Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (610 page)

“You’ve got neighbors and you trade with them?”

“Well, nominally. It’d be pretty lonely without them. I’ve taken care of whatever sniffles I could. Set a bone—broken wrist. Listen, do you want some Wonder Bread and peanut butter? I have a ton of it. Your friend looks like he could use a meal.”

“Yes please,” Van said. “We don’t have anything to trade, but we’re both committed workaholics looking to learn a trade. Could you use some assistants?”

“Not really.” She spun her axe on its head. “But I wouldn’t mind some company.”

They ate the sandwiches and then some soup. The restaurant people brought it over and made their manners at them, though Felix saw their noses wrinkle up and ascertained that there was working plumbing in the back room. Van went in to take a sponge bath and then he followed.

“None of us know what to do,” the woman said. Her name was Rosa, and she had found them a bottle of wine and some disposable plastic cups from the housewares aisle. “I thought we’d have helicopters or tanks or even looters, but it’s just quiet.”

“You seem to have kept pretty quiet yourself,” Felix said.

“Didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

“You ever think that maybe there’s a lot of people out there doing the same thing? Maybe if we all get together we’ll come up with something to do.”

“Or maybe they’ll cut our throats,” she said.

Van nodded. “She’s got a point.”

Felix was on his feet. “No way, we can’t think like that. Lady, we’re at a critical juncture here. We can go down through negligence, dwindling away in our hiding holes, or we can try to build something better.”

“Better?” She made a rude noise.

“OK, not better. Something though. Building something new is better than letting it dwindle away. Christ, what are you going to do when you’ve read all the magazines and eaten all the potato chips here?”

Rosa shook her head. “Pretty talk,” she said. “But what the hell are we going to do, anyway?”

“Something,” Felix said. “We’re going to do something. Something is better than nothing. We’re going to take this patch of the world where people are talking to each other, and we’re going to expand it. We’re going to find everyone we can and we’re going to take care of them and they’re going to take care of us. We’ll probably fuck it up. We’ll probably fail. I’d rather fail than give up, though.”

Van laughed. “Felix, you are crazier than Sario, you know it?”

“We’re going to go and drag him out, first thing tomorrow. He’s going to be a part of this, too. Everyone will. Screw the end of the world. The world doesn’t end. Humans aren’t the kind of things that have endings.”

Rosa shook her head again, but she was smiling a little now. “And you’ll be what, the Pope-Emperor of the World?”

“He prefers Prime Minister,” Van said in a stagey whisper. The anti-histamines had worked miracles on his skin, and it had faded from angry red to a fine pink.

“You want to be Minister of Health, Rosa?” he said.

“Boys,” she said. “Playing games. How about this. I’ll help out however I can, provided you never ask me to call you Prime Minister and you never call me the Minister of Health?”

“It’s a deal,” he said.

Van refilled their glasses, upending the wine bottle to get the last few drops out.

They raised their glasses. “To the world,” Felix said. “To humanity.” He thought hard. “To rebuilding.”

“To anything,” Van said.

“To anything,” Felix said. “To everything.”

“To everything,” Rosa said.

They drank. He wanted to go see the house—see Kelly and 2.0, though his stomach churned at the thought of what he might find there. But the next day, they started to rebuild. And months later, they started over again, when disagreements drove apart the fragile little group they’d pulled together. And a year after that, they started over again. And five years later, they started again.

It was nearly six months before he went home. Van helped him along, riding cover behind him on the bicycles they used to get around town. The further north they rode, the stronger the smell of burnt wood became. There were lots of burnt-out houses. Sometimes marauders burnt the houses they’d looted, but more often it was just nature, the kinds of fires you got in forests and on mountains. There were six choking, burnt blocks where every house was burnt before they reached home.

But Felix’s old housing development was still standing, an oasis of eerily pristine buildings that looked like maybe their somewhat neglectful owners had merely stepped out to buy some paint and fresh lawnmower blades to bring their old homes back up to their neat, groomed selves.

That was worse, somehow. He got off the bike at the entry of the subdivision and they walked the bikes together in silence, listening to the sough of the wind in the trees. Winter was coming late that year, but it was coming, and as the sweat dried in the wind, Felix started to shiver.

He didn’t have his keys anymore. They were at the data-center, months and worlds away. He tried the door-handle, but it didn’t turn. He applied his shoulder to the door and it ripped away from its wet, rotted jamb with a loud, splintering sound. The house was rotting from the inside.

The door splashed when it landed. The house was full of stagnant water, four inches of stinking pond-scummed water in the living room. He splashed carefully through it, feeling the floor-boards sag spongily beneath each step.

Up the stairs, his nose full of that terrible green mildewy stench. Into the bedroom, the furniture familiar as a childhood friend.

