The comfort of ending it all
Grave Predictions: Tales of Mankind's Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopian and Disastrous Destiny (2016) edited by Drew Ford
Readers unfamiliar with Grave Predictions may prefer to read these notes only after reading the anthology.
Grave Predictions (2016) is an anthology of doomsday stories well above the usual standards. The stories are culled from the last 150 years. Stories by Bear, Machado, Du Bois, and Campbell are especially worthwhile: braidings of the everyday and the weird within a traditional science fiction – or “scientific romance” – category.
“The End of the World” (trans. of La fin du monde) (1872) by Eugène Mouton is a chronological review of the coming period; it celebrates – if that is the word – human extinction after heat turns the earth's surface into a dry and scorched wasteland. Mouton’s dry recounting of the events underscores the fascination and excitement doomsday fictions feel when faced with dead-pan facts and summation.
Humankind scarcely knows any more about the probable duration of its existence than each one of us knows about the number of years that he has yet to live:
The table is laid,
The exquisite parade,
That gives us cheer!
A toast, my dear!
All well and good—but are we on the soup, or the dessert? Who can tell us, alas, that the coffee will not be served very soon?
“The Comet” (1920) by W. E. B. Du Bois is an exciting story. It pulls no punches until the end. Alas, at the end, we get a resolution only slightly less jejune that Conan Doyle provided in The Poison Belt (1913).
Our protagonist, Jim, is a messenger in a bank. He is Black. He must negotiate every action with this fact foremost.
“Danger!” screamed its black headlines. “Warnings wired around the world. The Comet’s tail sweeps past us at noon. Deadly gases expected. Close doors and windows.
When Jim emerges from errands in the bank's lower vaults, everyone is dead.
Up into the great basement he rushed. Here another guard lay prostrate on his face, cold and still. A fear arose in the messenger’s heart. He dashed up to the cellar floor, up into the bank. The stillness of death lay everywhere and everywhere bowed, bent, and stretched the silent forms of men. The messenger paused and glanced about. He was not a man easily moved; but the sight was appalling! “Robbery and murder,” he whispered slowly to himself as he saw the twisted, oozing mouth of the president where he lay half-buried on his desk. Then a new thought seized him: If they found him here alone—with all this money and all these dead men—what would his life be worth?
He meets a twenty-five year old Caucasian woman, and together they scour Manhattan in her Stutz.
Up and down, over and across, back again—on went that ghostly search. Everywhere was silence and death—death and silence! They hunted from Madison Square to Spuyten Duyvel; they rushed across the Williamsburg Bridge; they swept over Brooklyn; from the Battery and Morningside Heights they scanned the river. Silence, silence everywhere, and no human sign. Haggard and bedraggled they puffed a third time slowly down Broadway, under the broiling sun, and at last stopped. He sniffed the air. An odor—a smell—and with the shifting breeze a sickening stench filled their nostrils and brought its awful warning. The girl settled back helplessly in her seat.
“What can we do?” she cried.
That night they camp on the roof of her father's skyscraper. Du Bois here turns to portray their growing emotional bond with lush style.
She looked up at him with thankfulness in her eyes, eating what he served. He watched the city. She watched him. He seemed very human,—very near now.
“Have you had to work hard?” she asked softly.
“Always,” he said.
“I have always been idle,” she said. “I was rich.”
“I was poor,” he almost echoed.
“The rich and the poor are met together,” she began, and he finished: “The Lord is the Maker of them all.”
After dark, Jim begins sending up signal rockets. Her father and fiance show up, having spent the day driving a hundred miles out of town.
“Fred,” she murmured, almost vaguely, “is the world—gone?”
“Only New York,” he answered; “it is terrible—awful! You know,—but you, how did you escape—how have you endured this horror? Are you well? Unharmed?”
“Unharmed!” she said.
Fred is ready to murder Jim at the mere thought of the situation. Julia stops him, and her father rewards Jim with cash and the promise of a job.
The crowd poured up and out of the elevators, talking and whispering.
“Who was it?”
“Are they alive?”
“How many?”
‘Two!”
“Who was saved?”
“A white girl and a nigger—there she goes.”
“A nigger? Where is he? Let’s lynch the damned——”
“Shut up—he’s all right—he saved her.”
“Saved hell! He had no business——”
“The Comet” for a few hours puts Black and Caucasian on equal footing. Even some in the Jim Crow chorus at the end must think.
And Du Bois has succeeded in answering the racial clichés popular at the time in doomsday stories by writers like Shiel and Rohmer.
“The Pedestrian” (1951) by Ray Bradbury begins with a man taking an evening stroll circa 2053.
He stumbled over a particularly uneven section of sidewalk. The cement was vanishing under flowers and grass. In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time….
After a while he is stopped by cops. Married? No. A view screen at home? No. Occupation? Writer. No occupation.
