One night in the winter of 1999/2000, I was walking down
Gorgie Road in Edinburgh and began to conceive of a short story. Over the next
three months I wrote and edited it and finally submitted it for the Macallan Scotland
on Sunday short story competition. It didn’t win, which is fine, as it was –
well, not awful, as such – just not a
short story. In spite of two years’ close reading of many, many science fiction
short stories in the late 1980s, I didn’t know then and don’t know now, what
makes a good or even effective short story. Still haven’t read William Trevor,
or Maupassant, Poe, V.S. Pritchett. Or
Chekhov. I have read an awful lot of Kipling,
hugely enjoyed what I’ve read of Saki, and have been left largely cold by
Raymond Carver’s first collection. This probably goes to explain much, and lends
weight to the suspicion that the touchstone for my literary judgement is the
first ten Three Investigators novels, written by Robert Arthur, Jr.
The short story had an end-of-world-theme and was called ‘Payday’.
Subtle, non? It cut back and forth between
an unnamed narrator and his family life in the present day, and the same
characters after an unspecified apocalypse known only as The Fall. The notion was
that there was an inescapable causal connection between the two, that we were
living on credit and there would be a reckoning even though we weren’t aware of
it. You can’t be brought up in the shadow of Calvinism, as we are in Scotland,
and avoid predestination.
So far, so ho-hum. But there was another idea in back, never
expressed through the story, which was a little more interesting: the angst,
the dread, of the Cold War would find some payoff, some expression down the
line. Put simply, you couldn’t spend 40 years worrying about the prospect of
the world ending in nuclear holocaust and then simply put that worry away. In
my imagination those decades had built up a psychic charge, a potential energy
which would find some way to be released in the real world. Very William S.
Burroughs.
Of course, many cultures – possibly every culture – has wondered
and told stories about the end of the world, asked the question, ‘how long can
this go on for?’ They seem to be going through something of a vogue again, with
various zombie-apocalypse games and movies, and the likes of The Road, The Book of Eli, Children of
Men. (Much as I admired Children of Men
for its technical brio, the story and setting seemed to me to have been dredged
out of 1982, or thereabouts. I see the novel – which I haven’t read – is from
1992, leading to the uncharitable thought that here we have yet another example
of those outside the field playing catch-up.) As Will Self says in his
introduction to Riddley Walker: ‘Every
generation gets the end-of-the-world anxiety it deserves; it used to be
transcendental, then it became elemental, and now it’s environmental.’
Immediately preceding this are the lines: ‘More serious
objections [about Riddley Walker]
will focus on the nuclear holocaust angle. Surely that was a post-World War Two
thing, and all gone now with the end of the Cold War?’ I did not think so.
My wee ham-fisted short-story had this idea at its core,
arising from an inchoate gut dread on a wet winter’s night: we are waiting for
the other shoe to drop, even if we don’t know it. In 2000, I couldn’t have told
you what was coming; even what I suspected might be coming. Compared to where
we are now, things were pretty good in many ways. Clinton was still President,
the Tories were still nowhere, Blair hadn’t revealed himself to be a religious
nutter, and the Scottish Parliament had just been elected. In 2007, with the
fourth IPCC report, the shoe dangled, and two years later at Copenhagen, it
dropped. I think I first read about global warming in 1984, when I was young
enough to think that the consequences were a long way in the future, and that
there was no way we would allow things to get that bad. Governments,
authorities, institutions, were flawed but essentially benign, and would take
steps. Sue me, I was 12. I also thought we’d have a moon base by now.
If there’s a post-apocalyptic novel which has relevance for
where we are today, one might think it is On
the Beach, in which the characters continue with their everyday lives
despite knowing that the results of a nuclear conflict are shortly to engulf
them. As a country – as a species – we are in effect pretending that nothing has
happened, that nothing is happening, that nothing will happen.
In fact the SF novel which is most apt is The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Clearly Mr Adams had it right: we are not the descendants of a small group of
hominids with hard-won expertise in survival, but of Golgafrinchan telephone
sanitisation engineers.
*
According to a popular online
encyclopedia (others are available), the title of On the Beach is in part taken from this:
In
this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
-
The Hollow
Men, T. S. Eliot
The third line of this little
excerpt is key. And avoid speech.
Hence the long silence.
