Jandos Rothstein
In a recent column in the Prospect, Robert Kuttner argued that the era of Trump and the coronavirus pandemic heralds the end of American exceptionalism, the belief that America is special with unique virtues and blessings freeing it from disaster and putting it at the forefront of nations. There were actually pioneers predicting this fall from grace decades ago, namely, science fiction writers.
One of the remarkable things about speculative fiction is how it anticipates major historical shifts in a given era through the accumulation of genre-wide, culturally relevant tropes. Novels and other narratives are one of the principal ways we learn to experience and interpret the world. And Darko Suvin, whose Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Yale, 1979) remains the principal scholarly work on SF, locates SF narrative within literature as the special vehicle of “cognitive estrangement.”
This is a form of alternative world-building that makes the taken-for-granted background of our daily lives seem unreal, and unreal things—fictive cultures, other planets, aliens, transformative technologies—seem real. It enables us to imagine that things as they are could be different, and hence has the potential to liberate us by enabling us to see the structure of our society as a political artifact open to change, not a fact of nature.
In this vein, the end of American exceptionalism—if not of America itself—was deeply explored in the apocalyptic SF of the 1960s through the 1980s. Writers imagined change, all right, but the sort wrought by nuclear war, plague, famine, climate disasters, and other cataclysms that made America the victim and object of history, not its imperial subject—invaded by others, occupied by others, creating the poor, the displaced, the émigrés others don’t want.
Some of the classics:
- Warday, by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka (Holt, 1984), follows the travels of two journalists around the country after the Bomb finally drops. It vaporizes more than just cities. Gone too is national government and the fabric of national identity. Thirty percent of the U.S. population is dead and the rest is dying at the rate of 250,000 a month. Postwar America is administered by the British and exploited by the Japanese. It is a colony, no longer the leading edge of the future but the failed debris of history, its economy and destiny in the hands of others. What’s particularly striking about Warday is its unrelenting portrait of America as subject to the dislocations and deprivations of life in the Third World—a condition we used to export, not suffer ourselves. The novel’s reimagining of the concept of “the border” is particularly chilling, especially looking back from the age of Trumplestiltskin. Instead of the border being between Americans and other people, it’s between Americans themselves. Streiber and Kunetka’s most disturbing images are of an unbombed, still-rich, still-zany California that summarily imprisons and deports all “immigrants” (citizens of other U.S. states, not Mexicans or Salvadorans), of an Army that shoots escapees from dead zones on sight, and of a policy making it illegal for people who received high doses of radiation during the war to get medical treatment, since it would be wasted on those with short life expectancies. The novel ends with the writers’ trip to the charnel house of New York (population 7,000) and a grim interview with the general commanding the garrison. His message to their readers is that their generation needs “the strength not to torment our children with tales of what has been denied them.” This stoic resignation goes deeply against the grain of American exceptionalism and its confidence in the future. There will be no rebirth of a new, redeemed society after this apocalypse. Warday ends on a note of Elizabethan tragedy instead, when the stage is littered with bodies and we must “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young shall never see so much, or live so long.” (King Lear).
- The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner (Harper, 1972), invokes Milton and Swift rather than Shakespeare, but is as despairing as Warday. In the not-so-distant future Brunner imagines, the planetary ecosystem is devolving into a self-destroying rather than self-renewing cycle. Ordinary Americans’ physical well-being has declined rapidly in the world of the novel, the demonic version of technology’s transformation of everyday life for the better. Drug-resistant infectious diseases run rampant and a usually benign strain of E. coli mutates into a toxic form immune to antibiotics, causing a countrywide epidemic of the “jigra,” a severe and often fatal enteritis. What ordinarily happens to tourists in the Third World starts happening here, the ecological war the U.S. has waged against the planet by exporting pollution, and the way of life that produces it, coming home with a vengeance. This is the beginning of the end. In an eerie prefiguring of COVID-19’s devastating impact on the U.S. economy, the economic slowdown caused by the jigra leads to mass unemployment, a collapsed health care system, food shortages, and ultimately mass protests. A neofascist rump government invokes martial law and starts interning and then killing the protesters. On the last talk show broadcast before the government shuts down the networks, a U.S. scientist creating models simulating the jigra’s relentless global spread makes a modest proposal Swift would have been proud of: “We can just about restore the balance of the ecology … if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species”—that is, the Americans. The sheep have looked up and indeed are not fed, per “Lycidas”; the self-immolation of the United States then proceeds to its apocalyptic end.
- The Wild Shore, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Ace, 1984), the first book in Robinson’s celebrated Three Californias trilogy, strikes yet another despairing note. Robinson is still probably best known for his (Red, Green, and Blue) Mars trilogy, which transposes some of the great themes of the American Revolution and American exceptionalism to the next century and another planet. Mars is empty and lifeless—no indigenous peoples to exterminate, no ecology to ravage, unlike the America the Europeans invaded. Mars is colonized, terraformed, and ultimately freed from Earth’s domination. The hard path from colony to self-governing polity requires a brutal war of independence with Earth and a bloody internecine conflict among the Martians, and turns on technological innovations like life extension and social media enabling a planet-wide constitutional convention. But The Wild Shore holds out no hope for renewal, and the technology its story turns on is retrograde. Robinson’s Three Californias trilogy gives us three versions of the future history of Orange County (dystopian, neo-noir, and ecotopian). The Wild Shore is the dystopia, set in the ruins of San Clemente 40 years after a nuclear apocalypse. Its emphasis is on how America has been derailed from the tracks of history, its destiny no longer manifest but in the control of the Europeans and Asians who survived the war. Robinson actually uses the symbol of the railroad—once the chief metaphor for technological progress, the embodiment of the future itself in the 19th century—to make his point. The Wild Shore’s plot turns on the upstart mayor of San Diego’s attempt to rebuild the coastal railroad and reunify Southern California to defy the occupying powers—a pathetic, doomed fantasy in a primitive society reduced to subsistence agriculture.
