Apocalypse Now and Then

So everyone’s breaking into a sweat about global warming and quivering with fear as the forth, and potentially failed, Mayan world draws to a close on December 20th 2012. The Carter Catastrophe pits us against cold hard statistics, while Nostradamus just had a few dreams.

These days everyone’s a prophet and they ain’t seeing much future ahead of us. Of course there’s nothing new about the Apocalypse – religion, the arts, literature, film and media have been carping on about it for literally centuries coming up with more sadistic and terrifying ways to wipe the Earth (largely) clean of the human scourge.

Let me indulge my eschatological whimsy and take you on a short stroll through the end of the world – and what may come after.

The Spermocalypse

As much as the ladies of the world would like us guys to believe they would carry on fine without us, or at least these wicked penises, until a way of spreading the genetic fruit without sperm is found, then sterilising that half of the human race is a sure way for a (slow) apocalypse.

This is explored in with depressing aplomb in P.D James’s Children of Men (later made into a film starring Clive Owen), where the protagonist Theo escorts a young pregnant girl across an infertile and self-destructing England. The other way to achieve this is by simply getting rid of the blokes altogether. In graphic novel series Y – The Last Man, Y struggles to remain invisible in a world awash with estrogen and female angst. The reverse is the case in Margret Atwood’s classic Handmaid’s Tale. More dystopian than apocalyptic (think 1984 where religious fundamentalists and chauvinists have taken over), but worth mentioning as sterilising the ladies is equally likely to land the human race in hot water (and warm towels).

The Germocalypse

Dark tales of pestilence and plague wouldn’t be more appropriate in a society that collectively ducked behind the sofa at the thought of a swine flu pandemic. The threat of a humanity destroying bug is a very real one and has been explored many times over the decades.

Perhaps the earliest example of this is Victorian doomstress Mary Shelley’s tortuous Last Man. Stephen King spends a good 3rd of his classic The Stand killing off the human race with a human created bug, before plunging the survivors into an almost biblical struggle between good and evil. The after effects of a deadly pandemic are explored in more muted form in George R Stewart’s post-apocalyptic classic Earth Abides – perhaps the best piece of literature on the subject of the reconstruction of human society. Danny Boyle destroys the world with glee in his Triffids pastiche 28 Days Later, as his fast moving disease zombies rampage. The deserted London scenes are magnificent. Perhaps the most pertinent is BBC’s recent and ongoing Survivors which sees mosat of humanity wiped out by flu.

The Nukopalypse

Ever since the U.S brought World War 2 to an abrupt end by dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima the world has been obsessed with threat of these mass extinction devises. There is so much literary output on the subject that academic Paul Brians wrote a whole book on it (Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction). I’ll mention but a few examples of this from popular culture.

Bleak Cold War graphic novel/children’s book Raymond Brigg’s When the Wind Blows tells us how to (badly) prepare for a nuclear strike while James Herbert’s Domain tells us exactly what it’s like when the thing actually hits, from a few folks’ point of views. Should you survive the initial blast (refer to Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising for some grizzly data on your chances of this), Herbert goes on to suggest that you may get lynched by hordes of rats, while bona fide classic On the Beach by Neville Chute is determined that, thanks to the ensuing fallout, you will die slowly of radiation sickness. If you manage to get through all that, then you then have genetic mutation to spice up your sorry existence. There are several ways of dealing with this problem – ostracise them as in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, or submit to their greater power as per Philip K. Dick’s Dr Bloodmoney, hide from them in big cities like Judge Dredd and the other inhabitants of Mega City 1, or pretend to be Clint Eastwood (any number of gunslinger novels – try Stephen King’s Dark Tower books and the Jon Shannow novels by David Gemmell. Finally, if you hang around for long enough (ie. you are omnipotent) then society will rebuild and the whole thing will happen again as postulated by Walter M Miller’s seminal A Canticle for Liebowitz.

The Weedocalypse

OK, so there aren’t that many examples of plants actively taking over the world unless you count the fact that plants will invariably overwhelm the place once we’re wiped out (see Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us for more on this). There are notable exceptions though.

