Lefitsts Have Their Own Genre of Apocalypse Fiction - And It's Almost As Bad As The Apocalypse

 

 

There have been many, many subcategories of how writers have dealt with the end of the world over the years but I’m beginning to believe that the vast majority of them fall into one of two major groups.

The first is crisis fiction. In this version of fiction the world as we know it comes to an end because of an outside factor. Usually, if not always, that factor is supernatural – zombies, alien invaders, vampires – and in some cases it’s medical – usually a virus of some kind. (There can be an overlap of the two categories as we’ve seen in films like I Am Legend and World War Z.) In this kind of fiction, the remainder of society finds a way to band together to fight the common enemy or, just as often, each other along with that threat. (The Walking Dead is the most famous of that brand.)

The second is dystopian fiction. This brand of fiction takes place decades, if not centuries after society collapses on Earth and we see a new group of people, usually young, trying to rebuild society, almost always by rebelling against the old order. From this trope we have gotten such series as The Hunger Games and Divergent as well as more adult fiction that often can be satirical. Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind and if it handed been cancelled Joss Whedon’s Firefly very likely would have taken the same version of events.

The latter version is far more often political in nature than the former. It has been, obviously, since the work of George Orwell and as we’ve seen over the years many writers have attempted similar versions from Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone was the first major work of art to try and deal with it in anthology form and there have been several series in the 21^st century that have also tried to deal with – and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future. These works of fictions are generally darker than the crisis type of fiction because the problem has been going on for generations and seems impossible to solve. I suspect that’s why when The Handmaid’s Tale was adapted for television the writers chose to argue for a force of rebellion rather than Atwood’s dark vision.

But browsing through Barnes & Noble earlier today, in the midst of Christmas shopping, I was reminded of another, smaller subgenre of end of the world fiction. This is the kind of writing that while it has a clear niche for a long time and always will, it almost never becomes a film or television series. I’m aware of just one filmed version of one such story and I’ll discuss it later in this article. I’m not talking of the kinds of horror novels that tell these stories; though as I’ve made clear in an earlier article I loathe them just as much.

I suspect that these novels’ audience is almost certainly made up those who think publications like The Nation are too mainstream, avidly read the work of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky for fun and may very well do a lot of posting on sites like this. These are the people who believe that the apocalypse has already come, that there’s nothing to do the stop it, and actually seem to be waiting for the world to end to say: “I told you so.” These novels have those same kind of confirmation bias of the world as they suspect it is and because they are close enough to reality but ostensibly fiction they know doubt sell exclusively with these kinds of audiences.  In some cases the writing is superior to the kind of prose I see in this columns, but the sense of inevitable despair is just as obvious about our society and when the protagonist meets their doom, I suspect the readers at home lie back in their beds and light up.

I do my level best to avoid these novels like the plague (and to be clear, I’m not fond of those kinds of books either) but today I was doing Christmas shopping and I had the misfortune to encounter not one, but two such books. In fairness the second one I read at least tries to suggest an alternative with its end that isn’t pure despair but at the end of day their utter contempt for humanity as a whole more than shines through so it doesn’t make much of a difference. In short, both books will probably sell very well. That both books are written by authors that have done far better material in my opinion leads to be despair.

The one that’s the ostensible comedy is Adam Mansbach’s The Golem of Brooklyn. Mansbach is best known for writing the children book parodies “Go The F--- To Sleep” as well as some adult novels. The novel tells the story of Len Bronstein, a Brooklyn art teacher who steals an immense quantity of clay from his school, gets stoned, and despite knowing little about Judaism somehow manages to bring the Golem to the life. He’s unable to communicate with this mystic creature so he recruits a bodega clerk and ex-Hasid named Miri Applebaum.

The Golem learns English eventually by ingesting LSD and binge watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. This is funny. Not so funny: the Golem then reveals every previous iteration of himself and makes it very clear he comes out in every kind of possible trauma the Jewish people have undergone. He demands to know why he has been recreated and whom he must destroy. Miri shows him a vision of white nationalists at Charlottesville.

