Apocalypse Then

The post-apocalyptic genre. In case for whatever reason, you're not familiar with it, post-apoc is a setting for stories set after the fall of humanity, where life as we know it has been destroyed by some awful calamity, yet people live in this terrible new world as best they can. The Wikipedia article listing post-apocalyptic fiction is pretty damn useless, since it includes stuff like Signs, which isn't post apocalyptic at all.

Probably the most iconic post-apocalyptic fiction to my mind is the Road Warrior, a film I watched as part of a high school film class. Ah, good times. A bleak desert wastelands, gangs of raiders, and a combination of the technological and the primitive. And a bunch of weird outfits you'd only ever see from an eighties movie. Mad Max was just bad, in my opinion, and Thunderdome 's best feature is "Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves." And the knife in the flyswatter, of course.

But there's more than Mad Max. There's the Fallout series of PC games. And who could forget Waterworld (never have the amnesiacs been so blessed)? The Road? The Book of Eli (was anyone else hoping it WASN'T the Bible, just for a change of pace)? And then we have the whole gamut of works that combine the post-apocalyptic with terrible dystopia. Even the Matrix could be argued to be post-apocalyptic, even though it's way more about cool guys with slowmo gun fights than the downfall of society.

The genre is about far more than just having the excuse for savage violence, however. In fact, interestingly, it seems that whenever more critically respected writers, i.e. those outside "genre fiction" venture into the far more interesting branches of writer-created reality, they almost invariably gravitate towards the post-apocalyptic (Handmaid's Tale, anyone?). I'm not entirely certain as to why, but I can take a few guesses.

More traditional science fiction is about the future, and mankind's hopes and dreams (it's also about gratuitous space battles). The post-apocalyptic and dystopian subgenres are more about the fears and nightmares of mankind. It's kind of hard to write a happy post-apocalyptic story, since even if your characters end up happy, that happiness is built on the bodies of millions. And preying on the negative is certainly the easier, more common choice in the world; it's certainly seen as a more mature topic.

And the dystopian genre already has what most would consider to be definitive works of the genre. Post-apocalypse? Not so much. World-building is also much easier in post-apocalyptic, since you don't need to create any kind of functioning society. Instead, all you need to do is mess society up until it stops working.

The creator of the post apoc story, unless it's a particularly important plot point, will generally pick the most likely method of apocalypse. In other words, whatever we fear at the given point in time. Nuclear war doesn't seem a very likely way to go out these days, so instead we use pollution, mass resource shortages, whatever.

Speaking of fear, the popularity of the post apoc genre seems to see surges in times of uncertainty, in the wake of crises of all kinds. I don't know if it's because the times make the idea of the apocalypse seem more plausible and likely, or because maybe because we want the reassurance that someone's going to survive it.

Next time: Zombie attack!