Apocalyptica, Cli-Fi and Deindustrial Fiction

Apocalyptic fiction has long been championed by those who yawn at the dreary optimism of a sanitized life out among the stars. For those writing it in the shadow of the atomic bomb, perhaps at a typewriter in their suburban fallout shelter, apocalyptic fiction was a viable option, at least for fiction. In the 1950s SciFi was reaching an apogee, consumer goods, science and chemistry were going to make living better for everyone, send us into a remarkable future, but there also hung over it all the threat of the atom bomb.

Enter the futurist thinker R. Buckminster Fuller. Automation and advances in materials science suggested a resolution to the problems humanity face. On the other hand, was the solution of mutually assured destruction. Fuller got sucked into this way of thinking and laid out his own take on this binary with just two possible options for the human species in his 1963 book Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity. While he wasn’t the first to invent that meme, he did set it further into motion as his ideas were taken up by long haired freaks and hippies, among other countercultural types who gravitated to his thought.

Certainly, science fiction, isn’t all utopian. As the SF New Wave settled into place in the sixties, and cyberpunk on its heels in the beginning of the 80s, science fiction began to grapple with the less savory aspects of technological progress. Following the 80s, SF and Fantasy got ever more watered down in the decades that followed, to the point where much of the newest stuff is unreadable. It either waffles between the hopeful tropes of infinite expansion into space where there will be enough resources for everyone, on the one hand, or to dystopian surveillance states, and deadly game show riffs following in the footsteps of George Orwell and Richard Bachman.

That has left some big cracks in speculative literature. The New Weird briefly blossomed before its bloom was just another fleur du mal. Its eldritch trace can still be discerned in some small presses (where all the best energy is anyway). Horror remains, as ever, perennial, even if, in written form, it is a more rarified taste. Fantasy, long suffering under the spell of the epic, has forgotten the short and the sweet. It too has suffered from this dystopian cast in all its grimdarkness. Meanwhile, the fledgling sprouts of climate fiction and deindustrial fiction have clambered up through those cracks in the corporate made mixing cement of the publishing industries broken sidewalk.

If hard SF presupposes our ultimate destiny on Mars, with AI driving our brutalist cyber trucks, and fusion energy at our atomic command, as utopia, then apocalyptic fiction presupposes rag and bone men crawling amidst the ashes of our fallen towers as they fight mutants and AI driven brutalist attack cyber trucks for canned peaches.

What about a life on earth, that is neither dominated by machines, or the sole hope of a plucky band of bomb hardened survivors?

Climate fiction takes the real revelation that the world will be different, and not always in ways for the better, but none-the-less finds us making useful adaptations. For sure, climate change had a place in some SF, especially in the New Wave and later cyberpunk writers. J.G. Ballard and Bruce Sterling come to mind, for starters. So called Cli-Fi, as a term, is somewhat new, but as with many other genres, gets retroactively applied. Some of the new stuff, the self-conscious Cli-Fi, is pretty darn good, but much else smacks of self-righteousness when it isn’t plain old self- flagellation. Working in a large library system I get to see a lot of new books, many of them marketed as a kind of activism. The issue I have with them is that they seem to have forgotten about the art. This tendency has made me not be able to finish many of the newer books I start, because not only is the writer flagellating themselves, but also the reader. I don’t mind at all having social issues and environmental issues or mental health issues or issues any kind front and center in a book, except when those issues, and we all have issues, take the place of the art of storytelling. If I want journalism or an opinion piece, I can read essays and non-fiction instead. It’s unfortunate that this tendency to berate the reader has been adopted in Cli-Fi, to the point where activism is listed as a prime motivating force for those promoting this kind of writing.

As Robert Anton Wilson said in the documentary Maybe Logic, “I think the joy of art is trying to convey what you perceive so that other people will perceive it more or less the same way. Art is a form of seduction. I mean, there are rapists in the intellectual world. They become politicians. The seducers become honest. We try to seduce people into our reality tunnels instead of leading them there with a gun.” Fiction that is only activism often fails to enchant and seduce.

