The Last Policeman

If you enjoy science fiction you should soak yourself in the world of The Last Policeman. The trilogy by Ben Winters is a fresh angle on the end-of-the-world, following the investigations of a young police detective, Henry Palace, during the final year of the world before a meteorite strike. Some end-of-the-world novels can ponderously ominous in setting the scene but Winters mangers to paint a convincing slow collapse of civilisation and places the most refreshing hero I've encountered for a very long time in the midst of one small corner of it. The anti-hero has become a popular but weary trope in modern fiction, so watching Winters across the trilogy navigate the wreckage of the modern world was an amazing experience, up there with say Hazel from Watership Down leading his small band through ruin and danger; noble without being naff. The other fascinating sub-current of the trilogy is the way people behave and respond to the approaching comet. (For those with more stamina but a taste for this sort of thing might be interested in Lucifer's Hamer, the sprawling epic from the 1970's about a comet strike. Which I listened to recently on a drive to Melbourne.)

'The Second Coming' by WB Yeats

The Second Coming by WB Yeats

 Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Future is Theological

A poignant prediction from the current cardinal of Chicago:

“I will die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die as a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.” - First Things

While it's discouraging to hear about persecution and see Christianity forced out of the public square (for the meantime), our enduring cultural legacy will be theological. Theology remembered, articulated and practiced will outlast countries, controversies, disasters, people and scandals.  

'The Backwoodsman'

Essential Post-Apocalyptic Reading :)

Treme [some spoilers] - post apocalyptic?

From the creators of The Wire, comes Treme set three months after Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans (with many of the same actors, a few surprisingly cast against type).  As in The Wire some of the sexual allusions are difficult to cope with but there is less violence. Similar to Generation Kill, it's a shorter series and like Generation Kill (second invasion of Iraq) more of a snapshot of a significant period (post Katrina) rather than an extended exploration of a location (the city of Baltimore).

Again the central device is following several loosely connected stories that, while quite different, explore similar themes. One of the themes seems to be living in a post-apocalyptic landscape (patrolling National Guard units, the abandoned cars, the broken houses and damaged societal fabric): who survives, who thrives and who succumbs.  On the one hand, Jeanette the restaurant owning chef is defeated by the broken city, closing up and leaving for New York on the other hand Davis the musician thrives, partly because of his joie de vivre, and willingness to embrace the chaos of the broken city.

I wonder where David Simon will go next? The Wire so powerfully explored the broken dynamics of institutions.  While Generation Kill and Treme were great snapshots of important periods in recent American history, the first serious the second relatively more lighthearted.  Strangely I also like each of the show's inconsistencies (although Generation Kill was the least like this, in this regard).  For example in The Wire a few of the subplots were boring and fairly immaterial narratively or thematically. It's the same in Treme, for example the professor Creighton's lectures are cringingly [sp] lightweight given the pathos of his particular story.  But I like this because it's emblematic of our fallen condition, a funny mixture banal normality and intensity and beauty.

'Survivors'

There isn't a wide selection of TV shows chronicling the circumstances and themes of the post-apocalyptic world, so I was surprised and pleased to see Survivors, from the BBC.  It's set in the aftermath a particularly severe outbreak of the Flu. The production values aren't on par with other interesting British shows like say Ultraviolet, but reasonable enough to allow a dedicated enthusiast like myself to soldier through.  Most rewarding was watching group cohesion form and survive under varying pressures and see how the small group dealt with the changing world. Most frustrating was the idea that each episode needed some sort of mini-adventure. It was almost as though the producers thought, 'great setting but lets keep the kids keen by pumping this show through at a fast pace.'  I want to be steeped in the world while observing character development and only then indulging in some high intensity action.

Abandoned Places

One of the alluring things about the post-apocalyptic world is the urban landscape.  Check out this great montage of abandoned places from around the world.  There is something equally sad and compelling about abandoned building as, for example, this sequence of foreclosed or abandoned American homes shows. Here a couple from the original montage that were particularly striking.

Abandoned Russian Submarine Base:

Dormant New York Subway Station:

Abandoned Methodist Cathedral in Gary, Indiana, USA:

[Pictures copyright, I presume, to the Coolist*, 2010]


Also worth checking out if your interested in this sort of thing is the abandoned Japanese island of Hashima.

[Copyright Web Urbanist, 2009.]

'Without Warning' by John Birmingham

Without Warning is a post-apocalyptic novel of the alternative-future variety.  Birmingham, who reminds me of Andrew Klavan, realistically projects current trends and geo-politics into the near future.  So many action novels try the sprawling thriller thing, but the overly large casts weakens the sense of connection between reader and hero.  Birmingham gets around this by focusing on a few chosen narrators.  The other trap of this genre is plausibility, which Birmingham deals with by interspacing his narrative with focused chucks of description of how the disaster is changing the world.  In Without Warning it's the appearance of a strange humanoid consuming energy wave across North America, that immediately changes the balance of world power in 2003 on the eve of America's invasion of Iraq.

'Post-Apocalyptic'

"How deserted lies the city, once so full of people" (Lamentations 1:1)

Post-Apocalyptic fiction is set either during or after a major disaster. It is essentially about how civilisation does or does not survive, who survives and why they survive.

The first apocalypse occurred when Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden of Eden. Since then people have been wondering what would happen if civilisation as we know it dramatically changed. A classic example of this genre, set after a nuclear war, is Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O'Brien. There are some great English writers of Post-Apocalyptic fiction. For example; John Christopher's short and gripping post-earthquake novel, A wrinkle in the Skin or PD James' The Children of Men*, a great introduction to the genre, set in the near future after a very interesting disaster. From America we get the sobering modern release; The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Australia is well represented by Nevil Shute's pessimistic but compelling novel; On the Beach. Film has also been used to explore this topic to varying degrees. Great movies in this genre in no particular order are; Deep Impact, 12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later, Quiet Earth, The Day After Tomorrow, I am Legend, Reign of Fire, The Postman, Waterworld, Apocalypto and the Mad Max series. The recent television show Jericho is a celluloid classic of this genre set in small town America after a nuclear war.

Wikipedia says the top ten risks to civilisation are:

1. Ice age
2. Global pandemic
3. Megatsunami
4. Ecological disaster such as widespread desertification
5. World population and agricultural crisis
6. Pole shift theory (This one seems dubious, only compasses would be effected.)
   
7. Supervolcano
8. Nuclear War
9. Bio-Chemical War
10. "Divine Event" (I added this one.)
    

Discover magazine lists the top nine 'world as we know' it ending events:

1. large asteroid or comet impact
2. solar flare
3. supernova
4. gamma-ray burst
5. black hole
6. alien attack
7. death of the sun
8. galactic doom (sounds fun they mean the eventual burning out of the galaxy)
9. death of the universe

Not only is the 'Post-Apocalyptic' genre ripe for all sorts of sociological commentary and insights into the human character I think there is a useful theological insight here as well. There are several 'disasters' in the Scriptural storyline: Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, Noah's flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Exodus, the first destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, "that great and terrible day of the Lord" foretold in Joel, the death of Jesus, the second destruction of Jerusalem** and the final apocalypse at the end of time.

Some post-apocalyptic pictures from the rust belt of Detroit. [ht Tony]


Footnotes:
* Avoid at all costs the film of the same name, it's based on an idea the director had, after his deaf aunt, twice removed, heard part of the book on audio-tape told her cleaner who passed a synopsis of the plot to the director while he was attending "death to George Bush party." Ahgh I want that hour and a half of my life back.
** This one borders on speculation but given how close some of the NT books were written to this event and it's political and religious significance, it's worth putting into the timeline.