The End Is Still Nigh

 

Earlier this year my wife and I got to revisit one of the nightmares of our childhoods: the possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and (post-Soviet) Russia. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and media speculation about NATO intervention spooked us both, and we stockpiled canned water and iodine tablets and discussed possible evacuation plans. I’m sure our preparations would seem silly to younger readers who don’t remember the Cold War, and to older readers who have forgotten the intensely nihilistic dread generated by that conflict’s final phase. Myself, I’m not so embarrassed. (1)

 

We will all go together when we go.

 

To those of us who came of age in the 1980s, when Insane Anglo Warlord (2) stood at the helm of the United States and a succession of frightened old men ruled the Soviet Union, when a new arms race raised the world’s megatonnage to the “general extermination” level, nuclear annihilation seemed more likely than not. Two decades earlier, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, relieved Americans could laugh at Dr. Strangelove and play satirical card games like Nuclear War. In the detente era of the 1970s, nuclear war could appear in movies as the comic backdrop to gonzo adventure stories (like A Boy and His Dog or Damnation Alley). TSR Hobbies could produce a whimsical post-apocalyptic role-playing game like Gamma World and expect it to garner a large following. After 1980, though, armageddon no longer raised much of a chuckle.

The ensuing decade gave us The Day After (3) and Britons’ even bleaker Threads (1984), as well as Testament (1983), a grim little existentialist masterpiece. Science fiction and scifi-adjacent writers warned us that the next war would be the last one; at best, life in the aftermath would be squalid and bleak. So wrote Connie Willis, in “A Letter from the Clearys”; John Varley, in “The Manhattan Phone Book, Abridged”; Gregory Benford, in “Fermi and Frost”; David Brin, in The Postman; Whitley Streiber, in his near-future travelogue War Day; and James Morrow, in his powerful This Is the Way the World Ends. The most distinctive nuclear-war game of the decade was Balance of Power (1985), a simulation of Cold War political conflict that the player immediately lost if s/he started a world war. Whatever civics lessons we received in school and from television, American teenagers knew that our regime, with the help of the Russians, could kill all of us with our families at any time, and that there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. No wonder Gen Xers were so politically apathetic, and no wonder so many of us still fondly remember Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the arms race and let us grow up. (4)

 

You lost, Ronnie. (From Balance of Power)

I do know one person who would not have laughed at Susan’s and my halting war preparations: my late mother, a hard-nosed Reagan Republican who nonetheless came to fear, in the fall of 1983, that there was a reasonable chance of a nuclear war sometime in the near future. She made a family stockpile of canned food, bottled water, and other supplies, which she stored in a closet for the next decade. In hindsight, one might say she was overreacting to news stories like the Soviet air force’s downing of KAL 007, a passenger airliner with 270 people (including 62 Americans) aboard. With additional hindsight, one can say she was perfectly right to be afraid. In the fall of 1983 a NATO wargame called Able Archer persuaded the addled leadership of the Soviet Union that the Americans were preparing a nuclear first-strike. The USSR in response placed its own nuclear forces on high alert. The world came closer to destruction than at any time since 1962, and, national security services being what they were, very few people learned about it until recently. I suspect we won’t know for another two or three decades exactly how close the Russo-Ukrainian War has brought us to a nuclear exchange. Experience suggests it was closer than we might think. Funny, isn’t it?

 

This is somewhat less than reassuring.

 

 

*

1 Admittedly, preparing for nuclear war would have seemed futile to me as a teenager, but one’s calculus changes as a middle-aged parent.

 

2 Anagram of Ronald Wilson Reagan.

 

3 Ben Stein, who found The Day After unpatriotic, helped produce a “Better Dead Than Red” response called Amerika (1987). In this miniseries the Soviet Union conquers the United States and then proceeds to bore everyone in America to death.

4 He thereby helped end Jerry Pournelle’s interminable There Will Be War series, for which he should have won a Special Prize for Literary Merit.

SFnal Doings in May, 2021

 

Reading: Preoccupied as my Better Half and I were this month, I did less reading than usual, but did manage to complete The Burning God. This last book of Rebecca Kuang’s debut trilogy was inspired, like its predecessors, by the modern Sino-Japanese wars, and shared the other volumes' vividness and skillful plotting. Without giving away the denouement, I will say that General Rin’s titular ally, the Phoenix, has no plans ever to give Rin or her homeland peace, even if they desperately need it.

 

Video: My video watching has become sporadic in the last three years and almost non-existent since the start of the pandemic. That said, I watched my first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in mid-May. I know I’m two decades late to this party, but I was only inspired to try the series by a recently-published alt history blog post. The premiere featured a thin plot and mediocre acting, but I admired the writers’ attempt to build a new Star Trek continuity bridging the older series and the 21st-century milieu of First Contact. I may just give the rest of the series a try, and see how it holds up.

 

Gaming: Susan and I managed a fair amount of this in May, thanks to iOS or compact versions of some of our favorites. We enjoyed Duel, the excellent two-player version of 7 Wonders; Scythe, the cult board game based on Jakub Rozalski’s 1920+ dieselpunk art; and Innovation. Indeed, we were able to play all three while Susi was in early-stage labor with our son. I’d say this gave me an unfair advantage, but Miss S. still trounced me at Innovation, 6-2. Better luck next pregnancy. (Just kidding!)

