Move Over Mr. Zombie, Part I

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Michael Mearls for providing some inspiration for this article series with his own excellent article posted all the way back in '99 here on the Outpost, Parable of the Sower.

Introduction

I'm not entirely sure why post-apocalyptic settings intrigue me. I think, perhaps, it has something to do with the combination of modern and medieval; small bands trying to maintain some semblance of civilization while forces of anarchy and savagery swirl about them. Whatever the reason, it has inspired me to write this collection of thoughts on the genre and possibly provide someone with illumination on the subject.

Dictionary.com presents one of the definitions of apocalypse as a "prophetic revelation, esp. concerning a cataclysm in which the forces of good permanently triumph over the forces of evil" and the word itself comes from the Greek apokalypto, meaning "'uncover; disclose, reveal" [1], which can refer to a general prophecy or revelation. Indeed, the apocalypse is millenia old idea rooted in religious thought, with many ancient societies having complex mythologies about the end of the world; a deep sense that creation, in its troubles, will eventually be wiped clean and set right. So, with this almost hard-wired fascination about the end of the world, it should be no surprise that it continually holds the popular imagination.

But the idea of a post-apocalypse, of actually surviving a world or civilization-shattering event, is a rather modern invention. As the Enlightenment shifted Western civilization away from the divine to the humanistic, it became inevitable that contemplation of how the world might end would shift from the supernatural to the natural. As a modern literary genre, it came into being  with the publication of Mary Shelley's novel "The Last Man" in 1826 [2], which portrayed the last man alive after the rest of humanity race had been wiped out by plague. Still, its religious roots are apparent, as it is often used as a tableau for moral and philosophical discussions about society (The War of the Worlds) and works often display religious metaphors and symbolism (Alas, Babylon). Of course, the unraveling of a society is a convenient method for its literary deconstruction, as with David Brin's "The Postman", which examines how civilizations fall apart, while contrasting civilization and barbarism, along with asides on things like technology's role in society and feminism. Most often, though, its the popular conception of nukes, mutants, zombies, plagues, and technological relics that people think of.

Yet, despite these fantastic conceptions, civilization-ending events are quite common. What might seem obvious, yet something that most people don't contemplate, is that most civilizations that have ever existed are extinct in the here and now, with a precious few exceptions--the Mongols, Chinese, various aboriginal peoples--having survived culturally into the modern age, but whose empires have long disappeared. It is more in this vein of realism that this article will begin its discussion on issues surrounding the portrayal of post-apocalyptic worlds.


The Cause

Romulus and Remus

There are three levels on which a society may be destroyed, the social, the physical, and the environmental. The social can divided into persons (individuals), communities (the social bonds between individuals), and culture (the collective activity of communities; language, customs, traditions, beliefs, etc.). The physical can be divided into infrastructure (utilitarian objects which support the lifestyle of a society) and the physical expression of its culture (artifacts): books, paintings, sculpture, sheets of music, instruments, historical artifacts, etc. And the environmental can be separated into distinct natural components: the lithosphere (corresponding to geology), hydrosphere (the oceans), biosphere (biology and ecology), and the atmosphere.

The most immediate damage done by an apocalyptic event will be physical, with the loss of public and private property, leading to an interruption of normal life and the absence of modern comforts. The most heinous damage, however, is social. The the loss of persons, severing of ties, the abandonment of trust, and the forgetting of heritage drains the lifeblood of a culture and is its surest guarantee of extinction.  

Bang or Whimper?

How fast does the end come? Does it go up in a mushroom cloud or does it come through the slow attrition of pestilence and plague? More than simply adding texture to the story background, the speed at which the apocalypse hurdles at you can affect the totality of its destruction. If people have time to see it coming, they have time to plan ahead, to save something, or at least get out of the way while roars by. But in order to determine the rapidness of the end, it would help to know what type of end it is.

Mother Nature's Wrath

This category represents natural phenomenon largely uncaused by man and largely uncontrollable, often called an "extinction level event." Whether a meteor strike, huge earthquakes, or the eruption of a super volcano, the chief characteristic of this type of event is its sheer destruction. It wipes away everything, leaving nothing behind with in its area of effect.

In terms of survivability, however, that may also be the chief advantage. Being pure undiscerning physical force, it doesn't actively seek anything out. Things outside its area of effect may in fact go untouched. The social disruption, however, is tremendous. People die or people flee before it reaches its climax and then people tend to become isolated in the aftermath, focusing chiefly upon survival, not even having time to mourn the dead.

