After the Apocalypse (2011)
Maureen F. McHugh (1959)
188 pages
What I find intriguing about the subset of science fiction dealing with apocalyptic visions --- enough so that I give the books a shelf of their own, both at home and on this blog --- is learning how authors imagine we might react when faced with the new reality that comes After the Apocalypse. How will we wrap out heads around it? How will we interact with our family, friends, neighbors and strangers? How will we move forward?
Precisely these questions lay at the heart of the nine short stories in the collection of that name by Marueen F. McHugh. As shown by the picture on the book’s cover of a clock reading 12:05, McHugh begins these stories just after the apocalypse has occurred, or at least is well underway. It is no longer 11:59; the characters can no longer hold out hope of preventing the fateful turning point at midnight. And, unlike most apocalyptic fiction and movies, in which a deadly asteroid, super-plague or nuclear war figure prominently in the plot, McHugh focuses here on how people experience and get by in the new worlds created by the various versions of the apocalypse that she imagines. To borrow from the end of Laurie Anderson’s performance piece From the Air, the human race in each of these stories “had passed through a door. And we would never be going back.”
McHugh sets the stories in the near future, sprinkling in cultural references, such as movie titles, stores and products that will be familiar to most all readers. This approach gives added punch to the telling --- as readers we have little trouble identifying with the characters, or at least imagining ourselves in their shoes, as they fight to survive in the new reality. With the exception of one story that features zombies, and another in which some people can fly, McHugh creates worlds that are immediately identifiable to us; even in the two outliers mentioned, the fantasy remains a prop in the story, not the point of it. Thus these stories are more accurately called speculative fiction than pure science fiction.
The collection opens with The Naturalist, in which an outbreak of some kind has turned a portion of the population into zombies, though the zombies have been contained into major metropolitan areas. One of these cordoned-off zones is Cleveland, which the government has also begun using as a penal colony into which to dump the worst criminals, the implication being that it is a cheaper alternative than to house them in prisons. The main character, a convict recently transferred into Cleveland, decides that to survive in this city abandoned to the zombies he needs to study them, to understand their patterns and habits. He goes about his research thoroughly and carefully --- and with whatever means he has at his disposal.
In several of the stories, McHugh imagines near futures in which the economy has partially or completely collapsed. These are perhaps the scariest of the stories in the collection, because the worlds that McHugh creates seem so much like our current one, but with one more trigger, one additional event that pushes things over the edge into chaos. In these new realities we find that there are still rich and poor, only there is little left of the middle class, and the ranks of the poor have swelled beyond measure.
One example of this type is the title story, in which a woman travels on foot with her thirteen year old daughter through the central United States, scavenging in abandoned towns as they seek out a rumored refugee camp in the north. They are escaping from the border area with Mexico, which has turned into a war zone as heavily armed drug cartels, suffering from the economic crisis unleashed by the chaos following a “dirty bomb” attack in the U.S., lash out in search of food. The mother, recalling her own self-sufficiency during a youth lived largely on the streets struggles to handle a clinging daughter with whom she can barely identify.
In another example of economic collapse, a strain of bird flew has killed many millions in China (where McHugh has lived for a time) in the story Special Economics. The ensuing economic crisis has created massive unemployment, allowing companies to gain the upper hand over workers and the government. Two girls, desperate for work, struggle to avoid becoming trapped by their company’s feudal system of employment.
Other of McHugh’s stories tell of more “local” disasters, in the way that 9-11, for example, created a kind of local apocalypse for the people of New York City, leaving them scarred and reeling. The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large is written as a newspaper article detailing the life of a teenager caught in a “dirty bomb” attack on Baltimore. The boy suffers amnesia, and gradually creates a new life for himself; when his mother eventually finds him several years later, he struggles to reconcile his two lives. In Honeymoon, a young woman participates for money in a medical trial that goes horribly wrong.
Perhaps the darkest story in the collection, The Effect of Centrifugal Forces, has a bit of the feel of the novel by Nevil Shute from 1957, On the Beach, in which a group in Australia await the inevitable spread of radiation, and so death, from a nuclear war that has taken place in the Northern Hemisphere. In McHugh’s story there is no war, but still the gradual inevitability of a spreading disaster that destroys hope and morale. Without giving too much away, it is safe to say the story will make any reader consider again the merits of becoming a vegetarian.
This strong collection of stories avoids the dramatics of typical apocalyptic fiction, the detailed descriptions of wars and plagues and such, and instead examines how we go about fighting for survival when we have no hope of going back to the lives we knew. McHugh shows with stark honesty how we might sometimes hold onto our principles and our humanity, while at other times compromise them at a most basic level.
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