Post-Apocalypse Against Perpetual Eschaton

Reflections on the contrast between cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic narrative tropes.

My introduction to cyberpunk, as a genre, was reading the 4th Edition Rules for the tabletop RPG Shadowrun and attempting to create characters for that game. This was quickly followed by my reading Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. This process, starting with a setting that mixed in a great many urban fantasy tropes and following it quickly with an open satire, may have short-circuited any appreciation I might have had for the genre. Certainly I bounced off supposed “classics” of the genre like Neuromancer and Logan’s Run¹ when I read them later. Neuromancer, especially, was a very strange experience. Scene after scene went by, played completely straight and without elaboration, where Snow Crash would have been telling some sort of joke, and Shadowrun would have at least added some color to go with all the dark grey, black, gunmetal and static. And then the book ended. Was there really so little to this grand classic of science fiction? I mean, that did seem plausible on the face of it. I’m no great fan of “canonical” works. Then again, there are plenty of classic works that do stand on their own. Can a whole genre be so totally played out as to become a negative signal, a sign that I actually shouldn’t bother to engage?

I’ve had less experience with post-apocalyptic works, though of course they do come up. I played Fallout 3 as a kid, but didn’t engage with the DLC or the other games and hadn’t yet developed the analytic approach to media that I’ve ultimately landed on. I was never really into zombies, Fury Road didn’t come out until I was in college, and I only got my hands on Canticle for Leibowitz a year or two ago. Since then, though, my respect for this genre has only grown.

I’ve also begun to notice a resonance between these two types of stories. These genres are both what I would call “negative” science fiction: they look into the future, and they see bad things coming. Something like a space opera will, if needed, propose an external crisis that puts humanity into dire straits, or at least threatens to do so, and the story is generally about how there are already people with the qualities needed to shepherd society through the crisis. By contrast, for both cyberpunk and the post apocalypse, the disaster is fundamentally of our own making, a function of our inner demons expressing themselves. These kinds of stories differ from each other, though, in the scenery they choose for their stories, in their approach to history, and most strongly in their view of the further future.

It is worth pausing to note an amusing dichotomy I came across as a Shadowrun player. Dungeons and Dragons is famous for its nine point “alignment” system - two axes, law/chaos and good/evil, with neutral options in between, which together describe a character’s moral temperament. There are all sorts of problems one can have with the system, from what happens when players’ different readings of the different alignment concepts come into conflict, to the ethics of describing whole kinds of people as “usually” of some particular alignment, to the problematic impact of immature paladins on party dynamics. All that said, it remains a useful tool for shorthanding a great deal about a character, and can be a useful starting point in developing a character’s actual, well, character.

Shadowrun players, in contrast, introduced me to a “tonal” alignment scale: the “mirrored shades” player, adventure, or group, set against their “pink mohawk” counterpart. For a Mirrored Shades character, the situation, whatever it is, is extremely serious, and they are a slick, professional operator. They are wearing a trenchcoat. They will get the job done quickly, quietly, and thoroughly, and keep everything contained to a limited set of interactions. The world will barely know that anything happened at all, and the effects will be limited to what small adjustments the Mirrored Shades has decided to make. The Pink Mohawk character instead emphasizes loudness. The world, their environment - these are a drab background against which they provide a neon contrast. Some part of their outfit is likely fishnet. They’ll do what you asked, but you should expect it to be extremely conspicuous, and you should have a battery of cleanup teams ready to sort out the inevitable loose ends and random distractions shaken loose by the Pink Mohawk’s passage. Cyberpunk stories may be Mirrored Shades stories or they may be Pink Mohawk stories; if Neuromancer is classic Mirrored Shades, then Snow Crash is the epitome of the Pink Mohawk. They are united by their setting - by the quiet, constant crisis that creates an opportunity for hero and villain.

For cyberpunk, the crisis is, fundamentally, society. Social groups are large and undifferentiated, and their relationships with individuals, members or outsiders, are small and likewise undifferentiated. Corporations grow, workers are alienated, and our connection to each other becomes more and more abstract and tenuous as it is threaded through these larger constructs. Eventually, these abstract, mindless constructs become so large and so real that they threaten to crush anyone who comes to their attention, and the ever-present alienation keeps others from banding together to restrain them. This creates an intense urbanism in the cyberpunk setting. In most stories this would be unremarkable; I am a committed pedestrian and would normally cheer an increased focus on the mechanisms of the city. Cyberpunk, though, does not deal in mechanisms, only in abstract forms and types. In this genre, the city is not a space people create or a group they form²; it is instead the largest and most abstract of those faceless, motiveless entities whose machinations so carelessly grind down the protagonists. Cyberpunk is of the city, perhaps, but it is not happily so. The characters of a cyberpunk work may live in a society, but what individuality they have is to be loved and cherished in spite of that sad fact. Pink Mohawk or Mirrored Shades, they are to be celebrated for the way they contrast with and are separate from the people around them, whether through their furious insistence on themselves or via their slick and effortless competence.

