Surviving the Slow Apocalypse

More about the "slow apocalypse" from Kameron Hurley this month:

Of Men and Monsters

Writing about police brutality, serial harassers in the SF field, incompetence and corruption in government, etc., she says, "Monsters masked as men have always walked among us." She deplores the difficulty of making broad structural changes, with the result that the same problems cycle around and continually resurface, "because we punish individuals instead of remaking systems." About the "monsters," she goes on to say, "What ensures their continued existence is the esteem we hold them in, the lifting up of powerful bullies out of fear: fear of retribution, fear of discomfort, fear of what would happen if we did not uphold the status quo." She focuses in particular on the "monsters" in the "professional spaces" of the science fiction community.

In connection with the protests, riots, and assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s, she acknowledges, "There have always been times like these." Learning from the past is a necessary prerequisite for creating a better future.

Therefore, it strikes me as incongruous when, although she concludes with an expression of hope, immediately before that she declares, "It’s been difficult for me to write anything these days that isn’t prefaced with how difficult it is to do much of anything but survive during the final death throes of America as we know it."

Are things really THAT bad? I tend, rather, to accept Steven Pinker's thesis in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW that these are the best of times for our planet, not the worst. Yes, even now. What if COVID-19 had struck in the middle of the nineteenth century, before the germ theory of disease was accepted? Only sixty or seventy years ago, the deaths in police custody that have roused such passionate cries for change would hardly even have been considered newsworthy. Our country has survived worse, such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, and two World Wars. As my stepmother used to say, much to my annoyance when I was a teenager impatient to grow up, "This too shall pass."

Speaking of writing, my personal coping mode is the opposite of Hurley's. I don't feel competent to deal with the weight of the present crises through fiction. In my last few works, as well as the WIP I'm starting now, I've practiced writing with a light touch and hints of humor that I hope will offer readers (along with myself) an hour or two of pleasurable escape.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Adjusting to Difficult Times

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS column discusses the stress of coping with a period of crisis:

It's OK If This Email Finds You Well

She writes about the transition—whenever that may occur—from "these difficult times" to "life as we know it" and working through the stages of grief in that adjustment. She confides, "Unexpected change is difficult for me," a reaction with which I can thoroughly identify. I don't like change in general, unless it's completely pleasant, and unexpectedness makes it worse. Hurley brings up a point that had never occurred to me, the difference between traumatic upheaval requiring swift reactions and "slow-moving disasters." If we're continuously "forced to worry about our day-to-day survival," we never get time to do the emotional "processing" a traumatic event requires.

I'm lucky not only in enjoying continued health (along with all the members of our family) but in that my husband and I are retired. We don't have to worry about survival, because our income level doesn't change. The restrictions of the past couple of months haven't altered our day-to-day routine much, although we do miss the few activities we were used to doing outside the home. Because we're exempt from a lot of the stresses Hurley describes, I don't suffer the degree of inability to focus that she mentions. Yet I do feel vaguely stuck in a "waiting" mode, tempted to put things off "until all this is over." Since we don't know when "all this" will end and what "over" will look like, that's not a particularly useful attitude. I'm currently brainstorming a third fiction piece connected to my two Wild Rose Press paranormal romance novellas (YOKAI MAGIC, published in 2019, and KITSUNE ENCHANTMENT, now in the publisher's editing process). The project is still in the early stages, not even up to formal outlining. It's easy to slide into the mindset that there's no point in working too hard on it until the second novella gets nearer publication. Then I mentally slap myself for succumbing to laziness.

A few bracing quotes from Hurley's essay:

"Humans are resilient creatures, to both our benefit and detriment."

"There is a lot of horror in going through any crisis, and it can wear you down. But horror is not the whole story, and humanity is full of positive acts and examples that we don’t speak enough about."

"There’s good reason humanity has lasted this long, and it’s not because we formed death cults and threw ourselves off cliffs. It’s because we care for one another and our communities."

One of the things I love about S. M. Stirling's DIES THE FIRE and its sequels is that he doesn't dwell at great length on post-apocalyptic horrors, but focuses on groups of people who work together to build new kinds of communities after the catastrophic worldwide Change.

"The comfort I take is that we have been through the times of monsters before. And we will again. The time of monsters is necessary on our way to what happens next. No new world was ever birthed without pain."

As a sometime horror writer with a fondness for "monsters," I appreciate that sentiment.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Social Media in the Raging 20s

In her latest LOCUS post, Kameron Hurley writes about tension and anxiety in the era of instantaneous communication and miscommunication:

Into the Raging 20s We Ride

She discusses misinformation, the pitfalls of following news bites in real time, the anxiety caused by exposure to floods of "unfettered" and unfiltered content, and feelings of helplessness when overwhelmed by what appear to be irresistible, impersonal forces. The essay begins with this generalization: "I’ve found that the insidious problem for me in scrolling through social media is that it feels like action. Ironically, it also creates – in me – a profound feeling of being out of control over events in the wider world, while generating a huge amount of anxiety and worry."

We tend to think if we Like or Share a post on a vital topic, we've done something about it. We often forget to dig deeper for reliable information or to seek out something concrete we can do in the real world. Hurley recommends rekindling the joy of creation, as well as becoming more intentional and selective about the online sources we expose ourselves to. She points out, "Our always-on culture has been driven by organizations that seek to get an increasing share of a finite resource: our attention. The more attention I give their services and algorithms, the less attention I have for the things that matter to me." The "luxury of deep focus" is an important resource of which social media can deprive us; Hurley writes about the need to rediscover that focus.

