After Survival: What Comes Next in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction?
Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars arrives in cinemas at an interesting moment for post-apocalyptic fiction.
Post-apocalyptic stories have never really gone away. We seem drawn to them whenever the world feels uncertain, perhaps because they strip life down to questions that are easier to see.
Where will the next meal come from?
Who can be trusted?
What still works?
Who do you protect?
What are you prepared to do when there is no longer anyone coming to help?
Those are powerful questions. They are part of the reason stories about collapse endure.
But there is another question that interests me even more.
What happens if the survivors actually survive?
Not until next week.
Not until the credits roll.
For years.
What happens when the emergency slowly stops being an emergency and becomes ordinary life?
That is where The Solstorm Saga begins to find its real territory.
Why post-apocalyptic fiction often begins with survival
The opening of SOLSTORM: The Sky Went Wrong is very much a survival story.
An extreme solar event tears through the systems modern life depends upon. Communications fail. Navigation fails. Power disappears. Supply chains stop being meaningful because there is no longer a functioning system behind them.
Eighteen-year-old Erika is alone aboard a twenty-eight-foot sailboat in the North Atlantic when the world changes.
Brian is crossing the same ocean aboard Matilda, a fifty-four-foot Hallberg-Rassy, trying to reach Norway.
Elsewhere, people are trying to get home, protect their families, find medicine, preserve food, understand what happened, and work out whether the stranger approaching them is frightened, hungry, dangerous, or all three.
At that stage, survival is immediate.
Cold matters.
Water matters.
A leaking hose matters.
Knowing how to navigate without electronics matters.
A sack of grain matters.
So does the person standing beside it.
There is no room for abstract philosophy when the roof is leaking and winter is coming.
But people are remarkably difficult to finish.
Some endure.
And once enough of them do, the nature of the problem begins to change.
Five years later
By the beginning of the second SOLSTORM novel, five years have passed.
Children are running through Skjoldheim who barely remember the old world, or never knew it at all.
Bread comes from ovens built and maintained by people who expect them to be used tomorrow.
Boats are repaired.
Gardens are planted.
Tools have places.
Disputes are recorded.
People arrive from elsewhere carrying news, needs, skills, illnesses, grievances and stories.
The settlement is no longer simply a collection of survivors.
It is becoming a society.
That creates problems which are, in some ways, more difficult than surviving the collapse itself.
Who decides what is fair?
Who decides who may enter?
What happens when someone steals?
Who controls the food stores?
What happens when a respected person makes a bad decision?
Who keeps records?
Who teaches the children?
What knowledge from the old world should be preserved?
And perhaps most importantly, what prevents the people capable of protecting everyone else from gradually becoming their rulers?
These questions do not arrive with dramatic music.
They arrive while someone is repairing a barrel.
While children argue over rope.
While people divide seed grain.
While a boat comes into the harbor carrying strangers.
While somebody has to make a decision that will still matter after the person who made it is dead.
That is where rebuilding begins.
Civilization is mostly ordinary work
We often imagine civilization through its largest structures.
Governments.
Cities.
Armies.
Universities.
Power grids.
Courts.
But remove all of those things and something interesting becomes visible.
Civilization also exists in much smaller habits.
Someone records what was agreed.
Someone teaches a child how to sharpen a knife safely.
Someone repairs the same roof before the rain reaches the bedding.
Someone preserves a book they may never personally need.
Someone keeps watch while everyone else sleeps.
Someone accepts a judgment they dislike because the alternative is settling everything with strength.
Someone chooses not to take more merely because they can.
None of this is spectacular.
That is precisely why it interests me.
A functioning society is built from thousands of decisions that rarely look important while they are being made.
The wrong habits can grow the same way.
A temporary leader becomes permanent because it is convenient.
A guard begins deciding who deserves food.
A useful rule becomes unquestionable.
Fear starts doing the work that trust once did.
People tell themselves that extraordinary circumstances justify one more compromise.
Then another.
Eventually the emergency is gone, but the compromise remains.
What rebuilding civilization looks like
The third SOLSTORM novel widens the question.
Once communities begin surviving independently, they eventually begin finding one another.
Boats move along the coast.
Routes reopen.
People carry medicine, seeds, charts, letters, knowledge and warnings.
Someone knows how to repair a pump.
Someone else has preserved medical books.
A settlement has grain but needs iron.
Another has iron and needs skilled hands.
A harbor that once looked outward into an empty sea begins seeing sails again.
That changes everything.
Isolation can protect a community for a while.
Connection makes something larger possible.
It also creates new dangers.
Trade can become dependence.
Protection can become control.
Knowledge can become leverage.
A powerful settlement can begin making decisions for weaker ones while still insisting it is only helping.
The question is no longer simply whether civilization can return.
It is what kind of civilization returns with it.
The part after the ending
This is one reason I find the renewed interest in stories such as The Dog Stars so encouraging.
There is room in post-apocalyptic fiction for more than despair.
There is room for grief without hopelessness.
There is room for violence without making violence the purpose of the story.
There is room for competence.
For repair.
For friendship.
For strange new families.
For communities that make mistakes and try again.
For people who understand exactly how dangerous the world has become and still choose to build something inside it.
SOLSTORM does not imagine that catastrophe makes people better.
It certainly does not imagine that everyone suddenly becomes cooperative once electricity disappears.
Some people become predators.
Some become frightened.
Some become authoritarian.
Some simply fail.
But others do something much less dramatic.
They keep working.
They teach.
They repair.
They remember.
They plant things they will not harvest for months.
They build boats whose journeys they may never see.
They preserve books for children who cannot yet read them.
And eventually, if enough people keep doing those things, survival becomes something larger.
Not a return to the world that was lost.
Something new.
The end of civilization makes for a dramatic story.
I have become increasingly interested in what happens on the morning after the survivors realize the ending did not come.
There is still breakfast to make.
There are children outside.
The boat needs caulking.
Someone has arrived at the gate.
And now they have to decide what kind of world comes next.
