Post
by strawman » Sun Apr 14, 2013 5:59 pm
I too find tales of the end of the world as we know it... well... if you can say it's a genre, that's pretty much saying it's a trope.
That one person survives is definitely a trope; pretty hard to get over the what-are-the-odds on that one, so often the sole survivor finds Eve. Ah, a satisfying biblical allegory... until it makes someone wonder, "Hey that disproves evolution! Cause what are the odds that there would just happen to be two genders that just happen to have complementary procreative organs? And what are the odds that one of each survives? Answer me THAT, Charles Darwin. And then the LGBTU community would weigh in...
*sigh*
No, don't care for them tropes. But how about some analysis? The end is when everyone dies. The end "as we know it" requires someone to know it, so there's 1 survivor. Looks like the beginning of a spectrum to me, where the other end of the spectrum is: only 1 person dies, and it's still the end of the world as we know it.
Which is pretty much life as we currently experience it, Steven Utley being, in addition to a good writer, a case in point. The moral being that whenever people die, it's the end of the world. I think I can hear Jesus saying, "That's what I was trying to tell you." To which for the ten thousandth time, everyone says, "Shut up, Jesus. What do you know about speculative fiction?"
I'm thinking about trying to write an end of the world story from the POV of the Solipsist, who comes to the realization that the only people who will survive the imminent Apocalypse are the people he dreams about. So he spends his dream trying to get as many people in it as possible. At first, he takes the time to think about who he wants in his dream, and philosophizes about the abuse of his power: What right does he have to choose? Doesn't each choice he makes to save one also make him responsible for the death of another? As he feels the stirrings that herald the end of his dream, he is literally pulling them out of the wings, yelling "Come on, you slow bastards, you're killing the people behind you!"
Lots of room in such a story for social commentary, and for promoting physical fitness as a moral imperative. Of course, it's also risky for an author to have as the premise of his story that his audience is nothing but a figment of his imagination. But why should the author care? His audience is behind a wall of slow people.
Never judge anyone until you have biopsied their brain.
"Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle."
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