When Jordy Verreill (played by Stephen King) discovers a meteor in his yard in the movie Creepshow, he is soon overwhelmed by an extraterrestrial weed. We’re left with the impression that he’ll be far from the last. It’s a tough call as to whether it’s the mass blindness inducing comet or the giant rampaging killer plants from the title of Wyndham’s almost perfect Day of the Triffids is really cause of this apocalypse. Either way it’s a slow and harrowing demise for human (and more importantly British) society, as the Triffids multiply and overwhelm most of what’s left. The Question is, should the sighted help the blind or just save themselves?

The Wetocalypse

Whether you think climate change is an impending catastrophe or a government conspiracy, it’s clear that water has the potential to cause more inconvenience than just a wet foot.

In his novel Drowned World, serial pessimist J.G Ballard melts the world’s ice by way of solar radiation which sends what’s left of humanity fleeing towards the poles where it’s a bit cooler. But is it humanity’s inner animal, and not the rising temperature, that is the real concern? On the flip-side, humanity makes a spirited fight as serial optimist John Wyndham has sea bound extra-terrestrials melting the ice caps in Kraken Wakes. Metal bands seem to delight in this subject. Cancer Bats just see rain in Let it Pour while Lamb of God’s 2009 track Reclamation has nature (and primarily water) taking back what’s rightfully theirs, which they seem quite pleased about, but Gojira are less so on Global Warming, but at least they’ve got some flying whales to get around on.

The Zombocalypse

In the olden days Zombies were such innocuous entities, then George A Romero came along and had them taking over the place and eating everyone in 60’s horror classic Night of the Living Dead. Since then there’s been no stopping them, and they’ve become a significant part of popular culture. Like the Nukopalypse there’s so much said on the matter that I’ll just pick out some real high points.

The second of George Romero’s ever expanding Dead trilogy Dawn of the Dead is probably the definitive celluloid document of the zombocalypse to date, as well as exploring what fun can be had when you’re locked in a shopping mall on your own. By far the most practical approach to the subject is taken by Mel Brooks’ son Max in his book The Zombie Survival Guide and it’s companion World War Z. The latter’s matter of fact, reportage approach to the zombocalypse is so utterly believable and erudite that it’s simply inconceivable that it wasn’t written after the fact. Robert Kirkman’s disappointment at the fact that most Zombie yarns actually end led him to pen a series of graphic novels that don’t. Like a soap opera with zombies, the Walking Dead tracks the ongoing struggles of a group of survivors in a zombie infested world. Zombie culture has infiltrated popular culture to such an extent that there’s a musical sub-genre dedicated to it (Zombiecore – see Send More Paramedics, Zombie Holocaust), the classics are being rewritten to include them (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), they’re even running the country (well, Gordon Brown and co. are clearly dead men walking).

The Miscocalypse

This a of course by no way an exhaustive list of *ocalypses. Here’s brief lurch through a few more.

Greg Egan unravels the quantum fabric in Distress (Infocalypse) while Stephen Baxter invokes the Carter Catastrophe in Time (Statistocolaypse). The human race as we know it is ended by an outbreak of alien induced enlightenment on Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhoods End (Wakeupalypse) while Dan Simmons simply snuffs the whole Earth out of existence by way of The Great Mistake (Dumbocalypse) in his Hyperion books. Rampant killer coldness chases the life out of people in Roland Emerich’s preposterous climate change movie The Day After Tomorrow (Frostocalypse), whereas it’s the wind that’s causing a ruckus in J.G Ballard’s novel The Wind From Nowhere (Blowoffalypse). Various wretched tales have killed us off using giant rocks from space (the Rockocalypse), better documented on celluloid: Meteor, Armageddon, Deep Impact. Then there’s alien invasion (Etocalypse), a literary and cultural sub-genre so extensive that it deserves an article of its own, however for the unfamiliar, start with H.G Wells’ genre defining War of the Worlds (and Spielberg’s excellent film version), then move to Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (watch the superior 1978 adaptation), and disengage your brain and watch Roland Emerich’s ridiculous but entertaining Independence Day. Finally, what wrong with a plain old biblical Armageddon (Jesocalypse)? I’ll leave you with these lines from W.B Yeats’ sinister poem on the subject:

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

Pick your apocalypse folks. Can the last one out the door please turn the lights off.

by theinevitablenose