Kelly was in the bed with 2.0. The way they both lay, it was clear they hadn’t gone easy—they were twisted double, Kelly curled around 2.0. Their skin was bloated, making them almost unrecognizable. The smell—God, the smell.

Felix’s head spun. He thought he would fall over and clutched at the dresser. An emotion he couldn’t name—rage, anger, sorrow?—made him breathe hard, gulp for air like he was drowning.

And then it was over. The world was over. Kelly and 2.0—over. And he had a job to do. He folded the blanket over them—Van helped, solemnly. They went into the front yard and took turns digging, using the shovel from the garage that Kelly had used for gardening. They had lots of experience digging graves by then. Lots of experience handling the dead. They dug, and wary dogs watched them from the tall grass on the neighboring lawns, but they were also good at chasing off dogs with well-thrown stones.

When the grave was dug, they laid Felix’s wife and son to rest in it. Felix quested after words to say over the mound, but none came. He’d dug so many graves for so many men’s wives and so many women’s husbands and so many children—the words were long gone.

Felix dug ditches and salvaged cans and buried the dead. He planted and harvested. He fixed some cars and learned to make biodiesel. Finally he fetched up in a data-center for a little government—little governments came and went, but this one was smart enough to want to keep records and needed someone to keep everything running, and Van went with him.

They spent a lot of time in chat rooms and sometimes they happened upon old friends from the strange time they’d spent running the Distributed Republic of Cyberspace, geeks who insisted on calling him PM, though no one in the real world ever called him that anymore.

It wasn’t a good life, most of the time. Felix’s wounds never healed, and neither did most other people’s. There were lingering sicknesses and sudden ones. Tragedy on tragedy.

But Felix liked his data-center. There in the humming of the racks, he never felt like it was the first days of a better nation, but he never felt like it was the last days of one, either.

> go to bed, felix

> soon, kong, soon—almost got this backup running

> youre a junkie, dude.

> look whos talking

He reloaded the Google homepage. Queen Kong had had it online for a couple years now. The Os in Google changed all the time, whenever she got the urge. Today they were little cartoon globes, one smiling the other frowning.

He looked at it for a long time and dropped back into a terminal to check his backup. It was running clean, for a change. The little government’s records were safe.

> ok night night

> take care

Van waved at him as he creaked to the door, stretching out his back with a long series of pops.

“Sleep well, boss,” he said.

“Don’t stick around here all night again,” Felix said. “You need your sleep, too.”

“You’re too good to us grunts,” Van said, and went back to typing.

Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. Behind him, the biodiesel generator hummed and made its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he loved. Tomorrow, he’d go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not?

It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.

* * * *

Copyright © 2006 by Cory Doctorow

When the United States destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, modern warfare changed forever and the Atomic Age officially began. Science and technology, which had been contributing to the general improvement of human life, suddenly proved to be a major global threat. Superpowers such as the United States, the Soviet Union, and China entered into a dangerous and ever-escalating arms race, investing billions to make weapons more efficient, accurate, and destructive. As a result, many across the globe grew increasingly paranoid about the prospect of worldwide devastation, and the more radical and affluent individuals began taking the necessary steps to insure their protection and survival. Bunkers, fallout shelters, vast food stores, off-the-grid power and water supplies, private arsenals, and survivalist training grew in popularity and frequency as the threats of the twentieth century mounted, and science fiction visionaries matched this cultural trend by producing more and more narratives addressing the apocalypse in response. Yet thanks to the popularity of the survivalist credo, many of these end-of-the-world stories focus not on death and destruction, but rather on ingenuity, preparation, and staying alive.

This optimistic survivalist fantasy, which has become so ubiquitous in the twenty-first century, actually had it beginnings almost four hundred years ago. Whereas people today take pains to protect themselves from nuclear war, global pandemics, natural disasters, and political collapse, explorers and adventurers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were similarly cautious about insuring their survival while abroad. In response, contemporary writers enthralled audiences with tales of danger and isolation that featured the tenacious fortitude of enlightened individuals, steadfast adventurers, and dedicated survivalists. Over the past century, science fiction narratives have modernized these early tales, exploring how tenacious and forward-thinking heroes overcome the trials of global destruction or the annihilation of modern society. Admittedly a subgenre of the more common apocalypse narrative, survivalism should nonetheless be understood as a literary mode in its own right, either as the core defining feature of a narrative or as a central trope essential to the larger plot. Such stories can be classified as either survival in an unexplored territory or survival at home, but regardless of the specifics, survivalism itself has become an important staple of modern science fiction.

