The noxious orange smoke that fell over New York this month reminded me of the tatami room games my husband and I used to play. “Do we have what it takes to survive the apocalypse?” It became even more unbearable to think lightheartedly about But now suddenly versions of our game are popping up everywhere in new and almost inevitable genres. It’s a story that revisits the trauma of the pandemic even worse, but it’s plausible. — Scenario. What makes these works doubly moving is that many of them have children at their center.
There’s Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven, which depicts the aftermath of the swine flu, which will become a much-talked-about series on HBO Max in 2021, when an 8-year-old girl has an infection. It is a story that somehow survives. Surrogate parental help for strangers. HBO’s video game version of The Last of Us, released in January, features a pandemic of zombies and fungus. A seemingly immune teenage girl is humanity’s only hope. Le Mans Aram’s upcoming 2020 novel Leaving the World, about a bourgeois family’s vacation gone so wrong, will feature a vague yet terrifying threat of doomsday. I’m doing it. Also loosely in this category are the shows “Yellowjackets” (2021-present) – women’s soccer team turns cannibal after plane crash – and “Class of ’07” (2023) – school Alumni reunion and climate change apocalypse overlap — and Netflix’s new 2019 Icelandic film Women of War (rebel activists attempt to stop environmental destruction) and adopt a child).
These stories, in many ways, are about how children can and will survive the chaos we leave behind, and what it will cost them to do so. In “Station Eleven,” the post-pans (children born after the pandemic) are simultaneously a beacon of optimism and recruited killers deployed by a self-proclaimed prophet who seeks to erase those who cling to past trauma. But also. And in “The Last of Us,” a potentially immune girl, Ellie (played by actor Vera Ramsey), is forced to murder to survive and gives her own life to find a cure for her. You’ll struggle with whether it’s worth the sacrifice. .
The anxiety these works explore—anxiety about the destruction of the planet and what we have done to make it possible—is evidence. suggestSome people’s desire to have children is influenced by anxiety about their future and the belief that not having children will prevent the worst from happening. But following children in these fictions who didn’t create their suffering situations is more than just a devastating guilt trip. Almost all of these stories portray children as our greatest hopes, just as we often do in real life. We must believe that children have resilience and ingenuity that adults lack. In these stories, when phones stop working and Amazon stops delivering, kids who aren’t too set in their ways can rebuild something and imagine something different. They are our victims, but they are also our saviors.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Lydia Millett’s 2020 novel The Children’s Bible. In this novel, a group of middle-aged college friends rent an old mansion for a summer reunion. Parents drink and ecstasy when a superstorm sets off a chain of events that erode society, while children—teens—are sharp-headed. They care for babies, grow food, and make plans for an unrecognizable future. This fantasy of youth-led solutions is both hopeful and a lamentable evasion of responsibility, Millet hints. (This piece reminds me a bit of Greta Thunberg’s rebuke to adults: “I don’t want you to have hope. I want you to panic.”) It is that the innocence was robbed in the period. There is always a hunch in those rare moments when children are allowed to be children in these stories. Zombies await at Halloween stores every time you run around an abandoned mall. “Is this really the only thing they’ve had to worry about?” ask about us “Boys. Movies. Decide which shirt goes with which skirt.”
This post-apocalyptic tale, now in production, is not the first to feature children prominently. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, published in 2006 in the early days of the so-called War on Terror, depicts a father and son after civilization is destroyed by an unnamed flash from the sky. (“Are we still good people?” the son asks his father, ignoring the pain of others struggling to survive.) of humans imagine a destroyed world. lost fertility. And hope lies with the only pregnant woman. Of course, one of the reasons these fictions bring children to the fore is that a world without them is the most doomed world. It is no coincidence that some of the earliest apocalyptic tales, such as the Biblical Flood and the ancient Mesopotamian poem “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, imagined that the world would be saved by bringing in “the seed of all living things.” . Later work will put it on the boat.
But perhaps more than specific fears of civilization-ending calamities, these fictions help us deal with the inevitable and terrifying truths on a personal level. Whatever state the world falls into or remains in, it will survive without us after our death, and unless tragedy strikes, our children will live in the world without us. will live in It doesn’t feel good to imagine, but it can be uplifting. They will go through things we can’t imagine, but they will probably do better than we do, even without our help.
