivist" state, then the apocalpyse is just a way to get there, and there could be other. But for the militia types, having a post-apocalyptic anarchy where everyone preys on everyone and hence they need to defend themselves and can be heroes is the actual point. This isn't even about what sorta (obviously "better") society could arise from this situation; this situation itself is celebrated. The militia types decry the liberals as weak and want to see themselves as the hard men making the necessary hard decisions - but for that they need a hard world, in which they get to be the asshole-heroes, and the liberals die their deserved deaths for being so weak.
 
Susano said:
The militia types decry the liberals as weak and want to see themselves as the hard men making the necessary hard decisions - but for that they need a hard world, in which they get to be the asshole-heroes, and the liberals die their deserved deaths for being so weak.
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I'm not sure that's true though; I'm pretty sure the militia guys view the world as already being a "hard world" that justifies their "hard decisions", the rest of us just haven't realized it yet.
 
krinsbez said:
I'm not sure that's true though; I'm pretty sure the militia guys view the world as already being a "hard world" that justifies their "hard decisions", the rest of us just haven't realized it yet.
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That's why they need the world to get harder still. So it will kill off all the liberals for them.
 
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I guess many people think that thier ideology would clearly proves its "superiority" if only the world would be a "blank sheet" again.

This of course is self-deception: The reasone why for example fascism did not work is not the fault of a conspiracy, it is because fascist socities are by design simply not competitive in the long run against free societies. Heck even in a post-apocalyptic world fascism would be more of a obstacle than a advantage.

Also if an ideology needs an apocalypse in order to build up a "better world", its not a good ideology.
 
lordhasen said:
I guess many people think that thier ideology would clearly proves its "superiority" if only the world would be a "blank sheet" again.
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Adding to that. It feeds on a certain part of the human hind brain that remembers a time when you could win an argument by beating your opponent over the head with a rock. I know I've felt the impulse before.
 
I can see where the author of the article is coming from. The apocalypse is, of course, awful- And there are people who, not to put too fine a point on it, fetishize it.

But at the same time, stories are fundamentally about people, and how they react within troubling circumstances. And you know, people are very adaptable. It's kind of humanity's shtick, honestly- And I don't think that we're going to stop, just because our world ends. If the modern world is destroyed beyond repair, then we will change or we will die. Sure, the world after the end will be miserable in comparison to our own- But the survivors will get used to it, just like we have gotten used to the sheer wealth and luxury of our own age. They'll stop noticing it.

Or they will all die, in which case nobody is left to write about.

I mean, I don't think this is really over-optimistic, myself. Maybe the postapocalypse is about life in the midst of massive death and suffering, but it's still about life.
 
Vindictus said:
Sure, the world after the end will be miserable in comparison to our own- But the survivors will get used to it, just like we have gotten used to the sheer wealth and luxury of our own age. They'll stop noticing it.
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Actually they'll still notice it; they'll just consider it the natural state of existence. "Life is about suffering and punishment, pain and despair" was a historically common attitude.
 
Avernus said:
Actually they'll still notice it; they'll just consider it the natural state of existence. "Life is about suffering and punishment, pain and despair" was a historically common attitude.
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Basically what I meant- They won't consider it unusual. It will become the new normal.

Also, I think an important thing to keep in mind is, a lot of post-apocalypse fans are sort of self-aware about the whole issue. I mean, take a look at this cracked article, for instance- The author is a self-identified fan of post apocalyptic fiction, and they basically admit that the whole point of the genre is a combination of power fantasy and voyeuristic pleasure in looking at the ruins of our own world.

And that's fine. It's part of the genre. Complaining about it is like complaining that giant mecha are unrealistic and would be ineffective war machines- Sure, you're objectively right, but nobody who likes giant robots cares.
 
The human brain pretty much isn't set up to stay in one mood for so much of the time. Being constant angst factories for the years of some of these stories is unrealistic :)

Susano said:
But not "normal" in our ways of thinking. That is, we consider the world neutral or even good; the historical attitude was that the world is bad.
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Ehhh... there were plenty of people who liked the world in pretty much any era. Some saw the down side, others the positive.
 
Susano said:
But not "normal" in our ways of thinking. That is, we consider the world neutral or even good; the historical attitude was that the world is bad.
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A bit of a tangent, but this line of conversation is really making me think of Scott Alexander's How Bad Are Things?

Scott Alexander said:
Nevertheless, I ran the script twenty times to simulate twenty different people, and here's what I got (NP stands for "no problems"):

01. Chronic pain
02. Alcoholic
03. Chronic pain
04. NP
05. NP
06. Sexually molested as a child + suffering from domestic violence
07. Unemployed
08. Alcoholic
09. NP
10. NP
11. NP
12. Abused as a child
13. NP
14. Chronic pain
15. NP
16. Abused as a child + unemployed
17. NP
18. Alcoholic + on food stamps
19. NP
20. Clinically depressed

If the two problems mentioned above haven't totally thrown off the calculations, this makes me think Psychiatrist-Me is getting a much better window into reality than Normal-Person-Me.

And remember, this doesn't count all of the problems that don't fall into easily quantified categories, like "everyone hates them because they're really ugly and annoying". It doesn't count things that I couldn't find good statistics on, like "had a child die recently". It doesn't count things that I would have gotten in trouble for including, like "autistic" or "single mother". It doesn't count a lot of things. Consider that the first patient I mentioned – the homebound seventy year old with no friends who's being extorted by her drug addict son-in-law – would appear on this list as "NP".

The world is almost certainly a much worse place than any of us want to admit. And that's before you've even left America.

This is part of why I get enraged whenever somebody on Tumblr says "People in Group X need to realize they have it really good", or "You're a Group X member, so stop pretending like you have real problems." The town where I practice psychiatry is mostly white and mostly wealthy. That doesn't save it. And whenever some online thinkpiece writer laughs about how good people in Group X have it and how hilarious it is that they sometimes complain about their lives, it never fails that I have just gotten home from treating a member of Group X who attempted suicide.

This is also why I am wary whenever people start boasting about how much better we're doing than back in the bad old days. That precise statement seems to in fact be true. But people have a bad tendency to follow it up with "And so now most people have it pretty good". I don't think we have any idea how many people do or don't have it pretty good.
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Q99 said:
The human brain pretty much isn't set up to stay in one mood for so much of the time. Being constant angst factories for the years of some of these stories is unrealistic
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Put it another way, being a constant angst factory for years would be exhausting. People will acclimate as a survival mechanism.
 
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