When the end comes, someone’s gonna be tweeting about videogames.
I’ve recently been reading a lot of pandemic fiction. I picked up Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel Sea of Tranquillity on a whim, in that most luxurious of ways — picking a book by its cover and the blurb. You know it can all go wrong, you know you could take the time to sit down and read a little further first, but you allow yourself not to, because you can.
I enjoyed that books very much. At something like 225 pages, it’s one of her shorter ones, and both due to its length and the story itself, I managed to attain the elusive feeling of just losing myself in a book without getting sidetracked first. The book is about a pandemic, but it’s also about the future of the human race, people of the future living in colonies on the moon. It jumps between time periods and characters in a way I quite enjoy (my love for books like Cloud Atlas and The Time Traveller’s Wife can attest to this). After finishing it, I was determined to find something like it, chasing that high following an enjoyable reading experience. I tried The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker. I tried The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. None would do. So I went back to Mandel’s Station Eleven.
Shortly after I began my re-read, the first since the book released in 2014, I found out it had been adapted as an HBO Max TV show in late 2021. I love the show a lot by the way — you can’t really compare it to the book as it deviates significantly from the material, but it is a very, very good bit of TV that you should watch if you can stomach it. The writers (or screenplay enjoyers) among you can find the scripts for the show here.
Station Eleven had a bit of a moment back when the pandemic first began in 2020, when people collectively began to be almost obsessed with pandemic fiction. Contagion was one of the most-downloaded films for months, and people on Twitter urged each other to read Station Eleven. This is what Mandel had to say to that at the time, a sentiment she repeated several more times over the years:
But Mandel evidently kept thinking about pandemics, the big ones that take the lives of most of the human population, because there is another one of that size in Sea of Tranquillity, which is also the first piece of fiction I read that mentions our current pandemic.
I didn’t specifically set out to read about pandemics, but now that I’ve consumed three books and a TV show on that topic, I keep thinking about the significant discrepancy in how we portray world-altering events and what it feels like to live through one. As I see it, pandemic fiction can take two avenues — one is about how humanity adapts and what the (shudder) new normal looks like — the kind of book that will make you feel grateful to have running water and access to food and the internet and whatever else makes your life comfortable. Characters will speak about these comforts longingly, including those who don’t even know what it was like to have electricity. Mobile phones look like magic rectangles from another planet, people hunt deer in the abandoned mall and die of pneumonia. The expectation for our world this kind of approach conveys, if there is any expectation at all, has to be that it will either take generations upon generations to return to the status quo, or, more likely, that there is no return to it. The other avenue is the Children of Men approach, where in a thoroughly hostile world, one character, usually a woman or a girl, holds the key to ending the untenable apocalyptic state.
Both of these approaches essentially expect that the world will return to a dangerous, lawless state, but one of them looks forward while the other one looks backwards, finding our humanity in… the past of humanity. Games of course love both kinds — the reversible kind gives you the chance to be a hero, while the non-reversible kind is a great absolver for basically anything. In a way, both of them are absolving us of responsibility — either everything is already broken, or it is your goal to fix it, and when you’re the one doing the fixing it’s likely to involve as much violence as the destruction did.
When I think of apocalypses, I think of The Last of Us. The way it gets lauded as a human story. The one thing I will give The Last Of Us 2 is that it let go of games’ obsession with a post-apocalypse where it’s you against everyone, a fiction the first game very much helped sustain. It showed that you have no more right to lawless behaviour than anyone does, but in a world where no one is ready to let go of their thirst for vengeance, that just turned the post-apocalypse into a never-ending battle royale. But now we have been, and still are, in a situation these pieces of media don’t actually seem to have anticipated — an age when the unthinkable is already happening, we are doing our best to look away.
But just like Naughty Dog doesn’t ever want us to forget The Last Of Us exists because Neil Druckman believes he’s got a bona fide Citizen Kane on his hands, it’s getting difficult for me to look away from all the things that people have said and done to get us to this point.
Of course inaction doesn’t make for interesting plot lines, but for all the ways that fiction is supposed to act as a mirror of society, it feels odd now that none of it could have anticipated sheer inactivity. Our civic instruments are supposed to be the last to fail us, in reality they seem to be the first to go. When society has failed, I am supposed to believe in individual action, the main character, the hero, or at the very least the person who is good at surviving others.
I’m already not good at surviving. Others or myself. I would have needed a story about how the pandemic is actually going before this one happened — now I just feel oddly disappointed by the speculative power of fiction. I know, speculative fiction, it’s in the name, but I’m still surprised how no one anticipated that humans would overwhelmingly pick the option not to care.
In the pandemic fiction I read, there is a lot of mention of how people are slowly wasting away, or how we start bartering bullets, but no one seems to have imagined a future in which everything mostly stays the same, because our Just In Time systems don’t change, in which the rich stay rich and always find a way to maintain their equilibrium. A future, in which everyone just wants to hold on to the ideas that already don’t work, so there actually isn’t any need for further dystopia.
Billionaires didn’t have a bearing on my everyday life, because they didn’t inflict their bad opinions on me unasked. I used to think that to become a billionaire, you had to invent something people had real use for, not a car that doesn’t blow up an estimated 50 percent of the time. I didn’t understand or think about what “no good billionaires” meant until I became aware their decisions had knockoff effects on so many people. Money suddenly wasn’t just money anymore, but just a quantifiable representation of the nebulous concept that is power.
I feel gam dev has this odd obsession with the apocalypse, because it’s not so much an exploration of how people will act in a dangerous situation. It feels more like someone is designing an experience they are hoping for, training themselves as foragers between dilapidated buildings, the apocalypse as giant scavenger hunt. The people who imagine these scenarios will, when the time comes, cash in on the capital gained from imagining an unforgiving world. They didn’t look back at what makes humanity good, they imagined our capacity for limitless evil, and sometimes I think they will be right.
The feeling that I carry around with me through what I imagine will be an endless pandemic, studiously ignored, is disappointment. I’m disappointment in my fellow people, in my leaders, because I never felt so directly impacted by everyone else’s decisions to the point I had to check the going legislature every single day. Of course I’m impacted by my leaders and fellow people in many ways I choose to ignore for my mental health’s sake, but some things grew bigger and bigger until they eventually followed me to bed at night and forced my eyes open in the dark.
The apocalypse won’t be this single event that forces everyone into their cars until the roads are congested and nothing moves, there won’t be one decisive day when all of us leave for the woods again. In many ways it will be like now — I will likely miss it among the news of oil giants making a killing, ten people posting the same meme, someone asking for videogame recs. We will argue a lot, and I will vaguely think that all these people I talk to day after day will vanish, cut off, never to realise what’s happened to me even though you can read and be angry about what’s happening all over the world.
I will go out in the evening after it’s cooled down and peel climate change denial stickers from the lamp posts in the neighbourhood. Some days it will be too hot to do that even at night. I won’t save anyone, and I will probably be too cynical to romanticise the society of the past. I’ll just try to live, the same as I do now, knowing that humanity won’t magically change in any significant ways at all.