The World’s About to End… Oh Wait, It Already Has

Our guest blogger today is Christian Frey (visit his blog) the author of Freelance Hacks.

The World’s About to End… Oh Wait, It Already Has

I’ve always been the kind of person who was convinced they’d survive the apocalypse.

You too? I think I was at least 20 years old before it occurred to me that it would probably be easier to just end up as one of the dead people. Zombie fodder, what have you. Easier… but much less interesting.

I can’t remember where all this exactly started.

There were some short stories we had to read in school (in school! nothing like scaring the willies out of kids in English… don’t get me started on Lord of the Flies); one was about a boy who lived in a trash can at McDonalds and another was about someone who had survived a recent nuclear holocaust and was living in his basement off of canned food.

And there was always Stephen King’s The Stand. I think I saw the TV miniseries before I read the book, but the book… the scene where they’re going through the Lincoln tunnel packed full of all those dead people in cars…

I think part of the reason these stories have always pushed my horror button (and don’t get me wrong, I love horror, otherwise you wouldn’t subject yourself to the stuff, right?) is that, when I was little, the only thing in the world I was scared of was a dead person. Not snakes (fun!), not spiders (useful!), not mice (cute!). Just dead people and skeletons. Skeletons on TV made me cover my eyes – I always knew the jump was coming, and if I didn’t cover my eyes, a grinning skull would haunt me in my room at night. A dead person was a Chekhov’s gun – it was a given that it was going to come back to life and start stalking you at some point.

For me, post-apocalypse and dystopian fiction go hand in hand. (Technically they’re not the same thing, except one is often the cause of the other.) It’s that good ol’ heavy-on-the-chest feeling of being trapped in a panic situation that gets ground out into everyday life.

I’ve been thinking about this recently as I’ve made a return to reading dystopian/apocalyptic fiction. It started with The Hunger Games. Then I re-read 1984. And now I’ve found the WOOL Omnibus, by Hugh Howey, which kicked off all kinds of angst with the first story in that series, a story that messes with perceptions: what we perceive vs. what we want to perceive (I won’t leave any spoilers, just go read it).

Here’s what I’m wondering: what are we trying to work out when we put ourselves through these fictional experiences? Action plans for a worst-case scenario? My life is pretty dull, but I’m not craving that kind of action. Not by a long shot. But sometimes… do you wonder if you’ll get eaten up by the dullness? And the good novels, the shining ones, the ones that make you feel great and take you along for the ride – they are just about the best thing ever, but then The End comes and you have to close the cover. It’s such a letdown to have to leave. It’s the birth of every crappy sequel ever made.

You don’t get that from dystopian novels. Things are shit and they’re going to stay shit for quite some time. The characters may work themselves into a kind of reversal of the situation, a kind of heroism… or they may not. They don’t, in 1984. You can’t escape the world around you.

Maybe, in the end, that’s what we identify with. The feeling of being trapped and having to carry on regardless. The carving out of a small modicum of peace and tranquility, of hope. Or not.

God, that’s depressing. Excuse me while I go hunt down a Harry Potter book.