What can be salvaged is largely dependent on what type of disaster hits. Earthquakes are very good at destroying buildings, while floods tend to ruin everything inside them (though torrential floods or tsunamis will wash everything away), though if items can be carefully dried, they may survive. Whereas something like a volcano blasts or burns away everything in proximity and buries everything else under ash, leaving surviving items unrecoverable.

Master of All He Surveys

As man increases in scientific proficiency, so does his potential to manipulate his environment, but so does the potential impact of the side effects. If he missteps, his reach exceeding his grasp, he has the potential to undo the world.

That being the general truth, the specifics of such an apocalypse varies with the technological level of the society. Ancient societies most often extinguished themselves through the destruction of the food supply, often by overworking the land, as most experts believed happened to the Mayans. By the time you reach the nuclear age, you enter an era where man can plausibly initiate sudden cataclysmic events. Such was the concern of some Manhattan Project scientists before the detonation of the first atomic bomb, who worried that the warhead would ignite the atmosphere, leading to a cascade effect and the immolation of the entire planet.

In the context of current technology, the possibilities become even more exotic, whether the product of secret weapons research or an arcane physics experiment buried in the bowels of a university. But in order to be considered apocalyptic, it has to, by definition, be something that those who unleashed it can not avert. At best, you can get out of the way. At worst, you never see it coming.

Who Let the Dogs Out?

War, for the purposes of the discussion, will be defined as a conflict between between differing cultures or societies, which excludes civil war under this category.

Total armed conflict has been called the lowest state of man and it is perhaps the most direct of apocalyptic events, because the forces at work are intentionally killing and destroying as their first objective. Looking at the body counts and the sheer devastation left behind after any great conflict, it is right that it is the most consistently feared. its chief causes are most often economic, political, or territorial, with religious conflicts coming at the bottom of the list. The chief threat of war as an apocalyptic event is the destruction of infrastructure, such as utilities, medical services, food storage, etc., which are the physical backbone of any society. Cultural artifacts are also particularly at risk, as they usually sit on public display in urban areas, which are often the largest targets of large scale warfare.

War in the pre-modern period was quite prevalent, though ancient societies could weather decades or even centuries of sporadic conflict before collapse, though there are quite a few examples of civilizations being laid waste: Carthage at the hands of Rome, Israel at the hands of Babylon, or the Canaanites and the hands of the Israelites. But these events most often required successive campaigns stretched over months or years. With the advent of industrialization, war became more efficient and destructive; where once an entire war snuffed out tens or hundreds of thousands of lives, modern industry made it possible to wipe away millions in days.

However, this type of sustained mass military conflict could only be maintained by large economically robust nation states with well developed militaries. Smaller nations might be able to develop well equipped forces, with most of those materials being imported, but without a large industrial base, such forces were "one shot" solutions.

Yet that most grim symbol of industrial war, weapons of mass destruction, would change the formula. Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons finally made it possible for man to generate destructive power on par with Mother Nature. So, with the introduction of WMDs, smaller nations now obtained the means to severely, perhaps apocalyptically, wound larger ones who wielded large conventional forces.

But these types of weapons also introduced the threat of staying long after their deployment. Weaponized diseases would continue to spread, chemicals would linger in residue, and nuclear warheads being the worst of all; radiation, fallout, and nuclear winters.

Exposure would undoubtedly kill off large numbers of people, but the actual percentage will depend upon the safety knowledge and preparation of the general public. In the case of a nuclear attack, simply staying in doors will block the majority of exposure as lethal levels of radiation drop off by about 99% over several days. If the public lacks knowledge like this, it is bound to multiply deaths by several fold.

Many will feel the need to leave the area of effect, either before or after an attack (depending on the amount of warning), but it will also isolate pockets of the population as they dig in and weather it out. For both, lingering effects and further attacks will slow down day to day activities to a crawl, as extra care will have to be taken. In the worst case scenario, any densely populated area will is statistically likely to see more than a few survivors. With communication disrupted, the population tossed about, quality of life diminishing in the increasing absence of modern luxuries, the loss of infrastructure, and the physical and psychological attrition of warfare, a society risks becoming threadbare and falling apart at the seams.


Locusts and Boils

While plagues most often include pathogens unseen by the human eye, it also encompasses any species who breeds voraciously and whose migration results massive destruction. The common denominator of all plagues is that they begin as epidemics, or starting out at a central point and spreading outward. A major risk is that they may become pandemics, taking root in multiple locations and spreading from those points, or covering an entire area and moving as a wave.