The earliest tales of human survivalism explore the hardiness and ingenuity of white, European explorers and adventurers who withstand the dangers of an unfamiliar natural environment by civilizing their harsh surroundings. This transformative power of enlightened imperialism was most famously pioneered by Daniel Defoe in his landmark
Robinson Crusoe
(1719). Undoubtedly the most famous “castaway” story ever written—and the font of numerous imitators, if not the entire survivalism subgenre itself—Robinson Crusoe presents the fictional autobiography of its title character, a successful plantation owner and trader who spends 28 years of his life stranded on an uncharted island. Inspired by the real-life experiences of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk (Ross 16), Defoe crafted not only an exciting tale of adventure, but also one of realistic ingenuity and diligent perseverance. Rather than succumbing to the elements or to neighboring cannibals, Crusoe elects to survive by taming the wilderness and transforming his island into a place of safety and comfort. Over the years, the stoic survivalist builds an enclosed habitation, plants a garden, keeps a crude calendar, makes pottery, and fashions his own tools. In many ways, Defoe’s castaway not only survives, but thrives.

Robinson Crusoe
became an instant and worldwide sensation, and its popularity lead to a host of translations, spin-offs, and imitations; indeed, the influence of this foundational castaway tale can still be seen today. In fact, one of the most famous
Crusoe
“knockoffs” came to experience a similar level of popularity and influence in its own right:
The Swiss Family Robinson
(1812). Published almost a century after Defoe’s novel, Johann David Wyss’s didactic tale emphasizes family values, environmental responsibility, and self-reliance. Written more as an educational tool for the young than a realistic depiction of a family’s struggle to stay alive on an isolated island, the novel’s sense of adventure nonetheless resonated with readers young and old alike, inspiring two sequels (including Jules Verne’s The Castaways of the Flag [1900]) and dozens of cinematic adaptations. Other young-adult variations on Defoe’s initial concept appeared over the years as well, including R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). Both of these later works center on the shipwrecking of young boys, and their plots detail not only their successes at survival, but also the dangers of rugged and untamed environments—including each other.

The prospect of struggling against a savage wilderness has also been appropriated by mainstream science fiction, with distant and unexplored planets taking on the role of the deserted island, as in Robert A. Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky. Published in 1955, thus following closely on the heels of Lord of the Flies, Heinlein’s book similarly tracks the struggles of teenage protagonists, although this time the dysfunctional adolescents are marooned on a strange and hostile planet. Tunnel in the Sky envisions a future in which space travel will take place instantly via teleportation; unfortunately, cost restrictions mandate one-way travel only, not unlike early colonial undertakings.i Protagonist Rod Walker volunteers to take the final exam for his Advanced Survival course, which requires him to teleport to a nearby planet to prove he can survive on his own. Reminiscent of earlier survival narratives, Rod elects to rely on traditional tools, such as knives and basic survival gear, instead of advanced technology, and his preparations prove well founded when he discovers other teenagers on the planet who tell him a solar flare has temporarily cut them off from Earth. The remainder of the novel explores the difficulties the new society has with both survival and self-governance.

The science-fiction “shipwreck” narrative has also, and perhaps more famously, drawn on
The
Swiss Family Robinson
for inspiration. In 1962, Gold Key Comics began publishing
Space Family Robinson
, an original comic series created by Del Connell and artist Dan Spiegle that overtly transplants the premise of Wyss’s novel to outer space. Just three years later, producer Irwin Allen began a very similar project for CBS television, and the first episode of
Lost in Space
(1965–68) premiered on September 15, 1965. Both narratives, which were produced simultaneously and independently from one another, follow the adventures of astronaut families traveling through the uncharted reaches of space, encountering life-threatening problems and struggling to stay alive. Unlike their Swiss predecessors, however, these interstellar Robinsons find their survival to be more a matter of technology than ingenuity, as their space ships, computers, laser guns, and—in the television series—utilitarian robot provide them with the resources, and even the comforts, needed to survive despite being stranded many light years from Earth.

Although Stephen Hopkins’ film version of
Lost in Space
enjoyed moderate success in 1998, most recent tales of marooned travelers more closely resemble Robinson Crusoe. For example, in Barry B. Longyear’s 1979 novella Enemy Mine, along with Wolfgang Petersen’s 1985 film version, the human fighter pilot Willis Davidge finds himself stuck on a dangerous and hostile planet with the antagonistic alien Jeriba Shigan, clearly mirroring Crusoe and Friday. However, perhaps reflecting a modern-day enlightenment missing from Defoe’s colonialism, the two mortal enemies must learn to work together to survive their perilous conditions. Most recently, science-fiction has returned to the direct roots of “shipwreck survivalism” with J. J. Abrams’s television sensation Lost (2004–10). In this variation, an airplane crashes onto a mysterious and obstinately unchartable island; and although a healthy number of travelers survive, at least initially, their exploits and adventures mirror Defoe’s storyline. The Lost survivors build defensible shelters, recycle and reuse salvage from the crash, and learn to hunt and grown their own food—but they also struggle against a tribe of hostile “natives.” Like most of the shipwreck narratives described so far, the primary goal of Lost is not necessarily survival itself, but rescue, and the series charts numerous attempts to escape the confines of the island.

