the banal apocalypse
julia armfield, science fiction that forecloses the future
it’s kind of mind-numbing to see how much contemporary science fiction is about some sort of end of the world situation. this literary moment comes in tandem with the enshrinement of sci fi in the mainstream, and it’s not lost on me that a lot of the books that cross over from genre to general readership are this kind of apocalyptic fiction.
i recently read julia armfield’s private rites, which was published recently and has a lot of buzz right now. i have a problem with julia armfield. her writing is fine, and her characterization is decent — private rites included a particularly good depiction of difficult relationships between sisters — but she uses her science-fictional worlds as backdrops for rather traditional emotional plots. the setting is more romantic than truly science-fictional. these are landscapes that mirror characters’ interiority. no efforts are made to really explore the implications of living with strangeness. the premise of private rites, which is set in the near future, is that the climate apocalypse is here, and it’s pretty drab. it’s raining all the time, and everything is slowly falling apart. and yet still — still — this near-future world is really just a reflection of the characters at the center of the book. it might as well be cathy on the moors.1
this is in many ways not a problem — it’s even good writing. i’ve written before about how narrative and setting should inform each other. what gives me pause is the proliferation of this kind of narrative in the science fiction genre. armfield’s novels are essentially realistic explorations of grief that use their settings to enhance a sense of desolation, of everything winding down. reading her fiction feels like visiting a death doula. to read science fiction and feel as if i am visiting a death doula is a pretty bleak experience.
this gets at the heart of my issue — this trend of popular apocalyptic sci fi doesn’t feel speculative. instead it feels like an anxious reinforcement of the idea that we are, as a society and a species, moving toward death. there’s no afterlife after the end this time, just slow breakdown, entropy. even the millenarians of the early modern era imagined a better world to come. now, the cultural atmosphere is one of lethargy. private rites (a lot of this also applies to armfield’s other book, our wives under the sea, which i hated) is a tired book. even a book of this sort that i really enjoyed, the incredibly nasty doloriad, uses the same plot structure of winding down into extinction. these are books without the energy to imagine a future beyond this near, entropic vision.
to be speculative is to have the energy to question what happens if [insert question here]. i truly think that this is an important thing for fiction to be able to do. fiction shapes the realm of the imaginary, it tells us what it is possible to think about. i understand being afraid of the future — i am extremely afraid of the future. i also think it takes courage to look at what seem to be portents of great change and suffering and try to think through possibilities other than ‘apocalypse!!!!’ the most difficult thing to acknowledge is that life will go on, for a lot of people. they are going to have to figure it out. what will that look like for them?
i also recently read driftglass, a collection of short stories by samuel delaney. what strikes me most about delaney is that what he is, to some degree, is a writer of utopias. he imagines utopian worlds and then populates them, makes them realistic, asks what the problems of people living in these worlds might be. this seems almost unthinkable now, but i’m curious to see how a similar project would look in 2024. dystopia and apocalyptic are overwhelmingly popular genres right now. is it possible, in the contemporary world, to imagine a utopia? what does this look like?
it alarms me immensely that the world of speculative fiction right now seems divided between entropic apocalyptic and escapist dreck. if anyone has read anything written in the past couple of years that takes a different approach, please tell me and i will read it! i don’t want to seem like i am trying to turn my head away from ‘real life’ problems. i just think that there is something kind of grotesque of producing literature that essentially functions as a death bloom.
this is a joke, because i think what armfield would really be good at writing are detailed, 19th century style social novels. honestly we need more detailed, 19th century style social novels with workmanlike (NOT ‘lyrical’!!!!!) prose. what happened to that sort of thing?
I agree with the fact that we lack stories of different ways of life, which are different, maybe not as comfortable, yet desirable. It is -- and I believe it is an interesting sociological phenomenon in itself -- as if the energy-economy-ecology crisis we face has made the future unthinkable, almost impossible. I can only recommend "the ministry for the future" from Kim Stanley Robinson, imagining how we could, through hardship and losses, but also a great deal of agency and cooperation, curtail climate change and transition toward a more sustainable society worldwide.
And if by any hasard there are some people speaking French around, there also is the wonderful podcast "2030 glorieuses", in which guests present what they do to change our societies into greener, more peaceful ones. There is also in each episode a reference to a book which portraits, in a way or another, a concept or imagery of a better future, and the personal optimistic foresight of the year 2030 (it started in 2020, so the idea was to imagine what could be done in ten years with some voluntary effort).
Anyway, thanks for your work :)
Death to lyrical prose! ‘Darkly comic’ novels that aren’t even funny can go next.
This is an interesting perspective to keep in mind as I am myself writing a sci-fi novel that deals with the apocalypse as it’s happening. Granted, I want my work to skew towards horror as well. Which, as a genre, has a different relationship to futility than sci-fi.
I haven’t yet read the works you’ve mentioned (Our Wives Under the Sea is on my TBR list), but I do wonder if their inability to push the more speculative elements of sci-fi is a symptom of them being genre-bending literary fiction writers, not true genre writers. In one of your replies you mentioned how wanting to write a speculative story is different from wanting to tell an emotional story. The imaginative realm is not necessarily the point. It’s just set dressing. The imaginative elements are there to support the story, not complicate it. Serviceable =/= satisfying.
But the emotional story is one-note because sentimentalism infects everything. Everyone is either super precious about their sense of ennui or really, really wants to be a winning Hero. And we’re left with emotionally stunted stories that can’t think through, or tangle with, what it means to be a tiny part of a larger ecosystem. Which - granted, that’s intellectually and emotionally hard to deal with. But… these writers are (allegedly) creating stories more gripping and thought-provoking than your standard romance*. They are supposed to be able to do the hard stuff.
*no hate to romance writers BUT they work within a formulaic genre meant to hit certain big, flat buttons of overwhelming emotion and these buzzy little novels are… doing the same thing fairly often, but somehow getting an intellectual pass.