deeplyshallow // half the battle

half the battle

I was ten, maybe eleven years old, when I read The Stand for the first time. I’d been on a Stephen King kick since the babysitter, tired of dealing with my shit, sent my seven-year-old self to the bedroom with her copy of It. It didn’t scare me; I’d expected it to, but it didn’t. The Stand, on the other hand, scared the crap out of me.

Even at seven I could tell the difference between implausible horror and very, very plausible horror. Movies about blade-fingered killers didn’t scare me. But after The Stand I read The Andromeda Strain, and that scared the crap out of me, too.

Stories about mankind and where we’ve been are interesting to me. But the stories about where we’re going, and how we might not make it to where we’d like to be, are the ones that keep me up at night, turning pages, unable to stop myself from one more chapter, until I’m finished reading. End-of-civilization stories fascinate me, and the only thing I ask of them is plausibility. Don’t give me mutants and vampires, please. Give me crippling diseases or nuclear fallout. Give me catastrophic natural disasters.

But here’s the thing: all of the books I’ve read in this vein deal with the apocalypse in a traditional storytelling way. In The Stand and Lucifer’s Hammer a whole lot of people struggle through wastelands to an endgame that defines their future. In Earth Abides and Alas, Babylon, society is ripped to shreds, and then reformed, and set on a path much skewed from the previous reality. It wasn’t until I read The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s road journal about a boy and his father and their ruined world, that the concept felt personal. And not only personal, but possible.

Like you, every day I read an awful lot of things on the web. And tomorrow I’ll forget what I read today, so I’m not sure why I still do this. Anyway, today I came across this. Alison Headley writes about her secret fear of the apocalypse, of being killed over a tank of gas, of empty grocery store shelves.

I don’t generally find myself fearing an apocalypse, though I do think about it quite often. That’s what I like most about reading about it — imagining the endless possibilities. How would we survive? What happens to the framework we’ve built? How long do our cities last? Do the survivors forget everything we’ve learned? What happens to religion? Can you believe in god when your race is at its end?

There is a prevalent theme in science fiction stories: everything that is happening has happened before, and will happen again. Most recently it’s popped up in the Matrix movies, and in Battlestar Galactica, but it’s an old concept. There is another hypothesis that exists in science fiction: intelligent societies can only go so far before they destroy themselves. Of course, since we’re telling all of these stories, we look for the optimistic angles, even if they’re small — there’s always a survivor or two, enough to diligently repopulate, if not our planet, then somewhere. Inside the belly of a starship that’s gotten away at the last minute. On Mars, the Moon, on Titan. But what if we don’t survive? What if there is no repopulation?

The theme of repetition suggests that we wouldn’t be the last intelligent species on Earth, unless we managed to irrevocably destroy the planet. But we took a hell of a long time to evolve to where we are now. Whoever or whatever might come next might take twice as long, or half as long, but in any scenario, would there be anything of ours left behind for them to discover? What story would they invent to explain us? And would they fall into the same traps that we did? Would they make up fairy tales to explain things that they did not understand? Would they discover astronomy sooner than we did? Would they eventually wonder if information could travel through the air? On the great scale of intelligence, where does mankind reside? What we do not know still greatly outweighs what we do.

Contrary to Alison’s fear of the apocalypse, there is a part of me that wants to be around to see what happens. That’s probably a pretty awful thought, but I’m not wishing for the end of the world. I imagine, as probably anybody does, that I’d somehow survive. Would I survive alone, or with the people who mean the most to me? What would we do for food and shelter? Would we slowly lose our minds, or would we find determination that we didn’t know we had?

How did the Little Prince handle being the only living person on his tiny moon?

But it’s not only our doom that fascinates me. It’s what we still have left to accomplish, and how much of it we won’t achieve in my lifetime. I doubt I’ll see our demise or our greatest successes. That’s all I want, really. To know.