Also, just for the record

[sholio]

With the present state of the world being what it is, I should not be allowed to read about apocalypses.

It doesn't even have to be an apocalypse that's likely to happen! The book in question was about a comet hitting the Earth and everyone wandering around trying to survive in the ensuing nuclear winter. Apparently my hindbrain REALLY DID NOT LIKE THAT, because I finished reading it last night in bed and then ended up having to get up for two hours and do relaxing things on the Internet to calm down enough to sleep.

So, right. No apocalypses for me right now.

I really enjoyed the book, though - On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis. It's YA with an autistic protagonist (written by an autistic author) and, as apocalypses go, it's not at all grimdark. A lot of bad stuff happens because, well, apocalypse (and if animal harm/animal death is an issue for you, be aware that a subplot includes pets being put to sleep), but overall it's an optimistic book about people pulling together and trying to help each other and rebuild society.

All the scenes of people wandering around in a dark, flooded wasteland trying to find enough food to survive were apparently traumatic in a way my brain couldn't quite deal with right now, though.

Comments

[recessional]

I wonder if that's because the apocalypse of the 80s was (in terms of the cultural gestalt) MAD nuclear war: Rocks Fall, Everybody Dies, and of a kind where bluntly you have to outright handwave HOW anyone survives because we basically don't know - our suspicion is that Everyone Dies, basically, but since the actual killers tend to be shit like radiation poisoning and cancer, and we really don't KNOW how anyone will survive assuming they do, nobody wanted to hang out there. Bluntly, there's nothing sexy about radiation poison and cancer - they involve ugly tumours, throwing up, wasting away, open sores, dull, boring pain, gi distress, etc etc etc.

You can make violence and sexual violence and death-by-violence kind of sexy. You really can't make "brain liquified by nest of tumours" and its corresponding symptoms and experiences sexy or glam. It isn't the kind of suffering that anyone enjoys: it may or may not be horrific, but most importantly it's gross in a petty, icky, "ugh wash my haaaaands"/"this smell is gonna make me throw up" way. (See also: why someone like McCaffrey would decide to go with a flu pandemic for Pern rather than the Black Death - the flu at least potentially has the decency just to make you cough a lot and suffocate to death, whereas the Black Death is actively disgusting in an embarrassing/humiliating way in its symptoms.)

So to have the Adventure, you go to the place AFTER the apocalypse. And I mean there were grim versions of that, too, but.

Whereas the gestalt-concept of apocalypse at this point seems to be scarcity, which means the actual killers are either humans doing violence to one another, or people are starving because of having been run off by the violence of other humans. We're a lot better at glamorizing violence and the results of violence than we are diarrhea and vomit. Before the End of the World concept was SO big and overwhelming and catastrophic that our way of processing it in fiction was just to jump straight to "annnnd there was a band of survivors from The Terrible Dying Times", and then the struggle and adventure was continuing to survive in the now more hostile world.

Right now we have End of the World concepts that are a lot more comprehensible: they're basically the war-zones or plague-zones that already exist on our planet, except writ large and globally. And since we CAN engage with that in our fictional fascinations, we do. So a lot more living-thru-apocalypse stuff.

That's my off the cuff pondering, anyway. XD

[sholio]

I was thinking something similar. For nuclear apocalypses, most of the interesting stuff happens generations later; the immediate post-apocalypse period is not only disgusting but actually pretty boring. ("And then we lived in a concrete bunker for two generations.")

I also think that in-depth descriptions of nuclear attack may have hit too close to home for people in the 70s/80s in the same way that this book did for me now. A scarcity-related apocalypse doesn't quite have the same, idk, immediately catastrophic, "there's nothing you can do about it" feeling as nuclear war -- your actions actually could make a difference on an ongoing basis, so there are an interesting series of choices the characters can make, as opposed to "do you have a bunker", "are you in it", and "did the warhead fall right on top of your city or not". In a scarcity-type apocalypse, fiction can provide a template for how to survive it, on a fantasy level even if most of us would probably suck at it, but you don't really get the same template-to-success when the threat is a nuclear warhead falling on top of you. I think the sheer catastrophic randomness of a nuclear apocalypse made it hard to read about at a time when people really thought that there was a strong chance it would happen in their lifetimes. (I grew up right on the tail end of that, but I DID catch the tail end of it, in the 80s, and we really did worry about it a lot -- my sister tells me she used to be terrified of the sound of jets flying over at night, because she was afraid they were going to drop bombs -- so fiction that hammers home the fact that YOU'RE JUST GONNA FUCKIN' DIE was not something that people wanted. As opposed to fiction that gets on with the hopeful part about humanity still being around a few generations later.)

Come to think of it, I wonder if that's one reason why this book really hit me in the bad-place part of my brain, because the comet strike is similarly catastrophic and unavoidable, as opposed to other books I've read which are about rising sea levels and growing scarcity of resources that didn't leave me with the same feeling of massive doom as this one did.

Though obviously the political climate is a major factor too.

[recessional]

Yeah part of that "hits too close" is what I meant but totally didn't get across, as well as the randomness of it - the change I mean is mostly just that THAT was what "apocalypse" meant instinctively in the 70s-80s-90s, whereas yeah now "apocalypse" inherently calls up something more like plague or famine or, well, zombies. :P Whatever you want to call that.

I had more or less the same reaction to San Andreas - though I'd probably enjoy it now, at the time it was coming out I was a bit on edge because of other things, and living in a place at risk of A Big One just made it grate slightly too much. I have an Israeli reader who honestly can't really stand most movies that have Bad Things Happening To Cities (Avengers seriously pushes her edge fairly hard, for example) because she lives in Tel Aviv, has lived in Jerusalem, and served in the Second Lebanon War - so particularly the way North American media tends to TREAT this stuff makes her Extremely Upset.

And I mean as with everything, on the other hand some people crave this stuff exactly BECAUSE it's too close to home. It's just that with nuclear stuff particularly it's just really hard to do ANYTHING with it - not only is it too close to home, it's hard to use it to PROCESS something that's too close to home the way we might with stuff like Fury Road or whatever, because the actual threats and dangers it represents don't make Good Stories - humans are better with horror than disgust. (There's a reason films like The Human Centipede are for a very niche audience. :P)