Under the Weather, or Under the Sod?

Captain Trips is here! No it's not the return of zombie Jerry Garcia, but rather a reference to Stephen King's The Stand. Apparently a Dutch virologist working out of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands has genetically altered the avian flu H5N1 so that it is now easily transmissible between ferrets. "Ferrets" you say, "Big deal, ferrets aren't people and besides that, they smell like popcorn, why should I care?". Well perhaps because the ferret flu response is the closest to that of human beings and perhaps because H5N1's mortality rate is 50%, and because in some lab in Rotterdam some bozo has made it airborne and SIGNIFICANTLY more contagious! Why? For science!!

So who is this malevolent virologist? His name is Ron Fouchier and when he couldn't successfully alter the virus' genetic makeup using new fangled means, he resorted to the tried and true method of passing the avian flu around to a plethora of ferrets and found after 10 generations the virus had become airborne. Wait a minute though, back up the night train a minute! Ron Fouchier... the scientists name is Ron Fouchier? So I guess now that we have confirmed that this bastard is a reincarnation of Randall Flagg then the whole allusion to The Stand has come full circle! It's no wonder this guy wants to publish a paper describing how he gave a business of ferrets the sepulchral sniffles! He wants his research to fall into the wrong hands so that once the vast majority of humanity is wiped off the face of the earth, he can rule the wasteland and play a twisted game of chess with the survivors!

You Don't Deke Margaret

Something a little different from the Archives of Oblivion, a short video taken from the Rick Mercer Report. In this clip, Oryx and Crake author, Margaret Atwood, teaches us how to stop a shot on net. Remember: "You don't deke Margaret!"

Speech Sounds

Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and humanity lost its ability to not only speak, what would we do. We'll that's easy, you would say, we would write stuff down and get on with our lives. What if humanity didn't just lose its capacity to speak, but lost its ability to produce and understand language entirely. All of a sudden things become much more complicated.

Octavia Butler has written a charming little story that poses some very big questions. In a world where 99% of the human population has lost the ability to use language in any way, the tenuous membrane that separates humans from animals is torn apart. Octavia Butler presents a world without language as being violent and dangerous, as people struggle to get their thoughts across and convey emotion.

I think that in a larger story, Butler would have possibly shown how families fared with non-language communication. When you live in close proximity to a group of people for a great majority of your day, you begin to develop subtle and nuanced  forms of body language that bi-passes  the need for language altogether. Encounters with strangers would be the troubling and dangerous instances where communication would crumble. Butler seems to capture this very well at the beginning of the story where she describes strangers arguing on the bus without any means beyond frustrated grunts to convey their anger. More subtle is the moment where Rye is trying to ask Obsidian to come home with her. Initially he misunderstands her gestures and declines the offer. Rye decides to use a different set of gestures and Obsidian gets into the front seat beside her. The scene expertly and delicately conveys the difficulty that one would have communicating with nothing but body language and gestures. Without syntactical and semantic rules, things fall apart.

The End Of The Whole Mess

I must say, Stephen King can really stretch out an apocalyptic yarn to truly epic dimensions, anyone who has read "The Stand" can attest to this. What the casual King reader (myself included) may not know, is that King can be very succinct as well.

"The End Of The Whole Mess" is a nice little short story, written by a man in the last few moments of life. Harold Fornoy writes in the style of a journal as he recounts his early childhood, growing up with his uniquely brilliant younger brother Bobby. Bobby Fornoy gets this idea in his head that mankind's greatest downfall is their tendency to aggression and proceeds to isolate and synthesize an anti-aggression agent that he discovered in the water supply of a nearby town. Bobby and Harold disperse the chemical by dropping into a volcano (of course) and proceed to infect the world with the chemical.

One of the great things about science is the fact that it adheres (usually) to a strict set of rules that prevent "Island of Dr. Moreau" type scenarios. Usually mad scientists are too busy satisfying their messiah complexes to be bothered with silly things like ethics. So Bobby forgoes the preliminary, small group studies and goes right for the global experiment. Unfortunately the chemical causes dementia and eventually leads to death.