This leads us to Deindustrial fiction. Deindustrial fiction is the redheaded step-child of Science Fiction, because it is future centered, it’s the redheaded step-child of Apocalyptic Fiction, because it imagines a world during or after the fall or collapse of our current civilization, and it is the uncouth cousin to Cli-Fi, because it shares the knowledge with Cli-Fi that much of our future world is shaped by the ravages of climate change and environmental chaos. Deindustrial Fiction remains at odds with Solarpunk and Hopepunk, because so much of what gets put into those categories amounts to having our cake and eating it too. Hopepunk was conceived as opposite of the grimdark tendency in so much speculative fiction. I get that the grimdark scene gets old. I don’t read much of it myself. But the sickeningly sweet stories of hopepunk are themselves a kind of artificial saccharine disguising a sinister strychnine. Having become the opposite of grimdark, it provides just another polarized worldview on the opposite end of a spectrum. Hopepunk and Grimdark are just two sides of the same Utopia or Oblivion coin.

In reality, empires do come and go, just as the Romans and the Mayans are now gone from our past. When we study history from the point of view of our Oswald Spengler's and Arnold Toynbee's, we see that the fall of civilizations and empires actually happens as a ragged, uneven decline, punctuated by periods of crisis and calamity. SF writers of the past weren’t afraid of grappling with these writers, and incorporating the consequences of such a view of history into their prose, grim, dark, hopeful, or at the twilight or dawn times when there is more of a mix of both hope and grimness. Anyone who has been paying attention to current events should know that the United States days are numbered as a global hegemony. That will unspool all kinds of issues, many of them good, but many also challenging. Beyond that, the greater technological civilization the US is a part of is itself only here for a limited time, just based on the fact that fossil fuels, by their very nature, are a limited resource. Deindustrial fiction takes these themes, and the limits imposed on us by nature, as starting points.

As such, it has things in common with apocalyptic fiction, sci-fi, and cli-fi. It differs from either grimdark or hopepunk, in imagining a middle ground, though individual authors may be more optimistic or pessimistic. It does not believe in infinite human expansion, on our own planet or to the stars, and as such seeks to look at retrovation and low-tech solutions to the predicaments faced by humanity.

​So where to start with reading any of this? Perhaps a round-up of the best of the genres discussed is in order.
Since much of the original era of Apocalyptic fiction is concerned what happens after a nuclear Armageddon I’ll look first at a few of the best books along those lines.   

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank is the Cold War standard text, and the book had a huge impact on me when I read it in high school. Perhaps I related to it so well because I had been brought in an end-times church (some say cult - The World Wide Church of God for those who are keeping score). I heard so many end-times sermons by the time I was 14 and dropped out of the church that I can even still microwave scavenged tins of Dinty Moore Beef Stew just by radiation exposure. Let’s just hope the metal in those cans hasn’t been exposed to radiation. The title of the book is even lifted from a verse in the Book of Revelation and the tale concerns the survival efforts of a town in Florida after a nuclear attack on the U.S. The town gets cut off and they are thrown upon their own resources. As a legitimately post-nuclear attack novel, it remains quite good.

For shear literary prowess however, look no further than Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban. Hoban does here with language something similar to what Anthony Burgess did in A Clockwork Orange. In Hoban’s vision of life in England after the bomb, most people no longer know how to read and everything in the book is spelled out phonetically by the main character who has had a bit of lerning and tells his tale as a scribe. The style takes some getting used to, but it is not to be missed. I read it during my initial heavy obsession phase with the music of Current 93, and it is a favorite of David Tibet’s books. I enjoyed how the Punch and Judy shows became a kind of gnostic religion in the future. There is also a lot of hash smoking and packs of wild dogs.