The Golem then goes on a rampage through a right wing rally and kills dozens of people while Miri films it for the world to see. To Miri the Golem is here for one purpose: to become the enforcer and invoke the horrific vengeance on every anti-Semite in the world. Len is horrified by the carnage before him and as they escape tries desperately to explain to Miri that the Golem has done will backfire and at the end of the day, things will only get worse for the Jews. I won’t reveal the ending of the novel (not because of a spoiler warning but because it’s basically the same ending many of these books have) but Mansbach makes it very clear that there are two extremes of the world and that the far-left version can be just as contemptible as the far right.

In a sense this novel at the very least argues there are two sides to every story but it’s just as despairing as all the other kind of leftist fiction because it makes it very clear that this solution is the one that many in this group really think is the only resolution. I’ll admit there’s an ambiguity to the ending which makes it an improvement over most of this fiction but Mansbach has a different kind of despair that is basically the same variation: for certain minorities groups, there is never going to be end to hatred or discrimination, only endless suffering.

I encountered more or less the exact same version of this in Nicola Yoon’s One of Our Kind. Yoon is a very successful children’s author, publisher of such books as Everything, Everything and The Sun is Also a Star. The latter book was made into a movie. I really don’t think her first adult novel – helpfully described in the blurbs as Get Out meets Stepford Wives – is likely too.

In this novel Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned black utopia of Liberty, California hoping to find a community of like-minded people. Jasmyn came hoping to find liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality but the residents seem more focused on spa treatments and ignoring the worlds trouble. Jasmyn’s friends in the community are equally perplexed and frustrated by the outlook of most residents. However as you’d expect they come to change slowly but surely. Then she learns that nobody seems to leave Liberty except for one couple and when she tracks them down…

…well, the solution is horrific and perhaps inevitable. The novel, I should add, is punctuated by clippings of what have sadly become everyday horrors in the lives of African-Americans and that every member of the community is suffering from including Kingston. The members of this community have also faced this world and see nothing but an endless cycle of despair and death and they truly think that fighting and resistance is pointless. I won’t dare reveal the climax (though if you know the plots of both films in the blurb I mentioned you might be able to figure it out by yourself) except that, in my opinion, it is even bleaker than Mansbach’s ending.

Both Mansbach and Yoon are looking at bigotry and the centuries of prejudice their respective minorities have suffered; for Mansbach, it’s Judaism, for Yoon it’s African-American. Mansbach’s characters are working class; Yoon’s are wealthy. And yet both of them independent reach the same conclusion: that in America there is no real place for them in the world as it exists. Mansbach’s character resort to violence; Yoon’s essentially surrender. And while both books are, at least in theory comedies, all they really are is part of the fictional version of what people on this sight call doomporn.

And this is why the leftist version of the end of the world rarely makes it to the big or small screen. There is only one exception that I am aware of to date and that’s Dave Eggers The Circle. The novel deals with an intern who joins The Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company an organization that links users personal emails, social media, banking and purchase into a single online agency. As you’d expect it becomes very clear that this agency has sinister intentions that are built on complete world domination that will make everybody electronic slaves. Mae is forced to make a decision to either stop the Circle from essentially destroying the world or to stop it. I think you know what she does.

It's not what you think because Eggers wrote a sequel to this novel called The Every. This site is the world’s large ecommerce site and it merges with The Circle to create the richest and most dangerous monopoly ever know – which is most beloved. In it Delaney Wells an unwavering tech skeptic gets hired with one mission in mind: to bring down the company from within. She works with a colleague to find a weakness to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species.

Both of these books tell Eggers version of humanity which is part and parcel of the leftist version: in over a thousand pages combined he basically tells the kind of story all leftists have telling in tweets about humanity: they are sheep, who don’t want to be free and like the slavery there in. I don’t know whether Eggers truly believes this kind of thing or if it’s the kind of ego drive exercise won by a Pulitzer-Prize winner. But either way it fits dead to right the version of what so many leftists in this world think: people are infantilized idiots who don’t know what’s best for them and don’t want to really engage with the world around them as long as their needs are satisfied. That I’m reading a summary of Eggers work on Amazon would seem to be a hypocrisy to large for him but its in keeping with this kind of writing from the left’s general political methodology of living in its own bubble, seeing the sins of the world and not seeing those same sins in their own.

