A few weeks ago I received the news that my role at my bread-and-butter freelance gig has been automated. The job — which is a mishmash of coding, editing, and technical writing — has increasingly been my work focus over the past five years, and yet by the end of 2016 it will be performed by computers overseen, presumably, by interns.
Recently while ruminating over robot apocalypses — and I’ll give you one guess why — I questioned the assumption that AIs would necessarily want to kill humans. After all, we haven’t shared the Earth with another intelligent species for about 40,000 years so we shouldn’t assume that two of them couldn’t coexist. Then I recalled that any program is only as smart as its programmers, which is why computers are great for playing chess and winning trivia game shows but immediately out themselves as Nazi nymphos the moment a single degree of emotional intelligence is required. Anything crafted by the hands of shaved chimpanzees will naturally be obsessed with murder and fucking.
I’ve worked in the Internet since 1997 and while I will miss the gig’s sweet, sweet income, I’ve found that layoffs/contract expirations can be blessings in disguise. There’s always the possibility that the automation will be less promising than expected and the work will still require a human touch (again: it’s only going to be as good as its architects), but I choose to believe this is the kick in the pants I need to get back to neglected ideas and projects, primarily long-form nonfiction. Like it or not, the robots are shoving me into a brighter future.
On the shore of the Salton Sea, California. CC BY Alexander Novati
J.G. Ballard is unquestionably the godfather of post-apocalyptic fiction. Early on he wrote a number of Earth-ending novels featuring titular catastrophes — The Drowned World, The Burning World — but his short fiction also dabbled in localized doomsdays, stories in which cataclysms are contained or at least only opaquely affect the rest of the planet.
Memories of the Space Age, his eight-story collection from 1988, showcases a Western civilization that is mostly intact; it’s only the motels and cocktails bars along A1A and the psyches of his characters that have collapsed. Many of the stories are set in and around Cape Canaveral after space exploration’s sunset, its denizens scavenging canned goods from grocery stores and liquor from old Starlight Lounges, living in deserted hotels with railed balconies overlooking drained swimming pools. Even when they’re not — in “A Question of Re-Entry,” a UN official travels upriver into an Amazonian Heart of Darkness to locate an errant astronaut whose module went off-course — the landscape is no less upheaved; Major Tom’s splashdown in the godforsaken jungle is cataclysmic for everybody involved.
The collection’s opener, “The Cage of Sand,” is also its strongest, a story in which an invasive species unintentionally brought to Earth has turned Cape Canaveral into a quarantine zone whose only citizens are incomplete jigsaw puzzles questing after the final pieces of their heads. Likewise “The Dead Astronaut” depicts a Kennedy Space Center bombarded by space junk and corpse-filled capsules scavenged by relic hunters. You have to wonder how much of Ballard’s childhood in war-stricken Shanghai appears on the page; his characters live on civilization’s fringes, in abandoned offices and hotels among forgotten technology. Even when no Seventh Seal has been opened, such as in “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island,” the characters dwell in ruins slowly but surely being absorbed by beach dunes and creepers.
Three of Ballard’s stories, written in 1981–82, are tedious rewrites of the same outline. Here, escape from Earth’s gravity well has broken some fundamental law of the universe, snapping time itself — or at least mankind’s perception of it; meanwhile some madman pursues our hero’s wife. I vacillated between interpreting these stories as an evolution of humanity to adapt to the long distances of space travel or as a Luddite warning against technological progress; but in the end, though poorly done, I saw Ballard returning to a theme of earlier works like The Drowned World.
Somewhere along the Mullica River, New Jersey.
Ballard is sometimes credited with prescience for The Drowned World but he wrote so many potential futures that one or two were bound to strike close to the target. Solar storms have dissolved the ionosphere, raising the Earth’s temperature and melting the polar ice caps. The continents are flooded, the cities either submerged or choked with silt and runaway vegetation, and humanity has retreated to the poles. Dr. Robert Kerans works as part of a military expedition to map lost cities in the eventual hope of reclamation. Yet members of the team, including Kerans, spend their nights suffering through atavistic nightmares of a primeval past while their waking hours are consumed by a drive to wander off into the jungle. When the expedition departs, Kerans goes AWOL to stay behind; but the vacuum left by the military is immediately filled by scavenging raiders, who interrupt Kerans’s plan for a lifelong camping trip. If you’ve read Ballard, then it’s no spoiler to say that many of his stories and books end with the main character stumbling off into the wilderness alone, ready to adapt to the new environment. Kerans’s dreams and impulses are a necessary mutation.
I think that’s Ballard’s main point right there, both in his Space Age stories and in novels like The Drowned World. Much of the post-apocalyptic genre ends poorly for the hero. Life after the apocalypse is harsh and cruel, with cannibalism and terror — and that is why most post-apocalyptic fiction is ultimately conservative moralizing. The status quo was good, it tells us, and then the status quo was upset. Now life sucks.
Suwannee County, Florida. CC BY SA Michael Rivera
Ballard says something fundamentally different. Humans, he says, both as a species and as individuals, always evolve to meet the wasteland. It’s hard not to be reminded again of his childhood in Shanghai, or of the fact that a few years after he began writing professionally, Ballard’s wife died, leaving him a single dad with three young kids. He survived, and I imagine he would argue life after both events was not always worse than before. We define apocalypses as catastrophic, as world ending, as floods and famine and mushroom clouds, and so we fail to see the post-apocalypses we inhabit everyday. A house fire, a divorce, the death of a parent or spouse are just as world ending to those who must go on living afterwards among the blasted shacks and melted mannequins of the interior atomic bomb, of the White Sands of the soul. There’s something optimistic in Ballard’s visions of dead astronauts in orbit and underwater Londons. Bad things happen but we outlive them, adapt, and stagger on.
There’s nothing out there on the shelves like Jeffrey Barlough’s Western Lights novels. The series — called such because “the sole place on earth where lights still shine at night is in the west” — is a bouillabaisse of mystery, ghost story, and post-apocalyptic gaslamp fantasy. His seventh and most recent book, What I Found at Hoole, was published in November.
Dr. Barlough, who moonlights as a veterinary physician, kindly spoke to me about the world-building of the Western Lights, his latest project, and which Ice Age animal he’d most like to meet in a dark alley.
Barlough has flown under the radar for far too long; in a just universe, steampunk convention-goers would be cosplaying his characters and dressing up their pets as woolly mammoths. Here’s hoping the interview brings him a little more attention.
Over at Black Gate, you can