Here now we finally hit on the core of what I so dislike about cyberpunk: because it views groups and individuals as fundamentally incompatible, its attitude towards the broad majority of humanity can only ever range from contempt to indifference. They may be foolish lemmings trampling our protagonists into drudgery and boredom, mindless sheep indifferent to their own oppression, or brainwashed drones of the System seeking to crush what individuality remains in the world, but they are not and can never be true persons, co-equal with the principal characters who decide the direction of whatever story is being told. They have no stories of their own. The Matrix does not mourn the people taken over and murdered by the Agents; they are simply a precursor material, “biomass” from which an army of clone Smiths will be produced. Snowcrash, likewise, does not care about the programmers doing useless make-work for the Post Office, or the families through whose neighborhood the Deliverator drives in his efforts to dislodge his co-protagonist. And because of that, these worlds can change only for the worse. Our heroes seek to preserve themselves, to prevent the villains from making the world even more like it is, because the genre cannot imagine a world unlike the one that it shows. Armageddon is forever in these stories; the only escape available is to wake to the apocalypse and choose a side, to temporarily rebel or honestly submit to the rest of the world’s unacknowledged inner demons.

So that’s one side of the “negative sci fi” coin; what about the other one? What if, instead of an endless treadmill of degradation to be escaped only by the lucky few who possess Inherent Protagonism, the future held a total collapse? A final, climactic boiling forth of all those inner demons that The Man is so insistent you submit to? At first glance, it sure looks like the post-apocalypse would be an even more negative vision of humanity. Society is destroyed entirely, and people are reduced to desperate scavengers on the slowly dissolving skeleton of the world we now know.

And yet.

If all the downward sliding that the genre foresees for us has already happened, if it has already climaxed in that total collapse, does that not force the author to show us something else? If things are already as bad as they can possibly get, why then are we being told the protagonists’ stories?

What struck me most when I read Canticle for Leibowitz was its consistent and excellent humor. Humor is an odd thing in genre fiction. Mostly, it’s either a utilitarian piece of the writing, there for the characters to laugh and the audience to understand that they do so, or else it comes across as a bit a-tonal, like the action has come to a stop so that the whole cast can take a moment to wink at the audience.³ The exception comes when the story or setting has a fundamental element of satire that comments on our real world, often rather bluntly, as in Snow Crash or in the good Sir Terry’s many novels. But from the first part’s Brother Francis the fainting friar to the final section’s stubbornly misconfigured fax machine, Canticle gives laugh after laugh right alongside its more serious meditations on ethics, culture, history, and historiography. And it’s not just Canticle, either. Fallout is, of course, famous for its humor, which in its best moments does tend to shade into satire. And I just recently finished Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, another post-apocalypse that opens with four chapters of Pythonic police procedural and more or less never lets up on the humor, while still delivering a deeply thoughtful meditation on personhood, fulfillment, and our capacity to do better.

It’s rare to see a genre story simply toss off a joke, land it with aplomb, and move on. Rarer still for that joke to actually support the more serious themes of the story. I think this is ultimately why it’s so rare: genre fiction already asks its audience to trace a more distant connection with the characters and story. Without care, combining a basic premise of “what if things were weird” with a deliberate joke risks turning the whole thing into something the audience just can’t bring themselves to care about. More satirical variations get away with it by re-injecting the real-world resonance, using the exaggerations and distortions of a fantastical world to provide comfort enough for the reader to confront a present-day issue. When Pratchett’s deep-downers play the role of the Haredi, we can tell what’s going on, explore the issues, and allow the general shape of the story to inform our values without having quite the stakes involved in understanding something like Beit HaMeriva. A scale model of the ethical problems we may face out here in the real world, small enough to be safe to interact with and detailed enough to sketch out what might follow from our actions.

Post-apocalyptic humor does something similar, but there’s no re-injection, no realism taken out and put back in. Instead, we see characters we understand confront objects we also understand, but shorn of the context that, to us, makes them understandable. Out of context, does the fact that customers who saved money switching to the topical insurance company saved an average of $200 actually mean anything to whatever it is we’re talking about? Does the fact that this particular bag is 12% more water resistant than the leading brand actually change how useful it is? The post-apocalypse does not have time for all of the idiotic salesmanship, endless fine print, and baroquely specific doodads that festoon our lives and, in its lack of regard for these things, shows them to actually be pretty funny.

There is of course one other point to be made in the post-apocalypse, when comparing it to cyberpunk. With society gone, there are no formless masses. Against the shattered bones of a dead civilization, every person pops, no matter their relevance, with none of a cyberpunk character’s need to insist on themselves. Hell, Service Model has a series of automated cargo vans that are more interesting characters than anyone in the cast of Logan’s Run. And that comfort with the triviality of our modern ways is once more an asset, because the characters’ disinterest in those trivialities serves to build them up. By their indifference to the finest details of our stories, they show themselves to be full people with stories of their own, even if we never see more than a single scene of those other stories.

