Anxiety of the Future #2: Stories of the Future, Stories of the Past
“‘You don’t know that! You can’t read the future. No one can.’
‘You can if you want to. It’s scary, but once you get past the fear, it’s easy.’”
“Embrace diversity. Unite — Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed.”
Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower
“I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.”
Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Talent
One night last week, I had a lot of trouble getting back to sleep after being woken by thunder at some point in the night. As I tried to fall back asleep I kept finding myself dwelling on worries, fearing and wondering about the future, how I and my loved ones will live if things get much worse, uncertainty about how best to respond. Far from an uncommon feeling these days, I know.
As I struggled to clear my mind, the more I seemed to find something else to dwell upon and soon I shifted from thoughts and fears of the future to familiar anxieties of the past, with the added anxiety of the present moment. Fears that I could have done something better with my life if I’d just tried harder, fear that things won’t ever be as good again and it’s all just downhill from here. Memories of happy times that I worry won’t ever be possible again, bittersweet recollections of times that will definitely never come again. I turned on the light and read one of the books from the teetering pile I’ve kept on my bedside stand lately until I finally drifted off.
Among the many books that I dropped into the pile in recent months, a good number of them could be described as featuring post-apocalyptic or dystopian themes, whether going in a more “literary” direction or towards a more specific science fiction or horror genre. This has been a preoccupation for me for some years now, it seems, and it occurred to me that the same feelings that plagued me during my restless night drive me to seek them out, even, or especially, in a time like this. A global pandemic, great society upheavals all over the United States working for a better world while being repressed by an autocratic regime, this is what’s happening right now, stuff that seemed more like the plot of one of these works of fiction I’ve read over the last decade. The anxiety of the future is, after all, the theme of one of my very first book discussion entries I posted on BookLikes years ago in 2014, and I continued to discuss them throughout the years, not knowing how prophetic many really were. And I don’t think I was alone in these thoughts.
The recent novel Weather by Jenny Offill was, for instance, a darkly humorous and deeply topical work for our current times, or really, specifically our current times circa about six months ago. In many ways, this novel serves as a “pre-apocalyptic” story, especially as Offill depicts the world we in the white urban middle-class North American population have been living in over the past decade so well, with all its comforts and anxieties. I find myself sharing much of the same headspace of Lizzie, the viewpoint character in Weather, who finds herself preoccupied with worries about societal collapse, global climate change, latent fascism, and whatever the future brings while also dealing with life under late capitalism with its ride-sharing, podcasting, and WTSHTF (When the Shit Hits the Fan) survival forums. Lizzie narrates, punctuated by jokes and anecdotes, trying to come to grips with the fact that this world we kind of take for granted is changing, and faster than we thought possible, while also grappling with aging, dealing with family, and the emotional labor that women, in particular, must shoulder, labor that these tensions exacerbate.
It is funny to me, and disturbing, how Offill’s realistic literary novel depicting life today was already beginning to resemble the fears and tension of the more overtly post-apocalyptic novels I’ll be discussing later. It was especially interesting that Sylvia Liller, Lizzie’s mentor, and friend, hosted a popular podcast called Hell and High Water, discussing these very issues, and quickly found herself burned out, even with Lizzie’s help. A podcast makes sense as a contemporary vehicle in which these concerns are discussed, trying to come to terms with, and explain, where our society is going, and where it came from. As we watch the years go by through Offill’s story, from the heat of unseasonably warm weather to the shock of November 2016, I wonder what Liller would make of the events of 2020.
It struck me as interesting that I posted about reading Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven exactly five years ago, and now, the very thoughts that I wrestled with in my account of that book seem more topical than ever. It is so shocking how quickly these themes became prophetic, going from more or less theoretical discussions on genre literature to basically what’s going on right now. How would I react if I knew that, in the space between my last post on the subject of apocalyptic literature in February, things would feel so much more apocalyptic? It brings my mind to a “novel of the near future” I read almost a decade ago, Soft Apocalypse by Will Macintosh, which tells a very disturbing but relatable story, one that seems more relatable by the day. The near future is here, maybe. What seemed like a thought-provoking if grim novella following a group of aimless millennials over a decade as they try to maintain daily life while conditions in the US, and the world, deteriorate slowly but steadily, now feels more and more familiar. It’s interesting to read my thoughts on this work now, in the very years that it is set. Like with Station Eleven, it is interesting to explore our relationship with change, the past, and the future.
