Beginnings
By David Anthony Durham
As a novelist whose work frequently resides in the science fiction and fantasy genre, I’ve long been fascinated by end of the world/post-apocalyptic and … um… pandemic stories. As a creative writing teacher, my students have brought such stories to me in the hundreds over the years. One might think that stories of the collapse of society, population, the environment, the government, etc. might be depressing. And yet many are drawn again and again to stories about the end of everything. Why is that?
I suspect there’s a fair amount of fantasy wish fulfillment involved. If you’ve ever watched The Walking Dead you’ve likely screamed at the TV because of some obviously stupid mistake a character is about to make, one that you’d certainly never fall for. You might have thought it would be kinda fun to pick the mansion of your choice along the Pacific Coast to reside in, as in TC Boyle’s After the Plague. Maybe there’s even a grim satisfaction in enjoying the fantasy of surviving the mistakes humanity is making and looking back at it from the other side.
But I also wonder if these stories are ever really about the end of things. I’d argue that they’re ultimately about the beginning of whatever comes next, about what we might learn from the catastrophe and how the survivors move forward. There’s something exciting about walking into that new world with a small band of characters, wondering how they’ll survive and adapt, what they’ll make out of the ashes. Isn’t there something compelling about imagining oneself as a survivor, an architect of a better society, a wise leader? There must be, because we keep writing stories about it!
For me, the pandemic year we’ve just had has cast all of this post-apocalyptic fantasizing in a new light. It’s made me ask different questions about the stories I’ve enjoyed and have different discussions with student writers as well. Two things in particular made me rethink things. They’re small compared to what others have suffered this last year, but they got me thinking.
Last January, I attended the low-residency MFA program that I’ve long taught for many years. The residencies are 10 days of intense interaction with a group of people from around the country, all staying, eating, writing, socializing in a large rambling Maine inn. About midway through, I got sick. Really sick. I remember getting up from lunch and standing there a moment, realizing something in my body had just notified me to get ready for a world of misery. A few hours later, I was sicker than I’ve ever been before. Breathing was a chore. Getting out of bed to go to the bathroom required sliding across the wall, pausing every few slides to pant, and then leaning against the sink to steady myself once I got there, rallying for the necessary effort of getting back to the bed.
Most memorably, I lost my sense of taste and smell. I was feverishly sick enough to perceive it as a revelation. The world was made entirely of cardboard! That’s what anything I tried to eat tasted like. Cardboard. I was amazed that I’d never known this before. I wanted to tell people. Others should know!
During this fever dream, I was texting with my University of Nevada, Reno colleague Christopher Coake. He mentioned that the husband of the writer Jesmyn Ward had just died of the “flu”. He said to be careful. I tried to be. I kept my phone in hand – so that it wouldn’t be as far away as the other side of the bed if I needed it. I promised myself that if I felt any worse than exactly how I felt I’d call for help, go to the hospital, deal with all the disruption and the slow trickle of bills that would follow for months.
I began recovering before I needed to do that. I lived, but I had seriously considered the prospect that I might not. I lived, but not through any act of my own. I didn’t do anything heroic, or make a smarter decision than the zombie next to me, or tough it out with some personal fortitude that someone else lacked. I wasn’t the smartest, the cruelest, or the best with a samurai sword. What I remember most is feeling completely overwhelmed by how awful I felt and how powerless I was in the grip of an illness that owned me.
Fast-forward to March. My son was halfway through a University Studies Abroad Consortium study abroad semester in Madrid, Spain. He had been having a wonderful time, but he and his fellow students had been watching events in Italy, feeling the growing COVID-19 concern throughout Europe. He suspected the program was going to be cut short. What he didn’t expect was a surprise presidential announcement that flights from Europe were being cancelled. The announcement came with very little explanation or rationale or guidance. All we knew was that he had a couple of days to scramble if he was going to get home before the ban went into place. We got him on a flight that would get him back into the United States a couple of hours before the deadline. Then we waited. Separated by distance, complicated by time zones, anxiously texting for updates.
