10 - Visions of the End: Catastrophism and Moral Entropy

Summary

ACROSS THE WESTERN world, the specter of nuclear war and the growing awareness of impending ecological catastrophe intersected in the 1970s. Following the dire predictions of Danella and Dennis Meadows’s Limits to Growth (1972), with concerns about the environment and fears about a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers potentially erasing all life in Europe growing, apocalyptic media stories abounded. SF, with its long tradition of foreseeing catastrophes, reflected the mood, and it was rewarded with an ever-growing readership. As in its golden age in the 1940s, the genre came to the cultural surface with its chameleon-like ability “to reflect the conscious or subconscious states of the collective.”

In the case of disaster stories, such a reflection of the collective state of mind was criticized by those who held higher hopes for the genre—for example, by Darko Suvin, who branded it “black SF anticipation” and “romantic recoil.” Nevertheless, the attraction for SF writers to romanticize that “inconceivable terror” proved irresistible: by exploring external threats—real, perceived, or imaginary—they, like their Romantic forebears, were addressing the rapid technological change and the fears associated with it. They warned not only of the end of the world; they imagined a phoenix-like rising out of the ashes, one of SF's “most potent icons.” Few writers, however well-meaning and critical, could avoid the danger of romanticizing the apocalypse, or using it for heroic survivalism. Gertrud Lehnert has suggested that while it was only natural to develop fantasies of survival in order to cope with the all-pervasive fear created by a superpower arms race and ecological disasters, such fantasies often produced the opposite of what was intended:

When the catastrophe becomes the mere vehicle for one or more heroic individuals to take possession of this emptied world and to fashion it according to their desires, this “coping with fear” can have an effect that is diametrically opposed to its warning function.

Focusing on Anglo-American examples of disaster stories, Lehnert observed that in such a context, the question of human responsibility for the catastrophe was no longer relevant, and that the catastrophe was often presented as inescapable or as fated. Man, though responsible for his actions, was unable to prevent the consequences.