This Is the End (Again)
The New Apocalypse
Since the writing of the book of Revelation, the concept of the apocalypse has been part of human consciousness—and the subject of human fear. Though apocalypse originally meant a disclosure of secret knowledge, often with religious connotations, the term is now commonly understood as the end of everything, or at least the end of the world as we know it. The end of everything is scary enough, but even scarier is the question: what will follow the end?
Spikes in apocalyptic fiction track with major national and world events. An uptick in apocalypse stories accompanied and followed the advent of atomic and nuclear weapons and the concurrent, very real chance of worldwide destruction. Children of the 1950s and 1960s can recall “duck and cover” drills; children of the 1970s and 1980s have traumatic memories of the 1983 TV movie The Day After. Although the threat of nuclear catastrophe remains, fiction from the 1990s and 2000s through today seems to favor a world-ending disease pandemic. Sometimes these global plagues kill most of the world’s population, and terrible things follow; sometimes zombies are the pandemic that kills most of the world’s population, and terrible things follow.
The apocalyptic novel (and the related postapocalyptic and dystopian novel) presents a story that emerges from contemporary social issues. It allows for discussion of difficult topics such as poverty, social inequality, and racial injustice. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart) has moved into the pop-culture zeitgeist thanks to the adaptation that began streaming on Hulu in April 2017, and the iconic red dresses and white hoods worn by her characters have become garb for political protesters advocating for women’s equality. Atwood didn’t leave the apocalypse alone with that book, either. Her MaddAddam trilogy (McClelland and Stewart), which debuted in 2003, follows the survivors of a genetically engineered virus as they deal with the transformations of sentient life in the wake of death, illness, and environmental damage.
Christina Dalcher’s Vox (Berkley, 2018) is, in many ways, a successor to Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale; it imagines a world in which women are permitted to speak only one hundred words a day. Naomi Alderman’s The Power (Little, Brown, 2017) tells of a different sort of world turned upside down, in which special powers are bestowed upon the most unlikely of beneficiaries—teenage girls. The results are dramatic, though no one who has watched anything made by Joss Whedon will be surprised at what ensues. The question at the heart of the book is whether strength, when unevenly distributed, is a sweet or sinister gift.
Young adult fiction has been overwhelmed by Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (Scholastic, 2008–10), whose popularity was amplified by the movie adaptations starring Jennifer Lawrence as the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen. The stories are set in a post-apocalyptic North American dystopia in which a strong authoritarian government punishes citizens for a failed rebellion by holding an annual lottery that selects children to fight to the death in a televised competition. Echoes of Shirley Jackson, George Orwell’s 1984, and the phenomenon of TV reality show abound. On the heels of Collins’s books came Veronica Roth’s Divergent series (HarperCollins, 2011–13). This franchise takes place in a post-apocalyptic Chicago where people are categorized based on personality and social position.
The popular science-fiction post-apocalypse novel Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014) by Emily St. John Mandel follows several loosely connected characters as they try to survive in a world devastated by swine flu. Mandel explores how human culture, not just human lives, might outlast disaster. Among the surviving population is a group of musicians, actors, and artists who travel among the sparse settlements to provide entertainment and fellowship. Station Eleven won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015 and was nominated for a National Book Award.
Tananarive Due, whom we discuss in the Toni Morrison profile (see this page), has also ventured into apocalyptic territory. Her collection Ghost Summer (Prime Books, 2015) includes an entire section of stories, titled “Carriers,” devoted to the end of the world and what may or may not follow. One of those stories, “Patient Zero,” is a painfully poignant account of a young boy who lives in quarantine and doesn’t fully understand what is happening or why. The story is told from the boy’s point of view, and he describes his interactions with the doctor, nurse, and tutor who make up his tiny community. The way that Due unfolds the narrative, so the reader realizes what’s happened before the boy does—if he even can—is devastating. Her story “Danger Word,” written with her husband, Steven Barnes, is an exploration of family relationships: a grandfather who has prepared for the end of the world faces a post-pandemic zombie apocalypse with his grandchild. It was adapted in 2013 as a nineteen-minute short film.
Urban fantasy writer Seanan McGuire has ventured into zombie territory with her Newsflesh trilogy (Orbit Books, 2010–12), written under her pen name Mira Grant. The series, which includes Feed, Deadline, and Blackout, follows blogger journalists and social media savants as they report on a much-changed world following a drug-induced zombie apocalypse. The first book takes place once things have calmed down and humanity is trying to figure out the new normal. But the intrepid journalists find evidence of a vast conspiracy underneath the events that precipitated the catastrophe, and it turns out that the zombies may not be as easily controlled and vanquished as people thought. Newsflesh is planted solidly in our contemporary moment, with scare-tactic politics and a postmodern text full of blog and social media posts.
The prolific Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor writes science fiction and fantasy for adults and children and is known for her two series, Binti (Tor, 2015–18) and Akata Witch (Viking/Penguin, 2011–17). Her book Who Fears Death (DAW/Penguin, 2010) is set in a future Sudan rent by racial and genocidal conflict and focuses on women’s experiences. The main character is an Ewu, the child of a rape, seeking revenge on behalf of her mother. The novel won World Fantasy and Carl Brandon Kindred Awards, and in 2017, Okorafor announced that it had been optioned by HBO, with George R. R. Martin attached as an executive producer.
N. K. Jemisin’s three-peat Hugo-winning Broken Earth trilogy, The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky (Orbit, 2015–17), may take place on a fantasy world, but the premise, of an apocalypse created by climate change disasters, hits close to home. Jemisin’s characters face systems of power and oppression represented by various forces that, although fictitious, feel familiar to contemporary readers. Jemisin creates a society based on a caste system in which a powerful leading class exploits the strengths and talents of the workers. In a review of The Fifth Season for the New York Times, Naomi Novik wrote: “The end of the world becomes a triumph when the world is monstrous, even if what lies beyond is difficult to conceive for those who are trapped inside it.”
Two more post-apocalyptic tales worth praising are Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (HarperLuxe, 2017) and Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning (Saga Press, 2018). Erdrich, a literary fiction powerhouse, is best known for her Native American saga beginning with Love Medicine (HarperCollins, 1984). In Future Home, she turns her attention to speculative fiction in the vein of Atwood’s handmaids. Something is wrong with the babies that are being born; they appear to be devolving into something…not human. But the protagonist Cedar Hawk Songmaker has a “normal” child in her womb, and she must run from kidnappers who, for unknown reasons, are capturing women like her whose babies who haven’t changed. This dystopian world is spinning out of control astonishingly quickly.
Roanhorse won 2018 Hugo and Nebula Awards for her story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™.” She also won the 2018 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Trail of Lightning takes place in a world where rising waters from climate change have taken over much of the land. Because of its location, the former Navajo reservation now called Dinétah is in a place of power. The protagonist Maggie Hoskie is a monster hunter, and her knowledge and skills are in high demand.