Thus we heard of the around the clock fervor of the other students as they scrambled to book travel, to pack. Reports of the chaos at the airport, the long delays, the confusion. Our son left well before his flight and essentially spent the night in an airport filled with fleeing foreign students. All of this he got through with the intrepid, upbeat and organized approach that has made him an experienced international traveler. He got home. He was okay. His parents?
Well, his parents will never forget the feeling of long distance helplessness as our child was internationally adrift in an emerging pandemic, in what felt – no matter how rationally we attempted to view things – eerily similar to the opening of almost any pandemic apocalypse film. That scene with Will Smith and family trying to flee New York at the start of I am Legend? Yeah, I thought about that, and how the scene cuts from the turmoil of people in fear, being tested for the virus, etc. to a New York City devoid of all human life. Well, except for Will Smith.
It wasn’t that we feared the world was coming to an end, but I did fear things more mundane than the zombie apocalypse. Government incompetence. Misinformation. Conspiracy theories. The arbitrariness of political decisions made from on high. I feared uncertainty, and the seemingly real possibility that our child might be trapped abroad in situations we had no control over. It didn’t require the unimaginable to be terrifying; the mundane and easily imaginable had become terrifying enough.
We lived through so much in 2020, but the world didn’t collapse in spectacular fashion. The pandemic didn’t spread with the overt horror of the movie Outbreak. Thanks in large part to the people who gave and risked the most – doctors and nurses, hospital staff, bus drivers, store employees, delivery people – the necessary aspects of daily life have gone on.
There were some things as a Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) writer I would have expected of a pandemic: hysteria, stockpiling (toilet paper anyone?), denial, finger pointing, racist and cultural insults, financial profiteering, strains to our less than perfect healthcare system, signs that our systems of public safety aren’t as sound as we’d like to think.
On the other hand, I’ve been surprised again and again at the unexpected ways I – and my many post-apocalyptic loving students – didn’t anticipate the ways we’d respond to a pandemic. I don’t recall any student, for example, having written a story in which – after an initial period of uncertainty – scientist clearly isolated and understood a virus, explained what it would do and how it would kill, and what people should do to protect themselves and others, only to have much of the population shrug, ignore, dispute, cry fake news, and generally respond by doing all the things guaranteed to put themselves in greater danger.
I’d remember if someone had written that story because I’d probably have challenged the believability. It’s one thing to subscribe to conspiracy theories about political opponents, members of different parties or racial/social groups. Those beliefs may have negative consequences, but they rarely come back on the believers in ways as blunt as death after a horrible illness and time spent on a ventilator. News of that, I would have thought, would make everyone sit up, listen, and act upon expert advice. Apparently, I was mistaken. It’s made me realize that it’s not so much the thing itself as it’s our failure to respond to the thing reasonably, intelligently, humanely.
As I write this, I’m heading to a (virtual) residency for that same MFA program in Maine, marking the anniversary of my mystery illness. The year has shaped a lot of what this coming residency will be about. One of my workshop groups is entirely of students writing post-apocalyptic stories. Needless to say, I’m going to have different questions for them than I would have a year ago, and their writing is already showing that they’re processing the very idea of such stories in different ways. I see them engaging with the material in less melodramatic ways. Instead, they’re finding resonance – and horror, fatigue, loneliness, disruption, longing, fear, disillusionment, and hope – that’s been informed by the past 12 months.
It makes me hopeful that these student writers are ruminating a bit ahead of a curve of the nation in general. Perhaps the ways they’re reexamining collective fears will also take root in the larger consciousness in ways we don’t entirely see yet. As a country, we may still be holding on to viewing the pandemic through political lenses, but I wonder if quietly we’ve also learned things that will help us be better prepared for the next time. I want to believe that the things we’ve lived through this year will help us shape new beginnings. In relation to pandemics, and on many other things as well.
Photo/David Anthony Durham.
David Anthony Durham teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of seven novels that range from literary fiction about the African-American experience, to war novels of the ancient world, to epic fantasy. He writes for George RR Martin’s Wild Cards series of collaborative novels, and his screenwriting credits include working on one of the spinoff shows of the Game of Thrones series for HBO. His next novel, a middle grade fantasy called The Shadow Prince, is forthcoming in 2021.
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