Most plagues attack biological targets--people, animals, or plants--whether disease-causing pathogens like Ebola or Small Pox (or alien pathogens, like The Andromeda Strain), or higher species like locusts or mice, which often attack crops and food stores. However, in some cases, specimens can also destroy non-biological or non-living targets, such as the pseudo-naturally explained dragons of Reign of Fire, or the space bacteria which consumed all cellulose-based paper in Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

The are two chief social dangers caused by a plague. The first, like WMDs, is the isolation caused by a plague, in which physical barriers of some type will be raised to separate the safe/uninfected from the outside, whether they be checkpoints to screen infected from uninfected or the force field cities of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The second is the resulting paranoia, either of the danger outside or of the danger posed by the infected, both of which are amplified by physical isolation, creating yet a third fear of the unknown. In "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", the paranoia of a hermetically sealed community grows over the centuries to such an extent that the fear of the outside makes them believe that the entire world consists only of the interior of their bunker.

 
A House Divided

Social upheaval, as differentiated from war, is not the all out armed conflict between separate societies, but conflict with in a society (including civil war). Often, there is no one cause, but rather a confusing array of internal forces. Of course it is part and parcel for an apocalyptic event, but is probably one of the least used as a main cause for a society's collapse. Yet, like war, it can be the most total in its destruction. An army or a mob may be more persistent and systematic in its destruction of infrastructure and the artifacts of culture--destroying buildings or burning books--than a natural disaster. Most of all, it attacks its social bonds, which are the very bedrock of a society. A community with an external threat may band together, uniting against a foe or weathering the cataclysm. But when you can't trust your neighbor, civil society has already begun going out the window.

Even as the byproduct of an earlier event, social upheaval can still be the principal cause of a society's collapse. In "The Postman", it wasn't the nuclear warheads or biological weapons the Soviets rained down (or the plagues and nuclear winters that resulted), but rather the atmosphere of paranoia that saw many turning to militaristic survivalism and turning against their neighbors. Small towns became walled fortresses to hold the bandits and outlaws at bay. A democratic republic was transformed into a neo-feudalist society, doing what the most powerful weapons of man had failed to do.

The main types of causes, other than the general disruption of society, a fivefold: economic, political, religious, societal (between economic, ethnic, ideological, or other groupings in a society), and moral. The reality is that while any of one of these types may be a principal cause, every society, from tribe to empire is interconnected, so that one aspect of upheaval affects all others.

The Roman Empire, as a quasi-modern state, serves as a good historical example. Politically, you had the violent transition from Republic to Empire, replacing its republican institutions with the monarchy of the Caesars, whose long succession proved as volatile as its Senate was stable. This lead to economic upheaval, as a long line of monarchs repeatedly drained public coffers throughout Rome's later history, with Nero perhaps being the most famous of them. In trying to rebuild Rome (coinciding with, or perhaps initiating, his descent into insanity), after a fire had razed fourteen of its eighteen districts, Nero nearly taxed the Empire into oblivion, leaving many to starve. He eventually resorted to ordering the heads of the most powerful families in Rome to commit suicide and change their wills so that Nero inherited their fortunes. In turn, the social and political consequences were staggering, but one of the most religious consequence was a dramatic break with tradition when the Senate ordered his execution. Nero, being a descendant of Julius Caesar, was believed to have been part of the bloodline chosen by the gods to rule. This undoubtedly set a precedent, both for the ruling powers and general society, that reverberated through generations. One of the other precedents set during Nero's reign, followed by many Caesars thereafter, was his decadence.

Moral upheaval, or rather, moral decay, occurs when decadence and corruption filter through the whole society, sometimes from the bottom up, but most often from the the top down. When it is "bottom up", the effects of excess wealth often leads to vice, hedonism, and the decay of its moral norms, to the point that a society no longer has sufficient political will or social coherence to preserve itself, either internally from increasing corruption and crime or some secondary force, often external (like an invading army). "Top down" corruption occurs when the state grows so large and powerful, that it deforms and interrupts the natural institutions of a society, while the accumulation of power leads to its misuse and widespread political corruption, as is often portrayed in the fictional dystopic societies or seen in very real police states like the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, or North Korea. Eventually, a society collapses under the weight of its own rot.

 
Alien Space Bats

This is the unknown, sometimes unexplainable, world-ending events that remain beyond human calculation or explanation. Since it is so such an open ended subject, we'll discuss the most commonly used in this category, alien invasion.

The reasons for invasion can be manifold. Some of the common ones are: They want to conquer us, adding us or our world (sans our species) to their empire; Their world is dying and they need another hospitable world to live on; They want to harvest us for one reason or another; We pose some type of threat, either current or future, et al.