The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson is the first book in his Three California's trilogy where he gives us three different futures set in Orange County. This volume takes place after a neutron bomb goes off in the U.S. America has been quarantined following this attack and people have had to reskill with a quickness, living off the land, off the ocean, preserving knowledge. Into this is a story of ships coming around from who knows where -at first and reinitiating first contact with the outside world in some time, all built on top of a coming-of-age story. The second book in the sequence, The Gold Coast, remains my favorite of them, and it is set in an extremely hypercapitalistic consumer driven society (quite like the one we seem to be living in) but not cyberpunk. The last book, Pacific Edge, has made itself over to live ecologically. It is something of a utopia, but not quite. The characters still have problems in this last one, and there are a lot of conflicts over water, a precursor to the first book on the Cli-Fi list. The characters in Three Californias all feature in three very different future scenarios making this one of the most unique trilogies ever.

(I’ll put in A Boy and His Dog as an honorable mention in the nuclear wasteland category. It remains a favorite. It’s hard to beat the prose of Harlan Ellison, and he is a master of pulp adventure.)

Now let us turn to Cli-Fi. Despite my somewhat harsh words above, I still like a lot of what I’ve read from authors who have consciously set out to write this “Eco Fiction” which it is sometimes also called. I don’t want to retroactively assign the genre works that otherwise would have just have been classified as apocalyptic SF in the past, so here are some that grappled with the issue of climate change just as the term Cli-Fi was starting to get bandied about.

The Water Knife by Paolo Baciagalupi. In an American Southwest crippled by drought, Nevada and Arizona get into it over the meager supplies of water left in the Colorado River. California watches, deciding if it should just take the whole river all for itself. One of the things I liked so much about it, was his use of arcologies, a term developed by architect Paolo Soleri and put into action at his famed desert community Arcosanti. The battle for water creates the conflict in this highly readable thriller. Apparently writing this kind of thing mentally and emotionally exhausted Baciagalupi. I hadn’t heard of anything new from him since this book, and but when I looked him up just now, see he has a new one out just this past summer, a fantasy called Navola. 

Kim Stanley Robinson is the giant in terms of spreading the concept of Cli-Fi, so there is no getting around listing another of his books. I have to recommend, New York 2140. The best writers not only bring their readers new ways of envisioning the world, but new vocabularies for talking about the world. Sometimes the neologisms and words they coin break out and become part of the larger culture. Robert Heinlein gave us the word grok and aging hippies still bandy it about at outdoor music festivals to show how deeply they understand one another. George Orwell's term newspeak about the propagandistic use of language by Big Brother is now a subject for newspaper op-ed pieces. Writing this, the word repaleolithization comes to mind. It's from Kim Stanley Robinson's earlier book on climate change, Fifty Degrees Below. It is something I could have used a bit of today as it refers to a lifestyle shift used to reestablish sanity for the human body and mind, and consists mainly of activities mostly abandoned by the urban denizens of late industrial capitalism. As I sit here typing I think about how nice it will be to take some time off soon, and walk out on the land with family and friends, talking and cooking under the stars, staring at a fire instead of a screen. These are some of the things repaleolithization consists of. Kim says it can be thought of as a form of "landscape restoration for the brain” and the landscape, both inner and outer, is something he returns to again and again throughout the arc of his novels, New York 2140 being his eighteenth. It features a Manhattan that has become a kind of Venice, with canals instead of streets. It’s hopeful in that sense, but deals with some crazy economics. 

Stormland by John Shirley takes things in a grittier direction. That’s because Shirley is a cyberpunk veteran (they get a pass on using the word punk). Stormland is a sprawling, largely abandoned region of the southeastern coast of the USA, where a more or less permanent hurricane continues to churn and stew. Into this nasty vortex of rain and trash a former US Marshal and a stone cold serial killer head into Charleston, South Carolina where only squatters and the mad continue to live. There is a cult subplot here, which I like. Cults are an abiding interest. See book one in the apocalyptic section above.