Through podcasts, streaming services, books, video games, many people during the current COVID-19 are turning to nostalgia to get through this time, or else daily social media updates of all the unprecedented events of 2020. Nostalgia is a force that is feeling particularly relevant these days, along with an untethering feeling that the old world is dying and that we are just waiting for the new. Focusing on the nexus of memory and imagination, fears and hopes, I have found during my time reading and writing about the subject that reading such works provide valuable ways of thinking and dealing with these difficult times. I find that storytelling is a common theme for many of the novels I’ve read recently that deal with such topics, looking to the past, both personal and societal, to understand the present and come to terms with an uncertain, even scary, future. How do we remember the past? How will our future remember the present? These are some of the intertwined questions that come up again and again.
In 2015, in the same few months that I read Station Eleven, I went to see a production at the Guthrie Theater that strongly complemented the themes of the novel, — Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play. Reading the published script of the play may not quite capture the feelings of witnessing it in the full grandeur of it’s Guthrie production, but it was worth going back to explore the ideas in the work. Especially since live theater itself may be a thing of the past, at least for the foreseeable future. Written by playwright Anne Washburn, the play is witty, humorous, and yet dark andmournful, both flowing together into a bittersweet mix.
After what seems to have been a pandemic resulting in the collapse of the power grid, Mr. Burns follows the evolution of a certain episode of The Simpsons from a few survivors reminiscing about their favorite TV shows around a fire to, nearly a century later, as an epic pantomime of the newly formed culture recalling the world of before. I have never really watched The Simpsons personally, though from my friends and general pop culture osmosis I seem to have absorbed quite a bit of its mythos over the years, which is definitely what Washburn was going for. Reading the script brought me back to these questions, as we watch people begin to fashion a new oral history from the common culture that surrounds us all.
A fascinating work that explores similar themes from a very different perspective is the speculative novel Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. From the Wasauksing First Nation in what is now Canada, Rice writes an evocative and gripping post-apocalyptic tale from a people who have already experienced, and survived, multiple post-apocalyptic events in their recent history. Moon of the Crusted Snow follows an Anishinaabe community in remote northern Ontario who find themselves cut off from communication and power from the south as the winter bears down. Having been long neglected, the newly improved infrastructure of electricity, running water, and the internet has not been altogether taken for granted on the rez, but it’s still a shock to be suddenly cut off. Evan, working to raise his children in traditional ways also keeps the roads clear as the winter worsens. He tries, along with the reservation authorities, to keep things running as smoothly as possible in the face of whatever catastrophe has caused “civilization” to collapse. As these challenges mount, the situation is complicated as refugees from the urban world begin to trickle up, looking for food and bringing their own darkness with them.
All in all, the responses and dangers feel realistic, and Rice writes his characters as understandable people reacting to frightening circumstances. The nods to Ojibwa folklore worked well as a complement to this realism and helped to underline how the Anishinaabe have had their world end before, and have shown the resilience to sustain themselves into a new future. Drawing on what worked in the past, remembered through stories and tradition, there is a lot to think about here.
Another Canadian, cartoonist Aminder Dhaliwal’s Instagram webcomic Woman World is a slightly more light-hearted look into a post-apocalyptic future that looks to the past while envisioning a new society. Dhaliwal’s light, cartoonish art style belies a comic that, while not really going too heavy, explores some important ideas as well. Her comics depict a society of women trying to survive after a strange genetic defect has caused the male gender to slowly die out over a series of decades. Only spare copies of Paul Blart: Mall Cop on DVD remain to remind the world what the gender construct known as “men” were. Following a group of diverse women from a small community hoping to make a go of it in the wilderness, Dhaliwal shows how social anxiety, love, and humor will always be with folk, and, as much as we look to the past to make sense of our world, things can change for the better. While life in a “woman world” isn’t perfect, the lack of patriarchy has its perks.