- Pulling Through, by Dean Ing (Ace, 1983), is the right’s answer to Robinson, a hard-SF version of life after Northern California is destroyed in an atomic war. The fittest—those who know how to make do-it-yourself fallout meters, repair generators, create makeshift air filters, etc.—survive. They learn that old-time skills like growing vegetables and dressing chickens are the stuff of moral as well as physical well-being. Ing’s protagonist is the private detective Harve Rackham, who also appears in some of Ing’s superb short stories about life in a near-future Bay Area. Rackham undergoes a symbolic transformation from fat gourmand to lean survivalist, shedding his addiction to frivolous technologies like television for a mature appreciation of how to make sandals from old tires. You could say this is a rebirth of sorts, although the barren, depopulated strand Harve ends up living on seems more like a set for Waiting for Godot than a new frontier America. And Ing’s not just spinning a tale—the second half of Pulling Through is a detailed, illustrated manual explaining how to make the very devices that save his characters’ lives. We have been warned.
- Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, by Philip K. Dick (Ace, 1965), is a variation of postapocalyptic pastoral that uniquely debunks the notion of American exceptionalism via the exploration of Dick’s master theme of what is and isn’t human. The novel is set in a postwar Marin County commune where Dr. Bluthgeld, once America’s foremost wizard of nuclear Armageddon, is hiding out making mushroom stews instead of mushroom clouds. Bluthgeld is eventually unmasked, but this nominal plot is subsumed by Dick’s extraordinary depiction of a society in which prewar distinctions of race and class have blurred or dissolved. The community embraces all who can work or talk—of whatever species. Communication is the highest form of unalienated labor in Dick’s novels, prefiguring Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, and the protagonist of Dr. Bloodmoney is a black traveling salesman who is both an actual and metaphorical means of exchange between isolated communities. The Bomb creates the possibilities of new human potentials (telekinesis, telepathy), but more importantly erases distinctions far deeper than the old social ones. Mutant dogs talk, horses do arithmetic, and rats play the flute as part of the commune’s daily life. The category of the “human” has become rich and strange—a rethinking of human exceptionalism, let alone the American variety.
The question of what it means to be human, not just American, has become the dominant trope of SF—novels, film, TV—from the ’90s to the present as well. Zombie apocalypses (from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels through AMC’s The Walking Dead) and robot apocalypses (from the original Terminator movie and its sequels to HBO’s current reboot of Westworld to Linda Nagata’s Red trilogy) are the master metaphors of our time. They have replaced nuclear holocausts, just as the Cold War has given way to the polycentric post-Soviet world order and the United States’ status as the sole superpower has ended. They pick up where Dick left off both in terms of questioning human exceptionalism and reflecting our current fears and neuroses.
The early zombie epics—especially the original Night of the Living Dead and its sequels—were allegories of our alienated life under capitalism. Romero made this explicit in Dawn of the Dead as the dead all shuffled back to the malls out of habit. Shopping had been their “life”—a form of death in life. There wasn’t much difference between the zombies and the unbitten. The succeeding pandemic variations—Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and its sequels; The Walking Dead—allegorized other fears, primarily of immigrants, mass contagion as the metaphor for invasion by the culturally other.
This is particularly striking in the Resident Evil movies. Alice battles the minions of the malevolent Umbrella Corp. in the zombie-infested ruins of America’s culture and pleasure capitals, Hollywood and Las Vegas, as the malevolent originator of the zombie virus continues its rapacious drive for profit and power at the expense of humanity. In the British version of the wages of letting the other in, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, the filmmakers eerily foreshadow our current circumstances when the administration sought to prematurely end the economic lockdowns in place around the country. In 28 Days Later, the zombie plague, after ravaging most of Britain, seems to die out. In 28 Weeks Later, the occupying U.S. Army declares England free of the zombie virus and lets refugees return. One of these new immigrants still carries the virus, of course, and its second wave is fatal to all.
Eric L. Harry’s Pandora trilogy (Outbreak, Contagion, Resistance; Kensington, 2018–2020) has the best take on our current situation, however. It is a brilliant satire on American neofascism, Trumplestiltskin-style. Harry’s “infected” don’t die and reanimate to feast on the flesh of the living. Instead, they stay alive—but become cruel, ruthless, amoral, indifferent to human suffering, incapable of empathy, ready to explode into anger or violence at any unpredictable moment, devious and monomaniacal in their pursuit of self-interest and the scarce resources of the post-pandemic world as they plot first to coexist with, then enslave, the uninfected. In other words, they become Trumps. I won’t tell you the ending—Resistance was just published—but it certainly isn’t a rebirth of American exceptionalism or a celebration of human capability and the end of species essentialism. How much it’s a foretaste of our post-2020 future remains to be seen.