Susi triumphs again.

The Apocalypse Came Early

Some years ago on this blog I speculated about the outcomes we might expect from a deadly global pandemic, a category of disaster popular with authors of post-apocalyptic fiction. Basing my conclusions upon reading in my own professional bailiwick (history), I suggested that a future post-Plague world would see:

 

1 - Advances in medical science

2 - New developments in superstition and racial scapegoating

3 - Possible improvement in the conditions of working people

4 - A probable increase in political and economic repression.

 

Nine years on, our pandemical future has at last arrived. It is too early to speak of a post-Covid world. The disease may be contained in the United States (maybe), but we are unlikely to see global death rates taper off this year. Still, with a year’s worth of social and epidemiological data at our disposal, we can make some tentative observations about the pandemic, and I can see if the generalizations I made in 2012 apply to the very specific 2020-21 disaster.

 

1 - The new mRNA vaccines that have been going into arms since late last year are a promising medical advance, and one unforeseen (AFAIK) a couple of years ago.

2 - In the United States, our own president spent a good part of 2020 flogging snake-oil solutions like chloroquine and bleach injections (these didn’t catch on), and trying, with more success, to scapegoat East Asians for the “China virus.”  

3 - This seems to have occurred in the United States, much to my surprise. An emergency expansion of unemployment insurance and child-welfare benefits last year gave breathing room to impoverished working-class people, and the label “essential worker” has begun to supplant “low-skilled laborer,” which may help to bring up people’s wages.

 4 - Political repression has increased in some parts of the world, like East Asia, but mostly as a consequence of coups or popular uprisings. Quarantine measures have made North Korea and Cambodia more repressive, but they were not previously democracies.

 

There is room for cautious optimism here, but no cause to say “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” Three million people have already died of COVID-19 and the disease is still making its death march through India and Brazil, on its way to who-knows-what levels of destruction in the global South. Optimism, in any case, is always difficult for those of us of a certain age. It’s a lot easier to imagine how ghastly the world could become than to realize that many, perhaps most people in the industrialized world already live in a crapsack future and want its social arrangements to die with the pandemic.

Eating the Young: The 2020 Hugo Award Ceremony

While I have read about George Martin’s performance at the 2020 Hugo Awards, I have not watched his self-indulgent antics myself. 150 minutes is too much time to spend in the cramped emotional world of yet another Horrible Old White Guy, and I used up my quota of horrified fascination watching another member of that species, Daniel Feller, embarrass everyone at the SHEAR (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) conference last month. The two debacles did bear some similarity to one another. Both Feller and Martin were given a large online platform and a much larger audience than usual, and abused both. Both lionized formerly-respected and now justly-despised heroes of the past, in Feller’s case the murderous Andrew Jackson, in Martin’s the fascist sci-fi editor John Campbell and the incest-loving author Robert Heinlein. Both took the opportunity to piss on younger members of their profession, Feller by claiming that historians Jacqueline Peterson and Laurel Shire had completely misinterpreted Jackson’s relationship with Native Americans, GRRM by repeatedly mispronouncing the names of award winners. In short, both broke one of the essential rules of any viable society, professional or otherwise: don’t eat your young.

I know that it is hard to grow old, having recently crossed the Brimley/Cocoon horizon myself. One’s body fails, one’s friends fall permanently silent, the larger culture becomes the dominion of the young, the future becomes a realm of dread rather than hope. This is probably especially hard on science fiction authors and fans, who once saw the Future as our own special playground and are now losing it to younger, weirder successors who may not share all of our values. Some sci-fi franchises have turned the fears of the AARP set into central elements of their story lines: the first six Star Trek movies, for example, deal in large part with fear of old age and extinction, while the better Star Wars movies (episodes 4-8) all feature conflicts between the young and the old. (The younger characters usually win these battles, but they don’t always benefit from the victory.) We olds like these stories, and we have the cultural and financial resources to ensure they keep getting told.

Above: John W. Campbell, probably

Unfortunately, older SF fans and authors also have our fair share of narcissism and treacherousness, and are willing to use them in real life against the novices we should be helping. The World Science Fiction convention has seen too much of this inter-generational down-punching. The San Antonio con, for example, featured too many silverbacks muttering darkly about Miley Cyrus and the need to teach Heinlein in the schools. The 2018 Worldcon excluded several author panels whose members the program committee thought too obscure. GRRM’s two-and-a-half hours of auto-fellatio seems of a piece with this pattern of bad behavior. His message to the younger generation, intentional or not, is “The future doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to dead people who would have belittled or despised you.”

George Martin’s spectacle of the damned now lies, like his own professional relevance, in the past. Neither he nor the rest of us geriatric fans are going away, alas, and if we don’t want the rest of fandom and SFF authordom to despise us - or, worse, disappear because we have poisoned their cultural ecosystem - we need to develop a new code of ethical conduct for ourselves. This should include negative rules, like “Don’t grope younger fans or make excuses for Isaac Asimov’s having done so.” But we also need to reconsider our proper role within the SF community and the larger society, and for this we might re-purpose an idea from another aging fart of fandom, Larry Niven. More on this in a later post.