The cops don't burn the pedestrian to death, the way characters in another Bradbury tale treated books. They just drive him to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.
“No Morning After” (1954) by Arthur C. Clarke details, with levity, the challenges faced by “the questing intellects of the planet Thaar” as they reach out to guided missile designer William Cross.
“Listen, Bill,” they continued. “Our scientists have just discovered that your sun is about to explode. It will happen three days from now—seventy-four hours, to be exact. Nothing can stop it. But there’s no need to be alarmed. We can save you, if you’ll do what we say.”
Since Clarke had a penchant for ending life on earth in short stories, reading “No Morning After” should be approached with skepticism.
“Upon the Dull Earth” (1954) is one of Philip K. Dick’s early stories: nuclear war survivors eke out life on an earth transformed into a dusty cenotaph. Are manufactured memories of old times enough, or do they accelerate insanity?
“2 B R 0 2 B” (1962) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. depicts a future utopia where all life's decisions are a government phone call away.
“To be or not to be” was the telephone number of the municipal gas chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination.
It's a situation similar to Evelyn Waugh's Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future (1953), which I wrote about here.
“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967) by Harlan Ellison is one of the most anthologized modern short stories. Anticipating the story arc of the “Terminator” films, it depicts the last five humans on earth as they try to turn the tables on their captor: a self-aware network of three national defense computers.
Ellison's story-making skill and brevity are fully engaged in the story.
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) by Ursula K. Le Guin begins in a fantasy-world key:
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea.
Omelas, for all its material plenty, is a dystopia.
Every citizen participates in the atrocity that keeps the system working.
Only a minority, when they are shown the base of their society is unspeakable, opt-out in different ways.
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone.
No mass action, much less discussion; the only protest act in this world is individual withdrawal, a petty bourgeois moral witnessing.
“The Engineer and the Executioner” (1975) by Brian Stableford is a gem. A robot executioner is dispatched to an off-earth lab to destroy an experiment that has become too dangerous.
“It was held that Asteroid Lamarck held a danger which threatens the existence of life on Earth. It was considered that there was a danger of spores leaking from within the planetoid which were capable of crossing space. It was pointed out that if such an eventuality were to come about, there would be absolutely no way of preventing the Lamarck life-system from destroying all life on Earth….
The lab engineer who designed the experiment (evolution without natural selection) must play a cat-and-mouse game of survival to out-think and thwart the robot. To the engineer, a doomsday is inevitable no matter which alternative succeeds.
The "whole mess" referred to in the title “The End of the Whole Mess” (1986) by Stephen King is the grinding carnage of everyday late capitalist social life. Narrator Howard Fornoy gives us a sketch of his genius younger brother Bobby, who figured out how to stop people from contributing to the mess.
Like "The Jaunt," a personal favorite of mine, "The End of the Whole Mess" is a widescreen epic in condensed form. Writing against time and rapid mental decline, Howard explains how Bobby distilled a drug called Calmative, which he and his brother arranged to spread over the world. To calm the mess-makers.
King in this story does what he does best: gives us the poetic grandeur of belatedness, of sublime regret and mourning once unintended consequences have revealed their magnificent cunning.
...."The world," Bobby said, and then stopped. His throat worked. I saw he was struggling with tears. "The world needs heroic measures, man. I don't know about long-term effects, and there's no time to study them, because there's no long-term prospect. Maybe we can cure the whole mess. Or maybe-"
He shrugged, tried to smile, and looked at me with shining eyes from which two single tears slowly tracked.
"Or maybe we're giving heroin to a patient with terminal cancer. Either way, it'll stop what's happening now. It'll end the world's pain." He spread out his hands, palms up, so I could see the stings on them. "Help me, Bow-Wow. Please help me."
So I helped him.
And we fucked up....
King's zeroing in on the "do something, do anything, now!" mindset makes for interesting reading four decades after publication. Perhaps he was the first to diagnose Chicken-Little-Syndrome as it applies to the "Anthropocene"?
“Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back” (1986) by Joe R. Lansdale is as shocking and shattering today as it was in 1986.
The tattoo is of a great, blue mushroom cloud, and in the cloud, etched ghost-like, is the face of our daughter, Rae. Her lips are drawn tight, eyes are closed and there are stitches deeply pulled to simulate the lashes. When I move fast and hard they rip slightly and Rae cries bloody tears.
That’s one reason for the martial arts. The hard practice of them helps me to tear the stitches so my daughter can cry. Tears are the only thing I can give her.
Nuclear weapons designer Paul Marder begins his journal when he and spouse Mary emerge from an underground bunker and take refuge in a lighthouse. It is twenty years after nuclear doomsday. The oceans have evaporated, though sharks and whales have quickly become maneuverable in their new medium. Roses have become sentient, their deadly vines penetrating every opening.