And here at last is the thing that truly resonates with me. A post-apocalypse is truly that: it is post-apocalypse. The worst may happen. All this that we have built, could indeed fall down again. And yet, so long as people know, not even the specifics of our rise and our fall, but that there was this prior rise and fall - as long as they know that, they in turn will feel the drive to rise again and go further. It is this abiding conviction in our capacity to do better, to continually improve on what has gone before, that is ultimately what I come to in a story. I find that theme driving more and more of my favorite books, in various ways, so it’s no real surprise that I’ve fallen in love with the post-apocalyptic genre. The estchaton is boring. It too will end, and I am interested in what comes after.

So what, eh? Cyberpunk is a vapid, shallow genre of critique without solution; post-apocalypse says everything cyberpunk ever wanted to, but with more heart, more substance, and whole volumes of further thought beyond. That’s what I wanted to say when I got the idea to write this essay. But there’s this little voice in the back of my mind: do I really have the right set of stories in mind when I think of cyberpunk? I mean, sure, a random person on the street will name Neuromancer or Blade Runner if you ask them for something cyberpunk, but that same person will probably still call a crocodile a reptile, and anyway I haven’t seen Blade Runner. I’m always getting mad at nebulous gatekeepers of “true literature” who try to keep “genre” fiction outside that category, but feel free to reach out yoink a work like Frankenstein and just say “that one doesn’t count”.⁴ I don’t want to be doing that. And I’ve got to say, there are some novels that give me pause. Tad Williams’ virtual reality epic Otherland is an obvious example. I’ve heard it called “post-cyberpunk”, but that's a term with less meaning than postmodernism. Otherland is longer than most cyberpunk stories, and it has more moving parts, but that’s about it. Cyberpunk has a completely valid claim to that story, and it’s one of my favorites. Another pair of Tchaikovsky novels, Dogs of War and Bear Head, also come pretty close to the line, maybe cross it, with their focus on cybernetically augmented animals and people. And I don’t want to be doing backflips to claim that every cyberpunk novel that works for me is doing some special twist that means it’s not a “real” example of the genre.

So, uh, what does that have to do with all that post-apocalypse stuff? Well, Noah Caldwell-Gervais, a videogame critic whose work I respect quite a bit, made an interesting comment on “punk” aesthetics in his recent retrospective on the video game series called RAGE. “Behind the surface anger of most punk media,” he tells us, “is an optimistic core - the idea that individual expression is revolutionary, and non-conformity can transform society, or at least make it more tolerable.” It’s an interesting thought, especially given that he brought it up in the context of an extremely disappointing, generically edgy narrative of post-apocalypse.

I was tempted, in fact, to refer to what I’ve called “post-apocalyptic” fiction as “desertpunk”⁵ in contrast to cyberpunk, because there really is a strong connection between the two genres. How could there not be? One is about the ways in which our society can decay, the other is about what happens when it’s fully gone. They need to trade ideas back and forth. And to borrow another point from Noah’s reviews, while you can definitely write a post-apocalypse like the first two Fallout games, skewering the present by pointing out how ridiculous and irrelevant it is to someone with more immediate concerns, you can also create a post-apocalypse like Fallout 4, where it’s too bad the old world was destroyed, but at least we can put everything back together exactly the way it was before. It’s great that we’ll have the chance to do better, but we need to, y’know, actually do that at some point. And once that idea’s in your head, well, maybe it doesn’t actually have to get so far as a total social collapse for that to happen.

So here we are. Two subgenres, two sides of this “negative science fiction” coin that I’ve made up, and now I’ve wound my way back to where I always land: don’t give me that doomer shit. I know it’s bad. Let’s talk about how we do better.

1. Neuromancer has an excellent sense of style and very good prose, but does nothing unfamiliar to a reader with even passing familiarity with the genre. Logan’s Run is just not very good, in ways that make even its failure boring.

2. Groups of people are, frankly, beyond the imagination you typically see in cyberpunk, so relentless is the individualism of the genre.

3. Why, is that man playing Galaga? I say, sir.

4. I will never forget the paper I ran across in high school that confidently claimed that Kite Runner (I think - possibly that same author’s other novel) is a true bildungsroman, not a mere “coming of age story”.

5. I have refrained, on the grounds that *punk is almost meaningless as a genre descriptor. Steampunk, after all, has very little about it that is truly “punk”. Dieselpunk tends towards a bit more of a working-class aesthetic much of the time, but still isn’t necessarily well-described by the term. Biopunk kind of exists, I suppose. There is Wildbow’s Twig, where the description is apt, and then there is … Bioship? Ah, yes, Bioship, the worst story I have ever had the displeasure of reading, which for some reason made it into an anthology of 70s or 80s sci fi I picked up several years ago, over the much more compelling option of 30 or so blank pages. This footnote exists for me to tell you that Bioship is fundamentally ill-concieved, gracelessly written, and ultimately rather offensive to me as a reader. Also that *punk is not a particularly good term for describing a kind of literature, since it tends to refer not so much to the facts of the story as the attitude the story takes towards its facts.