Obviously, aliens who can travel from their home world and have a force capable of conquering our entire planet are formidable and most likely more technologically advanced than us. In which case, our options are limited. We can throw waves of soldiers and weapons at them, hoping to win a war of attrition, we can try and outmaneuver them, hoping to utilize a weakness they didn't account for, or we can obtain their own weapons and use it against them.

The actual consequences of such an apocalyptic event are largely the same as regular warfare, undoubtedly amplified by the disparity between our forces and theirs, mixed with any issues unique to that alien species.


Voting With Their Feet

Along with other psycho-social consequences of an impending apocalypse--paranoia, violence, suicide, abandonment of inhibitions, etc.--movement of populations is perhaps the most significant, but least thought of. Refugees flee the places of danger, often dense urban areas and "head for the hills," settling in more rural areas and digging in. Historically, we can see this the decline of the Mayan civilization and the abandonment of their great cities in the North, while more rural settlements in the South experienced population surges. But after these initial movements, isolation sets in and fortification results as lawlessness increases, as happened with Rome late in her history. Distant outposts, once open places of bustling trade, erected heavy walls of stone as the political and military reach of Rome at the out edges of its empire receded. We'll discuss more of this in parts two and three.

Mother Earth

The natural environment both supports and destroys man's society. The workings of our atmosphere gives climates and weather that sustain crops, provide power (wind and solar energy), effect the traffic patterns of everything people to aircraft, determine breathability of the air, and so on. Or it can destroy with wind and water through hurricanes, tornadoes, torrential, and a myriad of other phenomena. Our hydrosphere and and lithosphere encompass the oceans and soils which sustain the biosphere, but from these also originate earthquakes and floods.

So, just as each affect society, so each in turn affect the others. A volcano can change to topography of the surrounding land, sending waves crashing inland. It can spew ash and toxic fumes into the air, which blots out the sun, causes acid rain, and kills wildlife by choking or burying it.

This interconnectedness modifies and amplifies the initial of severity of an apocalypse. The long term damage comes from how it affects the biosphere, which includes both domesticated and wild species. Most directly, this concerns how many living things are killed, but effects in weather patterns, geography, and toxin levels after the fact determine what type of environment the survivors have to sustain themselves in. Shifts in temperature or soil conditions may cause changes in the distribution of plant species, affecting food supplies for herbivores, which in turn affect the number of available prey for carnivores. Specialists may see the diminishing or disappearance of their niche, while omnivores and other generalist species may adapt more readily and take over. Still, the disappearance of particular specialists means loosing "lynch pin" species which provide vital balance for connections in the ecosystem, whether it be a predator which keeps down the population of a fast breeding prey or an insect which pollinates a particular plant.

These animals, whose distribution and migration patterns have dramatically changed, pass through regions they don't normally dwell in and may be pushed into human-developed areas, where in the absence of humans they may take up permanent residence. In addition, domestic species are left to their own devices. Loosing the contact wand protection of humans, those domestic animals that don't die for lack of survival instincts will typically go feral, falling back on more natural patterns of behavior, but also sometimes lacking a fear of humans possessed their wild cousins, making them an increased danger to refugees or those who stay behind. Wild animals in captivity or exotic pets will also escape their enclosures, start breeding, and establish a presence, as has happened flocks of wild parrots in temperate climates, or more dramatically, with pythons in Florida, which are now showing up all over the state, In the wake of these dramatic changes, native wild species will now have more competition.

In some cases, the consequences of an event can be beneficial, resulting in hormesis, or some similar effect. After the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the exposure to beta radiation caused a dramatic increase in the growth rate of plant life in the area. For humans who experienced minor exposure to the radiation of the bomb, it has been shown in studies that they experienced an overall increase in quality of health, with lifespans longer than the statistical average.

So, what does this all mean for the survivor? Besides experiencing the total breakdown of physical infrastructure and the disarray of an environment in the wake of a disaster, you have to face a harsher wilderness and more dangerous wildlife, which is also looking to survive. As processed foods become scarce, survivors way seek out crops and farm animals for more food, but left untended, they may break out and crops, often requiring more intervention than wild plants, will rot or suffer infestations by insects, mold, bacteria, and other organisms. People will now have to hunt wild game, which will become a task of trial and error. And if the first Europeans who settled in North America can give us any indication, many will die from starvation and disease.

Will discuss more fully the transformation of man and his world in parts two and three.

Sources:

1. Language Log, "Apocalypto: Raising linguistic hackles"
2. Wikipedia, "Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction"