‘So why is it that I’ve been reluctant to hand over to my young Riordan aficionado the review copy I received of the author’s other recent publication, “Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods”? Lavishly illustrated on heavy, glossy paper, this is Riordan’s answer to the D’Aulaires’ celebrated volume. It is the same size as that familiar book, with its cover even drawing from the same color palette of yellows and blues. Inside, it contains the old stories, as retold in the voice of Percy Jackson himself: “A publisher in New York asked me to write down what I know about the Greek gods, and I was like, ‘Can we do this anonymously? Because I don’t need the Olympians mad at me again. ’ ”
Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire, European immigrants to the United States who co-authored many books after their marriage in 1925, retold the myths in a heightened, poetic language: “In olden times, when men still worshiped ugly idols, there lived in the land of Greece a folk of shepherds and herdsmen who cherished light and beauty,” their book begins. Riordan’s book strikes a very different tone. It is inscribed with obsolescence (Craigslist, iPhones, and the Powerball lottery are invoked) and delivered in the kind of jaded teen argot that proves irresistibly cool to kids from grade school up: “At first, Kronos wasn’t so bad. He had to work his way up to being a complete slime bucket.” While the D’Aulaires wrote that “Persephone grew up on Olympus and her gay laughter rang through the brilliant halls,” Percy’s introduction to the story of Demeter’s daughter reads, “I have to be honest. I never understood what made Persephone such a big deal. I mean, for a girl who almost destroyed the universe, she seems kind of meh.” The former book, which was published fifty-two years ago, remains mostly lucid, even if in places it is stilted and dated. But I suspect it would be a very discerning elementary or middle-school student—or a willfully perverse one—who would chose the old version over the Percy Jackson retelling. Put the books side by side, and the D’Aulaires look more like the Dull’Aires, as Percy and his demigod pals might put it. (Wow—this affect is contagious.)
Gaiman’s view that any book that is avidly embraced can serve as a gateway to an enduring love of reading is surely true: my own earliest literary love affair was with Enid Blyton, that mid-century spinner of mysteries and boarding-school stories, who is among the authors Gaiman lists as having been deemed bad for children. But the metaphor of the gateway should prompt caution, too, since one can go through a gate in two directions. What if the strenuous accessibility of “Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods” proves so alluring to young readers that it seduces them in the opposite direction from that which Gaiman’s words presuppose—away from an engagement with more immediately difficult incarnations of the classics, Greek and otherwise? What if instead of urging them on to more challenging adventures on other, potentially perilous literary shores, it makes young readers hungry only for more of the palatable same? There’s a myth that could serve as an illustration here. I’m sure my son can remind me which one.’ – Rebecca Mead. Read the rest here.
We do wonder how many American Gods and Percy Jackson fans have actually read the classical myth-lit such books pay homage to.
We also wonder where Percy Jackson got the idea to remain anonymous (cough, cough).
Rebecca Mead has a new book out we would really like to read.
This essay will explore the post-apocalyptic genre’s pro-natalist tendencies serving as the vehicle of “hope.” It argues that colonialism and apocalypse are symptoms of pro-natalist fixations. In a similar vein of Annalee Newitz’s work Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, it concludes with a brief exploration on how humanity might change when changing the narrative.
Be it natural disaster, war, famine, alien invasion, robots, zombie attacks, or all of the above, post-apocalyptic literature and film are usually about hope. Hope that no, this is not the end of us. There is more. We will continue.
In these post-apocalyptic stories, our hope is a hope for what was there before the apocalypse. But, at best, humankind tends to set goals of starting at square one (reestablishing civilization, the population, surviving until those points are achievable, etc.). These goals tend to ignore that “starting over” is a cyclical thing to hope for and that humankind is doomed to repeat its mistakes once it reaches its next apocalyptic turning point. It is not what I would call a “true solution” to avoid another “Armageddon.” The struggle perpetuates itself through never breaking the cycle—through putting our hope in the next generation, as if they will get it right the next time.
This is when the theme of “hope” can become synonymous with “children.”
This hope is seen very well in the film Children of Men, where humanity is in the tank not because it is necessarily struggling to survive a die-off caused by natural disaster or plague, but simply because no children are being born. In fact, you could argue humanity is not struggling to survive, it’s merely reaching zero population growth. The infertility itself spurs chaos. The message is, essentially, that there is no purpose for life if you cannot leave a legacy behind (such as art) for the future to appreciate. History becomes meaningless when it stops with you and religion becomes a crutch to get you through the despair. At the end of the film, the viewer is left with the “hope” that the only child born in the last eighteen years will restore, you could say, not only the species, but our humanity. However, putting all that pressure on one child is a slightly selfish spin on things and a risky ratio. There are still too many eggs in one basket—a basket of pro-natalist fantasies.
Collecting art means nothing when art itself means nothing.As Good As New by Anders
In a short story titled “As Good As New” written by Charlie Jane Anders and published by Tor, a young woman—a lone survivor of some recent apocalypse—finds a genie and uses her three wishes to restore humanity back to the day before it went to hell. She uses one of her wishes to reverse all apocalypses—overlooking that she, too, is the result of a type of apocalypse (what Annalee Newitz, based off her work Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, would call a “mass extinction apocalypse” (goodbye dinosaurs…)). And she uses her last wish to keep the genie “in the family” so that she and her descendants can stop the apocalypse from ever happening again—should they ever need to. It is a delightful and witty story, and it highlights the fact that even the author knows the human tendency to just keep screwing things up. But what undermines it is the main character’s faith in her own DNA to keep an apocalypse from ever happening again—as if the family won’t eventually produce some evil spawns or even infertility. The story makes for a very natalist excuse to keep on breeding and doing “what humans do” without true introspection.
A less post-apocalyptic example (but nonetheless approaching apocalyptic) is the BBC TV show UTOPIA, where the protagonists try to stop a secret organization that wants to sterilize the world population by putting something undetectable in our food. The show often vilifies or makes pitiful the characters who actually want population control or see it as humanity’s only hope.
The pro-natalist protagonists (kind of) stop the organization from releasing the medicated food, but they offer up no solutions on how to help their downward-spiraling world avoid its breaking point. Thus, the population is left to just “keep breeding.” Or, perhaps, something even more depressing:
What makes this post-apocalyptic story unique is that the Earth and what remains are not used to respark civilization. Yet, the driving force behind it all is still children and fighting for our species to live on regardless of our responsibility to the world we leave behind.
In an ironic twist, perhaps one of the few apocalyptic stories to break the natalist trope is the Christian apocalypse. Like it or not, the Christian mythos is the foundation that fuels many of our fears and interests in these stories “of the end times.” Karen Armstrong, in her book The Gospel According to Woman, observes that Saint Augustine “was clear that if everybody stopped marrying and having children that would be an admirable thing: it would mean that the Kingdom of God would return all the sooner and the world would come to an end. By continuing to propagate the human race we were simply holding up Christ’s glorious return.” What makes the Christian apocalypse so complex (and perhaps most inventive) is that if there were fewer humans on earth, mortals could force God to cash in on his threatening promises.
The Christian apocalypse is one that is still inserting itself into the genre, most recently in the 2014 Nicolas Cage Left Behind film (which I did not watch and don’t need to, because I think we all get the idea). The only reason that version of the Christian end-of-days is not a natalist orgy apoc-pile is because all the innocent little babies have been raptured up to God and God no longer needs humans to be good Christian breeders. But Left Behind fills a grey area: it is not post-apocalyptic, only apocalyptic—and it is something desired to happen (by Christians). The desire, coming either from revenge on sinners or for peace on earth, is what makes the story and all its versions ambiguous. What comes after said apocalypse depends on your interpretation and belief (i.e. what does “heaven on earth” mean to you? Will we be defined as human at that point? Will reproducing even be a concept? All this is irrelevant and beside the point…). Whatever Christians believe will happen, the post-Christian apocalypse, at its core, has no focus on children or future generations; it is a focus of the past and present being given “eternal life”—not adding new life.
The Christian apocalypse subverts the natalist trope and instead places hope in Christ or some version of heaven. The Christian apocalypse does not hinge on whether or not you think having children is a moral issue, though today the majority Christian stance seems to be but go ahead and have them anyway. Not even Augustine followed his own advice, after all. Thus, since it is a story recounted and upheld by natalists, we cannot claim that the Christian apocalypse, as story, is anti-natalist. At best, it is neutral. It still breaks from the norm and can highlight what the “norm” is for this genre, however.
At this point, you may be wondering if post-apocalyptic stories can exist at all without natalist fantasy or religion propping them up, and I am here to tell you that there are ways and I would like to see more of them. Just because the human era is dwindling does not mean our story is ending in these post-apocalyptic stories. Our hope does not have to be contingent on human children. Hope can be explored in, say, the uploading of our minds into a matrix-like computer where we can become immortal and not “need” to repopulate. We can become cyborgs that don’t need to depend on current human resources. We can even become a completely different species: a good example of this is the book/film, The Girl with All the Gifts, where hybrid zombie-human children, whose reproductive status is moot, are the future. Not humans themselves. Stories which break the natalist mold in such a way are a refreshing rarity and are cause for us to examine our choices and the genre.
Post-apocalyptic stories are usually clouded with flying storks. At the genre’s core is a cliché not readily broken, perhaps highlighting the human psyche in ways our storytellers could more actively address. Because if our characters really cared about future generations, they wouldn’t have let the apocalypse happen in the first place.
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What makes a story science fiction? Is it an otherworldly location, the science, the time in which it is set?
I’m thinking about this because of a review I saw this week of a novel billed in The Times as science fiction, which sounded rather disappointing – and it’s put me on a bit of a mission.
I haven’t read the book so it would be wrong of me to name it, but it concerned a new planet populated by humanlike aliens. The main threads are the bringing of God to the indigenous people, and the exploitation of its resources by mining companies.
It seemed this story could have been set anywhere. The human challenges were no different from those in a historical novel. The other-world setting didn’t add anything fresh, except maybe to save the writer some research. (I see a lot of science fiction – and fantasy –…
