When I was a kid, the word apocalypse kept me awake at night. It stalked my dreams and conjured images of four horsemen wreaking havoc on the earth. They galloped through my imagination spreading disease, war, famine, and death, whose pale horse had fire for eyes. There was always an abundance of fire. The end was certainly near.
But the end is always near, as the apocalyptic barker urges us to step right up and spin the calamity wheel. The needle bounces from one slot to the next as the wheel turns. Where will it fall? Nuclear Armageddon, super disease, neurotoxins, climate change, earthquakes, volcanoes, rising sea level, EMF, asteroid, alien invasion, solar flares, zombies, bee extinction, robots run amuck, some yet unimagined cataclysm, or the bonus section that promises a mystical stew of two or more catastrophes at once.
If no one survives, is this truly the end?
As avid consumers of tales of our own demise, we feast on post-apocalyptic worlds where wiping out much, or most, of everything and everyone satisfies our appetites for the end of times without taking it all the way to human extinction. The “post” in post-apocalyptic inserts an opening, a thread of hope, a future story yet to be written. It is a transition, the end of one era and the beginning of another. But immediate survival is one thing, generational survival is another.
With exposure to toxins, radiation, and not-yet-discovered poisons of a future past, characters in post-apocalyptic novel s face exaggerated elements of heat and cold, contaminated water, polluted air, disease and destruction. And they must somehow navigate this bleak landscape, like meatballs floating in a sky full of forks, and survive, managing relationships, battles, and innovations. Some people prepare for the apocalypse by stockpiling food and weapons, water purification devices and shelters. This helps for first generation survivors, but depending on the circumstances, future generations might live in a dark age as is the case with the Hinterland Trilogy, never knowing what exactly caused the world to fall apart. How these characters have children who become parents themselves and later grandparents in a post-apocalyptic world is as varied as what their ancestors originally survived, but they all have one thing in common, the world is a much different place than it used to be.
In 1980, only eleven years removed from the first lunar landings, buried behind USSR vs USA missile stockpile graphics on the evening news, the first patent on a living organism was issued for a bacterium engineered to consume oil as a way of cleaning up spills. Legal ownership of a GMO organism gave enterprising bioengineers the financial incentive needed to create rice that grows fortified with vitamin A and life-saving pharmaceuticals, patented seeds that grow crops impervious to a patented herbicide, as well as such oddities as glow-in-the dark cats, goats with spider web proteins in their milk, and featherless chickens.
Unlike eugenics which attempts to engineer people based on breeding , with rapidly advancing genetic technology, perhaps future humans will receive a genetic nip and tuck here and there to make them more suited to a changing environment and to resistant to our own poisons. Those who survive the apocalypse may very well be the products of GMO experiments designed to modify people to withstand more solar radiation, tolerate more CO2 , CO, ozone, and require less fresh water, or be more resistant to infection. Or even glow in the dark, which would come in handy in case the lights go out forever. They might even engineer people to withstand the rigors of space travel and life in low gravity so that we may better escape a dying world.
Human engineering, a heavy phrase that throws up stop signs, if not in our future, still provides fodder for horrific dystopian nightmares and post-apocalyptic tales. But when it comes to an actual impending Apocalypse, the scale of survival vs. ethics tips in favor of survival. Until then, some will prepare, others will cope, and others will capitalize. An enterprising Canadian company has already thought to put up for sale, to those who live in polluted cities desperate for a breath, bottles of fresh air scooped from the sky above Banff. If cans of air does not satisfy, one can also purchase on the Internet a terrarium backpack connected to mask.
M.E. Parker is the founding editor of the nationally recognized Camera Obscura Journal of Literature & Photography, now an online artifact. He is a fiction writer with a background in physics whose short stories have recently appeared in numerous literary journals. You can visit him at his website.
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