Now on to Deindustrial Fiction. There aren’t a ton of novels that qualify as such as yet. It was John Michael Greer who coined the term, and his work is the best place to start.

It got started with a novel he wrote called Stars Reach. “More than four centuries have passed since industrial civilization stumbled to its ruin under the self-inflicted blows of climate change and resource depletion. Now, in the ruins of a deserted city, a young man mining metal risks his life to win a priceless clue. That discovery will send him, and an unlikely band of seekers, on a quest for a place out of legend, where human beings might once have communicated with distant worlds…to a place called Star's Reach…” It’s back in print in a new edition from Sphinx Books this November.

Greer’s other novels have the cast of Deindustrial. In his vast seven part fantasy with tentacles, the essential Weird of Hali, the deindustrializing world is part of the backdrop, but its not the foreground. His latest novel Hall of Homeless Gods, is set closer to the present but still Deindustrial. I’m looking forward to getting my copy. Here is the blurb:

“a tough, two-fisted fixer who works for the boss of Habitat Four, one of five Japanese refugee communities built on abandoned oil platforms off the coast of the United States in a hard-edged dystopian future of technological decline and climate chaos. His beat is Shoreside, the bustling, brawling, anything-goes temporary port on the beach two miles from the Habitats.

​He's trying to bust a robbery ring that's preying on Shoreside gambling money when he encounters a mysterious woman with strange mental abilities. Before long he's having to dodge hoods sent after him by Shoreside's crime lord, agents of the US government, and spies from its archrival, the European Union. Does all this have anything to do with rumors of a secret supercomputer project in the now-abandoned country inland from Shoreside -- a project that once left a string of corpses behind it, and now might yield a fabulous trove of old world technology? Jerry's going to find out...if he can survive long enough.”

Where Deindustrial fiction has so far flourished is in anthologies and two magazines, one the successor to the other. The anthologies started with the After Oil series, focusing in on fiction that was able to wrap its head around the fact that 1) we are running out, and 2) fusion power isn’t going to come online to “save us” by allowing us to keep up business as usual and our current energy intensive lifestyles. Four came out from Founders House publishing. They were followed by another anthology (in which I had a short story) Love In the Ruins, applying similar logic to the much maligned genre of romance fiction. Sadly, there were some snafus in the way Founders House operated, and those anthologies are no longer available new. While Greer has taken his fiction over to Aeon Publishing and their fiction imprint Sphinx Books, who are doing a fine job, the anthologies haven’t followed.

The short stories spawned by the first four anthologies spawned the quarterly journal Into the Ruins. When the editor closed up shop after four years, he gave some advice to Nathanael Bonnell who started New Maps. I had written some book reviews for Into the Ruins and one short story. Now I am writing a column for New Maps, called Cheap Thrills, and two of my stories have been published so far in its pages. New Maps focuses on the kind of futures we are actually to get as the decline of industrial civilization continues. It's a fine magazine in print with great stories from a slew of writers coming to you four times a year.
Bonnell sums it up:

"New Maps is a quarterly journal of short stories that take place in the Earth’s realistic future. Not a paradisiac or apocalyptic end of days, nor an easy continuation of the last few decades’ business-as-usual with somewhat different fashions, but an era in which our ecological and energy bills have come due, and we and our descendants have proceeded to do what people always do: figure out creative ways to keep doing all those things that make up life, the loving and hating and laughing and crying and all the rest, in the times we’ve been given.
 
This is fiction of real life in an age of limits—an age that, like every other, will mix the tragic and the comic and the who-knows-what-just-happened, and leave it to us to make sense of it all. This is fiction full of cobbled-together and home-brewed technology, reinvented culture with sacred cows butchered and new ones bred, and mourning and celebration of the old world’s end mixed with hope for renewed health and integrity within a homespun patchwork of new ways of life."

So if you are tired of the both utopia and oblivion, why not give the middle road of Deindustrial fiction a try?