Mary daily tattoos Paul's back, fueled by anger over their daughter's death. Paul is saddened by it, too. His journal – a more traditional ink tattoo, on paper – records what he and Mary can no longer discuss.
Lansdale pays no lip-service to nuclear shibboleths of the late cold war. His world is a nightmare situated where Bosch crosses paths with Max Ernst.
“Judgment Engine” (1995) by Greg Bear is a fascinating aftermath story. It achieves an almost poetic, non-descriptive narrative voice: a collective computer intelligence of the far future, where an inquiry begins about events when earth was still inhabited. One witness questioned is an incompletely uploaded and rusty personality: a once-human professor once married to the investigation’s target.
In a way, “Judgment Engine” is science fiction with a narrative structure akin to “Citizen Kane.” Bear's achievement here is beguiling.
“Automatic” (2007) by Erica L. Satifka seems to be about a virus and an alien takeover of human bodies. It recounts the non-adventure of a man trying to leave NYC, though he turns around at the last minute. A vague and depleted kind of storytelling.
“The Black Mould” (2010) could serve as a summation of themes and imagery in most stories by Mark Samuels.
Many Samuels stories revolve around physical decline and dissolution: not just the breaking of nations and the shattering of planets, but the collapse of sections of the universe into static or UHF interference.
The titular black mold, like Hawthorne’s black veil, is both punctuation and symbol.
….Astronomers on distant worlds looked on with dread at the development. Those that perceived it not, perished all the same. Multiform were the species of the universe, following different paths of evolution and modes of thought, though none were as the mould. But all those that looked outward at the universe felt wonder and terror, whether they were taloned crustaceans in a fungous jungle, cognisant machines of incredible technological complexity, or peace-loving sea mammals that gazed with dark eyes at the stars above the waters of an alien world. All knew the end was near and their kind would, ere centuries had passed, be consumed and then participate in the cosmic corruption of the mould.
“The Pretence” (2013) by Ramsey Campbell is a poignant tale about the thinning and ultimate disintegration of reality.
Sources of this collapse are hidden from the reader: Family man Paul Slater experiences air travel turbulence, while at home the kids awaken from what they think is an earthquake. These events apparently coincide with a doomsday deadline promoted by a group called The Finalists.
The title “The Pretence” offers several routes to thinking about the story.
✂charade:
[....] As [Paul] risked opening his eyes his sight returned, unless the uncontrollable lurch of the aircraft had put out the lights in the cabin at the moment he’d jerked awake. How could the voice be declaring “Police state sees to damned”? No, it was telling the passengers “Please stay seated and keep your belts fastened. Justify caution. No cause for alarm.”
✂pretending: Customs officials and local cops, as well as Paul's boss at the bookstore Texts, work on as though the strange shifts in reality are negligible, or misunderstandings. When Paul raises questions, these authority figures rely on subtle and obvious menacing to demand silence and acquiescence.
✂fabrication: Everything from sunlight to song lyrics to the look of familiar landscapes assumes an increasingly indefinite and unreal pallor.
✂simulation:
[....] Surely most of the barriers beyond the narrow [tollbooths] used to be automatic, but now every cabin was occupied, and every face turned in unison to watch the car. He had an uneasy sense that he was close to recognising some of them—far too many, if not all—or was that a result of their expressionless official look, which was identical, not just among themselves but with everyone who’d interrogated him since he’d come home?
“The Pretence” makes for an interesting comparison with “The Black Mould” by Mark Samuels. “Mould” is tonally cold and objective, cosmic horror unsympathetic to intelligences that succumb. “The Pretence” offers the extirpation of the material world on an earthly scale, narrated at human level with a third person limited point of view.
“The Pretence” is the most ambitious story collected in Grave Predictions. Its scope and aesthetic zeal are enticing, its pace and viewpoint beautifully estranging. It is reminiscent of films like “Lost Highway” (1997) and “Jacob's Ladder” (1990).
“Inventory” (2013) by Carmen Maria Machado is a devastating personal record/diary in which the narrator tracks in tandem a virus-driven social collapse and an accounting of various sexual encounters.
One woman. Blonde hair, brash voice, friend of a friend. We married. I’m still not sure if I was with her because I wanted to be or because I was afraid of what the world was catching all around us. Within a year, it soured. We screamed more than we had sex, or even talked. One night, we had a fight that left me in tears. Afterwards, she asked me if I wanted to fuck, and undressed before I could answer. I wanted to push her out the window. We had sex and I started crying. When it was over and she was showering, I packed a suitcase and got in my car and drove.
“Inventory” is presented in a deadpan, close-mouthed voice, like Hammett or Camus. It's a forlorn tale, but Machado is careful to avoid self-pity.
* * *
Jay
17 March 2024