Speaking of patriarchy, Margaret Atwood’s work is a thematic place to turn to next as the preeminent Canadian novelist has just published The Testaments, a sequel to her influential classic The Handmaid’s Tale. I discussed my reading of the Handmaid’s Tale in the first rendition of this series, so it had been a few years since I read it. I recalled being impressed by her ability to convey the bleakness of this setting while also exploring the everyday lives of the characters and what they did to survive the fundamentalist theocratic takeover of the United States. In order to brush up my familiarity with the story, I read Canadian graphic novelist Renee Nault’s interpretation of the story, which I felt was a very effective transcription of the novel through Nault’s beautiful watercolor art, a beauty which served as a stark contrast to the horrors occurring in the story.
The graphic novel adaptation reminded me of how Atwood kept much of the world vague, encountered only through the eyes of Offred, whose diaries became some of the most valuable primary sources available to future societies to understand how life in Gilead worked. I think that this worked to make the novel more timeless and able to speak to people worried about creeping authoritarianism and the erosion of civil rights for women and other vulnerable populations throughout the world and now, specifically, the US. While I have not watched the Hulu adaptation of the novel, people have really found Atwood’s work particularly relevant over the last few years.
In The Testaments, Atwood’s returns to the future (or is it contemporary?) world of Gilead, and in contrast to The Handmaid’s Tale, the world she depicts here is much more concrete, spending a lot more time describing the specific aspects of Gileadean society and the world it exists in. The Testaments refer to the three linked narratives that comprise the book, including the diary of a young woman belonging to the elite class of Gilead, a teenager from Canada who finds herself involved in the Underground Femaleroad, and the secret records of Aunt Lydia, who has been plotting the end of the Gilead regime from the inside for years. For the most part, these narratives seem to exist mostly to answer all the questions people have about how Gilead works, and also seems to give it a more contemporary feel. As I mentioned, I have not watched the TV adaption but I wonder if Atwood has taken some of the ideas used for that adaption and expanded them here? While there is plenty of intrigue and cloak and daggers tension in The Testaments, I felt that the deeper questions about how society could progress to a totalitarian state seem missing here, as well as any ambiguity.
Reading The Testaments at the same time as another classic sci-fi novel depicting a nightmarish and realistic future for North American society, specifically another fundamentalist takeover of the US government, led to a pretty heavy few days. It also served to show how little impact the Testaments made on me compared to the other books I was reading, Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, the first of her Earthseed series. She impressed me so much with her gripping, horrifying, yet ultimately hopeful work that I immediately checked out the sequel, The Parable of the Talents. Both of them were shockingly prescient and disturbingly relevant, and are a great place to end my discussion.
Over the course of both books, I was struck with Butler’s well-realized and compelling world. As I found myself drawn into the world of the 2020s and ’30s as she depicts through the series’ main narrator, Lauren Oya Olamine, again and again, I couldn’t believe that these books were written in 1993 and 1998 respectively. So many futuristic sci-fi works seem rooted to the time that they were written, and while some of what Butler envisions feel specific to the world of the ’90s, much seems ripped from today’s headlines. Perhaps we’re only a few years less far gone. From a xenophobic fascist president with the promise to “make America great again” before establishing covert concentration camps, to an extreme rise in homelessness, so much Butler writes of looks downright prophetic today. There are some very grim scenes. Basically, for trigger warnings: all of ’em. But the message as a whole is hopeful.
Both novels are told, for the most part, through the diaries of the young Lauren Oya Olamine, the daughter of a Baptist minister and professor in a walled community near Los Angeles as she slowly develops her own belief system, which she calls Earthseed. I’m not a religious person, but I found her philosophy enticing, and, after the horrific destruction of her neighborhood, she and a small band of survivors work to put her ideas into practice in a very inspiring way. With the ultimate, even if seemingly impossible goal of surviving to invent and build space travel allowing humanity to spread to other worlds, despite it all, I have to say that that Earthseed was a very convincing ideal. The fact that Butler is writing from the perspective of a Black woman in a world in which racism continues to take the lives of citizens of color and treat them as disposable reminds the reader that the apocalypse has never been far away for many people in the United States. Yet, change is possible and successes have been made, and perhaps we are in such a time right now.
It is interesting how many of these later novels I discuss couch their narratives in the form of a document, turning their tales of the future into their own historical documents, allowing the reader to feel that they are looking back at dark times from a better future. That, in itself, allows a hopeful note to be established. As we enter what feels like an “apocalyptic” time ourselves, reading these works can aid us in finding reasons to keep on surviving and working for something better.