I always like when the structure of a text helps drive the narrative, call it the post-modernist in me, but I think it's cool. As Harold's dementia progresses, he has an increasingly difficult time typing and communicating effectively, and his grammar disintegrates. These intimate moments give an insightful glimpse into the mind of someone suffering with Alzheimer's disease or dementia, and turn King's short story into something much more than simply a tale of the end of mankind. I really get the feeling that King has had very personal experiences with Alzheimer's and this story definitely describes the frustration that these poor souls must feel as their minds steadily slip away from them. King's story is short, but it still hits the reader right in the solar plexus.  

Earth Abides

Earth Abides is a novel written by George R. Stewart that recounts the experiences of a young man named Ish in the aftermath of mankind's near total extinction. Humanity has been devastated by an unknown virus that appears to only effect humans and primates. The novel is split into three parts: the effects of mankind's absence on nature, both plants and animals; the effects on the remaining pockets of humanity who are left to adapt or die in the new environment, and the tenacity of lack thereof of the old, civilized world.

I found Earth Abides to be a very well-written novel that tends toward an analytic approach to the apocalyptic narrative. However, behind Ish's scientific observations lies a rather beautiful and poetic vision of our planet's will to carry on without us. Reading Earth Abides I couldn't help but think that in spite of humanities sloughing off of higher modes of thinking and philosophizing in favor of more utilitarian tendencies, that we'll be okay, and we will come back around when the time is ripe.

Ish's children and grandchildren, Joey excluded, have no use for literature, art, or philosophy, because it has no bearing on there immediate concerns. The civilization that Ish's world held so dear have become for the next generations, nothing more than ancient ancestral tales. In a sense Ish has become like a shaman to this new tribe of humanity and all of his higher learning and the great men of civilization have become the ancestral ghosts of a bygone and shadowed age. In my opinion this is neither bad or good, it simply is. Mankind has shed all things that are of no consequence to his immediate survival.

Eventually mankind will lose the need for clocks and other time keeping implements and the sun will continue to rise and fall countless times without measure. In this environment a thousand years can pass in the blink of an eye. Mankind will rebuild the world anew and innumerable civilizations will come and go, but earth will abide in its blind orbit. Ultimately Earth Abides is, in my opinion, a somewhat optimistic novel about mankind's tenacity and fluidity in adapting in the face of nearly insurmountable odds.

The Time Machine

This marks my first entry into what I hope will be a much anticipated weekly look into the bleak and desolate world of Apocalyptic Fiction. Just because its bleak however, does not mean that it can't be fun, and as H.G. Wells', "The Time Machine", has shown me, just because it's fun doesn't mean it can't also carry a weighty message.
H.G. Wells' novella is about much more than time travel, in fact, the central message of the story could be told without the protagonist ever leaving the familiarity of the 19th Century. At its heart, "The Time Machine", is about the Victorian age that Wells' was living in and how the division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will eventually cause mankind to wither and die. In short, Wells is calling for compassion and love to win out over greed and the human need to have power over others.                                                                                                                                                          I found Wells' story to be a short and pleasant read that refused to beat around the bush and wasted no time in getting things moving. I was quite amused by Wells' portrayal of the bourgeoisie as being useless little fructivorous squirts that are treated like cattle by the chthonic Morlocks who make the Eloi's life so easy and carefree. I found their symbiotic relationship to be of particular interest because it was the last twisted remnant of balance left to humanity: that one should tend to the others needs and make them complacent just so they can be picked off and consumed all the easier.
"The Time Machine", is a good book, not a great book. The themes it covers are pretty heavy handed, but Wells can be forgiven in light of the books groundbreaking status. He certainly has a knack for pop fiction and this little story is no exception. If you haven't read it, I recommend it as it is a page turner.