The Power of End-of-the-World Novels
Why envisioning the collapse of civilization can be unexpectedly life-affirming.
What, Paul wondered, was troubling his eleven-year-old daughter?
“Is her anxiety related to school?” Paul asked. “I’ve been worrying about bullying.”
“Bullying?” The psychiatrist raised his eyebrows. “She said nothing about that. No.” A slight smile curled his mouth.
“It seems she is worried about the future. So many of her peers are. Climate change. What, in our day, they called global warming. It seems your daughter is afraid the world will end.”
The reader meets Paul and his daughter in Erin Swan’s recent novel Walk the Vanished Earth, a multigenerational saga that stretches from the Kansas plains of 1873 to a colony on Mars two centuries later.
Walk the Vanished Earth is a work of “cli-fi,” or climate fiction: It envisions a world altered dramatically by climate change.
Early readers of this newsletter may recall an August 2020 essay in which I tried to figure out why I was reading so many novels about pandemics in the middle of a pandemic.
Since then, I’ve continued to seek out books that portray different visions of the end of the world as we know it, from climate change to democratic collapse to the entrenchment of surveillance capitalism.
If this sounds like a depressing reading habit, take a look at my latest article, “End-of-the-World Novels Are ‘Memento Mori’ for Civilization,” which was published in Long Now in June.
The article is both an essay about why I find these books unexpectedly life-affirming and a reading list covering nineteen titles, from Ling Ma’s Severance to Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible to Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface.
In the article, I focus in particular on Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which, despite being a work of fiction published in 1993, can read uncomfortably like the news in 2022:
Parable has been heralded as a warning of an America ravaged by climate change, and it is certainly prescient on that front.
But Parable is also eerily prescient in describing an America in which power is concentrated among religious nationalists and large corporations, an America in which any notion of “common good” has disintegrated, and in which public services, from health care to education to public safety, have been privatized.
It is an America in which state borders are closed, and freeways have become lawless walking paths leading toward the hope of food and jobs and safety further north, and the best clean water comes from commercial stations that “let you draw whatever you pay for—and not a drop more.”
Parable of the Sower, I write, “reveals an anarchic world in which capitalism has replaced democracy and libertarian fantasies of privatizing public goods have been taken to their inevitable end.”
The article in Long Now also highlights a number of novels in which “some of the most chilling passages—some of the most vivid reminders of what has changed—reach the reader almost in passing.”
Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander has one of these passages that offers the reader a fleeting glimpse into a different world:
Fire, floods, disease, nuclear contamination, foreign wars, civil unrest, police brutality, drought, massive electrical outages, famine. Always somewhere else. Until the garbage piled up and the buses stopped running and security forces patrolled streets instead of cops.
Some places, militias conducted roadblocks, and no one tried to stop them. Military tribunals popping up. A federal government in crisis. Cell towers destroyed by conspiracy theorists. At the very least, we had become a failed state. Was the world a failed state, too?
As does Matt Bell’s Appleseed, which includes a storyline about Earthtrust, an omnipresent tech conglomerate whose founder’s sociopathic savior complex and hunger for power give her more than a passing resemblance to Elon Musk:
After the catastrophic California earthquake finally struck, it was Earthtrust that pushed an emergency funding bill through the last true Congress in Washington, a rushed order seizing all lands west of the Mississippi; then using eminent domain and the president’s emergency powers to create the Western Sacrifice Zone, a long-planned takeover waiting only for the right shock: half the country abdicated and sold to Earthtrust for dollars an acre by a weakened government busy fleeing to dryer land in Syracuse.
Neither of these passages is critical to the book’s plot. Neither passage is what the book is about. Each passage simply helps build the world in which the novel takes place. These are worlds that have been transformed—but not beyond recognition.
As best as I can tell, this is what keeps me coming back to end-of-the-world novels: the opportunity to see different possible futures.
Not everyone finds that so appealing. In Walk the Vanished Earth, the psychiatrist leaves Paul with some advice for his daughter.
“Try to distract her,” he says. “Encourage a new hobby. Keep her mind off the future.”
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You can read the full article, “End-of-the-World Novels Are ‘Memento Mori’ for Civilization,” in Long Now. Thanks to Ahmed Kabil and the team at Long Now for editing and publishing it.