I should mention this book was adapted into a film starring Tom Hanks, Emma Watson and John Boyega. It was extremely poorly received by critics and even on a budget of 18 million dollars barely made it’s money back, the rare box office failure for Hanks. I blame neither the critics nor the audience but rather the creator who thought this was a commercial project. It’s not.

All of these works are masters of subtlety to Andrew Yang (yes that one) and Stephen Marche’s The Last Election. This not even thinly veiled work of progressive dogma disguised (not well) as fiction tells with not even veiled anticipation the end of America as we know it. This isn’t a book so much as Yang writing fanfiction for his own political career arguing that America really wants the leftist vision he sets out for but because of our broken electoral system, democracy as we know it collapses. The book follows the story of the campaign manager of a third party system who is a popular centrist and frank and honest in contrast with a New York Times reporter who stumbles on a plot by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to seize power in the anticipated chaos of the next election. The incumbent president is an out of touch Democrat, the Republican candidate a near fascist. Commentary from the talking heads of MSNBC and Fox News are recording saying for all intents and purposes nothing they haven’t said before.

The book essentially has almost every single talking point the left uses about the electoral college and the Constitution for the last twenty years. (I’m honestly shocked Daily Kos didn’t endorse it.) The fact that America is essentially tearing itself apart while this is going on – bombings, assassination attempts and murders are taking place throughout the book – are fundamentally irrelevant to Yang’s polemic which is to argue that America was a failed state long before this last election because it never fully embraced the leftist version of America, particularly in regard to our institutions such as politics and journalism. There are no working-class or average Americans seen in Yang’s book, of course; this book isn’t for them. He ends the book before the coup and fascist state that he’s been working for unfold, no doubt because he has no idea what it really would like or just as likely he assumes we’re already in and always have been. There’s a possibility that Yang will self-fund this film, even if nobody goes to it: that’s how much of a vanity project it is.

The reason none of these books will ever be turned into the kind of TV shows such as Station Eleven or The Last of Us and why The Circle bombed is simple: like almost all of the left’s political writing, they are pedantic drags that are as not about entertaining its audience as its lecturing them. I don’t know for sure but I suspect many of the people who ended up reading The Circle never came back to it the same way they would books like The Stand or The Hunger Games and I don’t see much of a value in rereading any of the other books I’ve mentioned in this article. It’s not just that they’re one-trick ponies; it’s that the trick isn’t particularly good and its not particularly fun. There’s value in re-watching Get Out or The Stepford Wives because you can pick up[ on things you missed. When you reach the end of One of Our Kind, there’s no reason to read it again. People read fiction for the purpose of being fun and entertained as well as educated. We want our messages in our novels to be subtle and nuanced and only think about them later on.

None of the books I’ve listed have any of those gifts for prose. Like almost everything leftists write in non-fiction, it’s heavy handed and doesn’t trust the reader to get the point unless its spelled out in letters so big you could read from space. It’s disappointed particularly in the case of Eggers and Yoon who in other books have the ability to keep whatever messages they want to tell their readers with delicacy and gentleness. In One of Our Kind and The Circle at a certain point both writers abandon nuance and decide to make their view of the world abundantly clear. Both claim their books are satirical, but whatever laughs they have are mean and from the perspective of looking at the world with almost visceral contempt. I don’t mind that they end unhappily; I mind that are just a slog getting there and give you nothing in return for it.

I should mention by the way that I browsed all of these books when I was either in libraries and bookstores and made a point going forward that I would not only never buy these books but that these authors were on my shit-list from this point forward. (I put an asterisk on Yoon because this is for adults; her YA books are still in my good graces.) This is a big deal for me because I am willing to read just about anything and find a certain amount of value in it even after I’m finished. A book has to be truly horrible in a certain way for be to never want to read any of the author’s work ever again and there are few authors on that list even now.

So to sum up, if you ever find yourself in an apocalypse scenario and you need to build a bunker do not under any circumstances bring these books with you. Consider using them for sustenance first. Reading them makes dying by zombie bite or mysterious contagion seem almost desirable by comparison.