I was surprised at her remark that she's trying to spend more time on books. When and why did her book-reading decrease, I wonder? I can't imagine not reading a portion of a book-length work every day (in practice, two or three, since I always have several books going at one time, each for a different reading slot in my schedule). Unlike many people, including Hurley, I don't get ensnared by Facebook for long sessions. Some days, if time runs out, I barely glance at it or don't open it at all. When I do scan my feed, I devote only twenty minutes or so to it. Since I've friended or followed so many people, the content is effectively infinite, so there's no point in trying to consume all of it. The organizations and individuals I'm really interested in, I see regularly near the top of the page. My personal infinite black holes in terms of online reading are Quora and TV Tropes, where I have to make a conscious effort not to get sucked in except during free time I've specifically allotted to recreational surfing.

Hurley's comments about the illusion of taking action remind me of some lines from C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. (Like Shakespeare, Lewis offers an apt quote for almost any situation.) With regard to steering the victim's "wandering attention" away from what he ought to be spending his time on, senior demon Screwtape advises his pupil, "You no longer need a good book, which he really likes" to distract the "patient"; "a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about." Later, Screwtape says, "The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel." Screwtape would probably get a lot of mileage from the temptation to chase an endless chain of web links down multiple rabbit holes. In a different work (I can't remember which), Lewis points out that our brains weren't designed to cope with infinite demands on our sympathy in the form of a torrent of news about crises and disasters in distant places that we have no power to affect. I wonder what Lewis would say about social media and the 24-hour news cycle. His reaction would definitely not be favorable; in his lifetime, he avoided reading newspapers on the grounds that the content was often distorted or downright false.

Hurley's essay concludes with a declaration that's easy to applaud but often hard to practice: "Our attention, like our lives, is finite. Choose wisely."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Writing in Times of Anxiety

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS column tackles the problem of writing through anxiety. The essay focuses mainly on public crises and disasters but mentions its application to personal troubles as well:

Writing Through the News Cycle

She quotes a common reaction: “It’s 2019. Who doesn’t have anxiety?” She also highlights what she sees as the difference between today's news-inspired worries and those of people in the 1950s and '60s faced with possible nuclear war: Nuclear holocaust was a hypothetical threat; such crises as wars in the Middle East and global climate change are already happening. "That makes optimism and hope a lot more difficult to cling to, and anxiety ratchets up the more one stays glued to the news." (A good reason, by the way, to resist the temptation to click on every Internet headline or obsessively pore over social media streams, a remedy Hurley herself alludes to.) She compares chronic anxiety to a "faulty fire alarm" (I'd say "smoke alarm," which is what she seems to be talking about), which keeps going off despite the absence of fire. Subjected to constant alerts, one suffers fear and anxiety even though, objectively, there's nothing more wrong at this moment than there was a minute, an hour, or a day ago.

One cognitive trick I try to remember to use on myself, by the way, is becoming mindful of the fact that very seldom is this present moment unbearably terrible. (It can be, of course—if one is in acute danger or severe pain, for example—but more often than not, it isn't.) Much of our unhappiness springs from brooding over unpleasant, scary, or outright horrible things that might happen in the future.

In response to the challenge of writing "through the tough times in life, personal as well as national, and, increasingly, global," Hurley says, "I’ve found that focusing on a better future, and putting that into my work, has helped me deal with the news cycle and the rampant anxiety." My own reaction as a writer to public disasters and personal troubles is pretty much the opposite. I don't feel capable of creating fiction with the weight needed to confront such crises. The problems of my characters seem to trivialize by contrast the real-world distress around us. Instead, I've turned to composing lighter pieces, stories featuring hints of humor and protagonists with believable but not dire problems (such as my recent novella "Yokai Magic," a contemporary light paranormal romance inspired by Japanese folklore) rather than backstories that abound in horrors and tragedies. Also, on a personal level, working on a story that I can hope will entertain readers as well as myself not only helps to distract me from whatever I'm worrying about but can cheer me with a sense of having accomplished something.

Some critics might label taking refuge from real-world problems in fiction, whether weighty or light, "escapism." Tolkien dealt with this charge many decades ago, asserting that such critics confuse "the escape of the prisoner" with the "flight of the deserter"? If we find ourselves in "prison," why should we be blamed for trying to get out? Hurley herself makes it clear that "this doesn’t mean closing one’s eyes to the horror." A fictional vision doesn't have to equate to "the flight of the deserter"; rather, according to her, "We are what we immerse ourselves in. We are the stories we tell ourselves."

Coincidentally, this week the local Annapolis newspaper, the CAPITAL, published a column by psychologist Scott Smith headlined, "How to stay happy in a world filled with sad events." He discusses how to deal with the modern condition of being "inundated with tragedy." He makes the very cogent point, "Our human brain is not really built to process this ongoing flow of tragic and negative events. We live with a brain that is tooled for a much slower pace...." Like Hurley's column, Smith's emphasizes the emotional and physiological stress caused by being constantly bombarded with negative images in the 24-hour news cycle. He mentions, in addition, "Our brain is also not very good at placing tragedy in context or calculating probability." When we hear about high-profile, terrifying, but extremely rare disasters, our brains are wired to react to these remote (for the vast majority of us) contingencies as if they were "imminent threats." Smith lists several suggestions of ways to reorient our thinking and appreciate the good things in our own lives, remedies that collectively boil down to "focusing on the positive and limiting our exposure to negative events that are out of our control." He would doubtless agree with Hurley that we, as writers, should resist allowing stress to drain our energies and instead cultivate the positive benefits of exercising our creativity.

I've probably quoted C. S. Lewis's refreshing perspective on global problems here before, but it's too relevant not to include now. This passage comes from his essay on living in an atomic age—demonstrating that news-related stress is far from a recent phenomenon:

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. "How are we to live in an atomic age?" I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' . . . .

"In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt