Full disclosure: This post has been slowly marinading in my head since shortly after I turned sixty. Hence its timing. Anyway…
Having watched human spacecraft depart Earth for forty years now, coupled with four decades of reading science fiction about human spacecraft escaping doomed planets, I’ve noticed a troubling trend among our species – we love stories about the end of humanity. Or at least, I do. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like I spend all day thinking about how humanity will eventually go extinct. It’s just that…
When I was around twelve years old I read Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. This was during the period where I was following NASA mission transcripts religiously, so here I am devouring humanity’s escape into space and reading a book where the entire planet is lethally irradiated and dying over the course of several months. My mother caught me reading it at 2AM under the blankets with a flashlight and asked me what was so interesting about “such a depressing book.” I couldn’t articulate it then, but I think…
Whenever I read or watch stories about the end of civilization I feel… compelled? It’s hard to describe. There’s something cathartic about reading about the worst-case scenario our society can face, played out in realistic detail. Is it because we get to experience our greatest fears vicariously? Are we stressed so much about day-to-day life that the utter cessation of day-to-day life lets us exhale?
Children of Men was particularly impactful for me, and I watched it later in life than most – I believe I had just retired, which is probably why it hit me the way it did. Full disclosure: I was also well into my sixties at this point. Old enough that mortality really starts to sneak up on you in ways it didn’t when you were busy with a full-time career. In Children of Men humans just stop being able to reproduce. Women become infertile globally and suddenly there is no future. No children. No one to build that future for. The movie adaptation is fantastic. Long steadycam shots that immerse you in the hopelessness of the society it depicts.
What struck me about Children of Men, though, was that in many ways it wasn’t a book or movie *about* the death of society. It was about hope in the face of overwhelming odds. When that infant’s cries pierce the refugee camp and the battle simply ends in that moment… everyone takes a breath and remembers what they’re fighting for. I’m not proud to admit I choked up during that scene. My wife came into the room to see what “sad movie” I was watching in retirement and I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t sad, not really.
Beyond that, as an engineer I was impressed by the constraints author P.D. James put on herself in order to tell the story. She didn’t explain infertility through some hand-wavey sci-fi plot device like alien contagion or genetic warfare. Children literally stop being born for reasons that have plausible scientific explanations but are never disclosed to the reader. Hell, most science fiction does this kind of thing all the time. Rare is the science fiction story that lets real-world science impose limits on the story. Everything else has magictero-nuclear space lasers, but for some reason biology is crystal clear to mankind’s geniuses within hours of a global catastrophe. James resisted that temptation and it’s better for it.
The Road hit me differently. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t write hope the same way other authors do. I could not put this book down. It’s beautiful and horrible all at once. Eating glass describes how this book feels to read. Man and son traverse a post-apocalyptic America landscapes littered with the ash from global firestorms. The few supplies they do not hack together from abandoned buildings are carried in a shopping cart. They hide from cannibalistic armies and starvation. There is no explanation for what caused the apocalypse. No hope of rebuilding. No plot arc really, just survival because what other choice is there?
What gutted me about this book was how believable it was. I did radiation exposure projections for crewed spacecraft for a living, and I know what kind of fallout a global nuclear war would actually look like. There’s no information-dump about death rays knocking out the satellite network, wiping out power grids and sterilizing soil worldwide. You know it happened, because the ground is covered in ash and dead trees can’t sprout leaves. The air is cold. McCarthy doesn’t have to tell you everything is death and despair – you feel it.
What does all this have in common? Hope. These characters desperately cling to hope in a world void of it. The man loves his son so much that he keeps putting one foot in front of the other until he can’t. Holding out that drive for one reason is what keeps readers rooting for these characters to survive. As a parent who raised children and recently watched them leave the nest… Goddamnit, McCarthy.
Let’s talk about The Expanse. I hesitate to put this one in the same bucket as the above three because it’s something of a reverse apocalypse. Humanity has colonized the Solar System but we haven’t changed much as a species. There are Belters living in the asteroid belt and mining it for profitable metals. Mars has been terraforming since before we re-established contact with them and Earth is as polluted and densely populated as ever. All the fuel we’ll ever need to light the next World War is right here on the blue marble.
If you haven’t read The Expanse books or watched the series, I won’t spoil them but Chris and I highly recommend them. The ship transit times are realistic. Spaceships use vestibular acceleration impulses because nobody has invented antigravity and water is still damn heavy in zero-G. If you’ve read both Martin and Brown’s books I know George R.R. made Brown his assistant – trust me, they did their research. These authors not only know their science, they know how to restrain themselves and let it drive the story.
