Hats wanted: an apocalyptic discussion post.

[thevinegarworks]

I'm so bad at hiatuses. *facepalm* (Bear with me, I've spent the better part of a day surrounding by whooping Superbowl-crazed idiots, shoved into a corner scribbling tragic gen fic. devilyouwere, I'm looking at you right now

Comments

[uselessplayback]

I've been a fan of apocalyptic stories since I picked up my first one in (oh, god) second grade. The first story I ever read in the genre had a girl trail her father into an underground bunker with peeks of nuclear winter hanging outside and, throughout the story, she had no idea what was going on only that she couldn't leave and the few people she was exposed to were going slowly mad, food storage was dwindling and there was no communication with the outside world. The thing that struck me most in that story was the fact that no one ever explicitly stated what had happened--it was all filtered through the eyes of this kid who had no idea what was going on--but by the end of the story you realized "holy shit, these are probably the only people left on earth!"

Bam! I was an instant fan.

I remember this because it was one of those life changing moments where I realized I was probably never going to be a normal girl.

I've been told that the thing that unites fans of post-apocalyptic literature is the thread of hope (usually tempered by ambiguity) but there are stories in the genre that aren't like that at all. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, for example, is a cyclical narrative that's all about the human tendency toward destruction and Tepper's A Gate to Women's Country is really more "feminism, yay!"

I guess this is all by way of saying that what I like in apocafic is kind of all of the above: bleak atmosphere with a heavy serving a human perseverance, scraping my in gritty ways and only coming out on top in the way of "hey, so, we're still alive at least?" I find it tends to be more effective either from the viewpoint of a particular character or set in a contained environment because the danger of large, dramatic endeavors tends to be that there's so much going on you lose the emotional impact (which isn't to say that it can't be done, only that it's really difficult.) And what I want--what I love--is the idea of losing everything and rebuilding from the rubble. It doesn't need to be an overblown conflict between good and evil or Heaven and Hell, there are fragments of those concepts contained in every one of us and, sometimes, the personal is more powerful.

(Apocafic, yay!)

[thevinegarworks]

Dude, that story sounds kind of ridiculously awesome. Nuclear fallouts? Yes please!

I definitely would say that a large part of the apocafic fanbase is based on that vein of hope that runs underneath all the chaos and despair. There's something really moving about seeing people band together and unite for a cause, even if that cause is just survival.

Canticle for Leibowitz, yay!

the danger of large, dramatic endeavors tends to be that there's so much going on you lose the emotional impact

Absolutely, I agree. I think it's possible to have these stories that bring in a global arc, but it does lose some of the impact and moves into sensationalism when the events are epic and terrifying, but they're not tied to the characters' themselves.

Guh, yes, losing everything and rebuilding from the rubble is the best thing about apocafic to me. This is why sometimes I enjoy post-apocalyptic stories better than the ones that takes place in the heat of the moment, because there's something really compelling about people somehow making it through something they never expected to survive, and then looking around at what's left and asking, "okay, what now?"

\o/