Although the survivalism subgenre regularly emphasizes protagonists stranded in faraway locations, the same tropes are also strong components of apocalypse narratives. As with many sci-fi subgenres, tales of global destruction originated in the nineteenth century, specifically with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898). Shelley’s novel describes the results of a devastating plague, but her story focuses more on the deaths and social collapse associated with the pandemic than on Lionel Verney’s efforts to survive. In fact, The Last Man ends once Verney realizes he’s the only one left alive—the point when most apocalyptic survival narratives begin. Wells’ novel has a similar trajectory, emphasizing the destruction associated with an alien invasion rather than survivalism, but at the heart of the novel is a section in which the narrator and an unstable curate take refuge in an abandoned building. This chilling sequence not only features the active survival efforts of the novel’s protagonist, but it also establishes some key tropes of the apocalyptic survivalism subgenre: a loose alliance between antagonistic characters, hiding out inside a remote and somewhat fortified location, and the careful application of survival skills and supplies.

Many survivalism narratives of the past fifty years understandably explore the tragic results of nuclear warfare, as the Cold War convinced many that the world would likely end in an atomic holocaust. One of the earliest, Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) follows the exploits of Randy Bragg, a Korean War veteran who lives in a small town in central Florida. After the Soviet Union launches a preemptive nuclear attack on the United States, Randy finds himself the leader of the Fort Repose militia, and his training and level head help to organize the community. He successfully addresses housing concerns, finds and distributes food and water, and rallies his new “troops” against roaming marauders. Another key example of this subgenre is Ray Milland’s 1962 film Panic in Year Zero. Harry Baldwin’s (Milland) family serendipitously survives a nuclear assault on Los Angeles because of a camping trip, but they find survival in the backwoods to be harrowing and dangerous. Harry takes drastic steps to keep his family safe, including stealing supplies, abandoning their camper for a secluded cave, and resorting to violence against murderous teenage rapists. Both of these narratives chart the tactics necessary to survive an atomic war,ii but other significant tales feature global devastation as a result of biological rather than nuclear assault.

Many stories of survival thus feature pandemics, plagues, and other forms of infection, threats that became all the more real and terrifying after the use of chemical and biological weapons during the first half of the twentieth century. One of the first modern examples is George R. Stewart’s 1949 novel
Earth Abides
, an alternative history of Berkeley, California, in which the majority of the population have died from some variation of the measles. The protagonist Ish Williams tries to rebuild civilized society upon an agrarian model, but the young survivors of the plague grow up to be both primitive and superstitious. Richard Matheson’s
I Am Legend
(1954) picks up thematically where Shelley’s
The Last Man
leaves off, as Robert Neville is the only living person in a world inhabited by vampires. Matheson’s novella does much to establish the tropes of the small-scale survivalism narrative, as Neville lives inside a heavily fortified home, roaming the city streets during the day in search of food, fuel, and other essential supplies. Using science in the face of superstition, Neville determines the biological nature of the vampire plague, and he makes a valiant attempt to cure the disease. Unfortunately, his efforts fail, and he is eventually killed by the new vampire race—the true “survivors”—as a monstrous outcast and murderer.

Not all plague narratives are as pessimistic as those from Stewart and Matheson; in fact, some of the more influential have decidedly positive resolutions. Stephen King’s
The Stand
(1978), for example, not only narrates in exquisite detail the destruction of US society because of a human-made biological weapon, but it also tracks the efforts of the survivors to rebuild civilization. Led by the messianic Mother Abigail, the righteous remnants of the nation make a pilgrimage to Boulder, Colorado, where they must relearn the difficulties of democratic government, reestablish the electrical grid, and find more primitive ways of feeding and clothing themselves. They also launch a war of faith against the evil Randall Flagg, a demon whose efforts at destruction are eventually overcome by the literal hand of god. David Brin’s 1985 novel
The Postman
, along with Kevin Costner’s 1997 film adaptation, similarly recounts a post-viral apocalypse society struggling to reestablish both the symbols and institutions of government and civilization. Although Gordon Krantz initially only pretends to be a postal employee, his scavenged uniform becomes a symbol and a rallying point for beleaguered survivors, who find the courage to stand up against a dangerous sect of “hypersurvivalist” and, as the end of the novel implies, unite with other communities to reform a healthy society.