Warnings from Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

Starbuck has never missed a chance to apply science fiction to world affairs. This week he and Adam Elkus stepped up the discussion with an article on speculative fiction at SWJ. Even Tom Ricks jumped on board. I'm a SF geek myself (ssshhh!) so I thought I'd add to the discussion.

This year I've been on a post-apocalyptic reading kick. I've always enjoyed the genre, and this year I've had the pleasure of reading some of its finest works. I started with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It is a lean book told in a spare, straighforward style that still manages to convey a tremendous depth of meaning. What made the book sing, for me, was the protagonist's efforts to protect his son's innocence in the barbaric aftermath of the world's destruction. Next I read Stephen King's The Stand, which will probably reign over the genre for decades to come. In King's nightmare vision, a weaponized superflu virus kills most of humanity in a couple weeks, setting the stage for a cosmic showdown between good and evil among the survivors. After that I read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, in which biological engineering and nanotechnology run amok and destroy civilization. Next was One Second After, which follows one man's efforts to save his daughters and his small North Carolina town in the wake of an electromagnetic pulse attack that instantaneously sends the US back to the Dark Ages. It's not a very good book, but the ideas are interesting. I've read other post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories in the past: stories about nuclear war, stories about asteroid impacts, stories about a nearby supernova that destroys all electronics on the planet, stories where American government gradually ceases to function and gangs and megacorporations rule over the anarchy that's left.

These are works of fiction, but they're giving me plenty to think about. It really is remarkable how interdependent our world is today. This has brought incredible benefits, but it also has created critical vulnerabilities. To function, our world requires a constant flow of... well, almost everything. Electricity. Water. Food. Raw supplies, intermediate parts, finished goods. Information. People. If these flows get disrupted, our advanced civilization turns into an anarchic jungle in very short order. Look at New Orleans. Very little resilience is built into our communities. In "One Second After", every US town and city becomes an island. People who rely on medicine (such as those with diabetes) begin to die almost immediately. Within a few weeks the East coast is starving to death.

Most people assume our complex, interdependent world is not capable of crashing. I often wonder if that is a valid assumption. History has produced plenty of black swans that nobody anticipated; even when people did anticipate them (as the author of "The Black Swan" predicted the financial crisis), nobody took them seriously because the ideas sounded so ludicrous.

Are we vulnerable to threats so serious that they can crash the whole thing? These SF authors explore a variety of scenarios that don't seem entirely implausible. It was chilling reading "The Stand" in the midst of the unfolding swine flu crisis. The EMP scenario is particularly frightening, although I don't see this being a realistic threat in the near future.

I'm actually less worried about apocalyptic events than I am about the confluence of natural economic and political forces. Look at how fast the global economy crashed. A vast amount of the world's wealth vanished almost overnight. The US has taken on an unprecedented amount of debt, confidence in the dollar is falling, and new economic train wrecks like the bankruptcy of social security loom like thunderstorms on the horizon. Worse, government seems incapable of solving any of these critical problems. Few of the root causes of the economic crisis have really been addressed, and heated debates on social security, health care, and immigration have only led to paralysis. The Guardian recently ran a sensationalist article titled Will California become America's first failed state? An Economist article this summer wasn't much different in tone. California's budget crisis: Meltdown on the Ocean paints a gloomy picture of a gridlocked state government paying its bills in IOUs because it can't legally declare bankruptcy. These dramatic events are unfolding against a backdrop of an increasingly angry, polarized, hostile American public. When you look at these trends, the dystopian futures of Margaret Atwood, Neil Stephenson, and Octavia Butler don't seem so unrealistic.

I'm not wearing sandwich boards and proclaiming the end of the world, but the ideas in these SF novels merit discussion. Are there ways to dampen the volatility of such a highly globalized world? Can we bolster our resilience to disruptive events? Most American homes (let alone towns or cities) don't have the resilience to survive more than a day or two when disconnected from the global economy. What does it mean when so many American citizens have completely lost faith in their government to solve problems? What does it mean when they are arming themselves at unprecedented rates? What will happen when the bills come due for our enormous debt?

Good SF doesn't necessarily predict the future, but it should force us to think carefully about the direction our society is heading, anticipate possible developments, and consider how we will respond.

Image is a screenshot from the post-apocalyptic video game Fallout 3.