The factions feel like today’s geopolitical power blocs trying to find resources and justifications to go to war with each other. Earth thinks everyone else are space barbarians. Mars thinks everyone else are hypocrites. The Belt thinks everyone else is screwing over the have-nots. It’s Putin and Trump and -ista squatting on a fleet of rockets.
Watching the characters in The Expanse grapple with problems that are basically our problems on an interplanetary scale made me think about a lot of the other apocalypse sci-fi I’ve read. Sure, a lot of the technology is made of magic, but the tensions between the factions are very much rooted in modern society. Global warming? Cheque. Billionaire libertarian senators? Double-cheque. Climate refugees? Everybody’s an immigrant at some point on the ship Rocinante.
Hell, The Belt really hit home with me. Humans had been living in low gravity for generations and their bodies adapted. Sure, it’s not compatible with living on Earth or Mars but that doesn’t matter when you’ve been treated as sub-human your whole life. It was both fascinating and horrifying to think of society’s ills being amplified by low Earth orbit.
I read all the books and binged the series twice. To be perfectly honest I’m still processing everything about it. Usually when I read fiction I find myself thinking “Man, that would suck.” Or “Why would they do that?” The Expanse made me feel… cautiously optimistic? There’s enough screwed up things happening in the real world that I find it comforting to see a future where we’ve managed to fight about the same things on a larger scale. Don’t get me wrong – I liked where the story was going. I’m just wary of humanity’s ability to solve problems without digging ourselves a bigger hole first.
The protomolecule could’ve benefited from less hand-waving – as a lifelong sci-fi reader whenever some magical alien tech violates known physics I instantly become suspicious AF. But I was willing to forgive it because the human element of the story was handled so damned well. Holden, trying desperately to do the right thing and invariably making things worse. “Uh, fist” Avasarala. Martian Marine punching infantry superseding diplomacy again. Characters who feel like actual people.
So what do all these apocalyptic stories do for us? Why are we fascinated with reading about the death of civilization when most of us will die peacefully in our beds? I think they let us test how we might react when faced with societal breakdown.
Picture your life with all the luxuries stripped away. Power grid goes offline and doesn’t come back on. Plants won’t grow. Water is scarce. What do you do? Who do you become? If you’ve been reading this blog for a while I know you engineers are automatically Googling “How quickly would society collapse if …” and filling in the blank with some post-apocalyptic scenario. So imagine whatever worst case comes to mind and strip away technology, politics and law.
Would you help your neighbour scrounge for food? Or would you be too busy stockpiling what you have? Who survives? What would you do if you lost your job and couldn’t feed your family? What if you lost your family? How long do you work before you accept it’s lost cause and just give up?
Post-apocalyptic fiction lets us explore how we might react if our world actually did end. And I don’t just mean global firestorms or inexplicable infertility. I mean like, why did society collapse? Were we hit by cosmic calamity or did we bring it on ourselves? Are we allies or enemies? What happens when fuel supplies run low and everyone is too stressed to remember how to solve problems without fighting?
You spend your whole life being told how special and unique you are as a person. Some fantasy epic loves-you-bruinely sums it all up. We are legion. While I was grumbling about SpaceX not having Moon rockets ready when they were supposed to I engineering archiving the decommissioned International Space Station so it can one day tell the story of us. Astronauts refer to it as The Cold Tube for reasons I think we can all relate to by now.
What we discover over centuries of stories and stories within stories is that humanity is remarkably consistent. We are tribal. We build things. We believe in gods. We kill and love our families. When crops fail we massacre each other. We throw our neighbours in jail when they disagree with us. We tell stories about how we used to live so grossly exaggerated future generations believe in space magic.
Stories of apocalypse and survival are stress-testing how we might react when faced with the end of our world. Are we evolved enough as a species to deal with it? Truthfully, part of me expects us to fuck it all up. We’re nowhere near smarter than rats – just better at not killing ourselves off en masse. But I also know that some of us keep reading these stories because we hope. We hope someone would do the right thing if it happened to us. We hope that we are that someone.
You know what I’ve realised as I hurtle towards death? I don’t want to adapt. Not really. I built a comfortable life for myself and I like it. I liked it enough that I read these books and watched these shows to try and understand what it would take to live when it was all taken away. To figure out how we keep going. To see us at our worst and try and remind myself that there’s good left in the world.
Maybe there isn’t. But I choose to believe we’re better than rats.
John spent forty years designing real spacecraft before turning his attention to fictional ones. Writing from Oregon, he brings a scientist’s curiosity to sci-fi—separating good speculation from bad physics while keeping his sense of wonder firmly intact.