In November 2018, the largest and most deadly wildfire in California history destroyed entire towns and displaced thousands of people. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey drowned southeast Texas under punishing, endless rain. And in early 2020, Australia continues to grapple with bushfires that threatened to engulf the continent over its summer. Apocalyptic-scale disasters happen every day (and more often now, as climate change intensifies weather patterns all over the world.) Apocalyptic disaster isn’t always the weather, either: it’s human-made, by war or by industrial accident; by system failure or simple individual error. Or it’s biological: the flu of 1918, the Ebola outbreaks in 2014, COVID-19 now.
In science fiction, apocalypse and what comes after is an enduring theme. Whether it’s pandemic (like in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Stephen King’s The Stand), nuclear (such as Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “Thunder and Roses” or the 1984 BBC drama Threads), or environmental (Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, and a slew of brilliant short fiction, including Tobias Buckell’s “A World to Die For” (Clarkesworld 2018) and Nnedi Okorafor’s “Spider the Artist” (Lightspeed 2011), disaster, apocalypse, and destruction fascinate the genre. If science fiction is, as sometimes described, a literature of ideas, then apocalyptic science fiction is the literature of how ideas go wrong—an exploration of all of our bad possible futures, and what might happen after.
Most of apocalyptic literature focuses on all the terrible ways that society goes wrong after a society-disrupting disaster, though. This is especially prevalent in television and film—think of The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later where, while the zombies might be the initial threat, most of the horrible violence is done by surviving humans to one another. This kind of focus on antisocial behavior—in fact, the belief that after a disaster humans will revert to some sort of ‘base state of nature’—reflects very common myths that exist throughout Western culture. We think that disaster situations cause panic, looting, assaults, the breakdown of social structures—and we make policy decisions based on that belief, assuming that crime rises during a crisis and that anti-crime enforcement is needed along with humanitarian aid.
But absolutely none of this is true.
The myth that panic, looting, and antisocial behavior increases during the apocalypse (or apocalyptic-like scenarios) is in fact a myth—and has been solidly disproved by multiple scientific studies. The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program, a research group within the United States Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), has produced research that shows over and over again that “disaster victims are assisted first by others in the immediate vicinity and surrounding area and only later by official public safety personnel […] The spontaneous provision of assistance is facilitated by the fact that when crises occur, they take place in the context of ongoing community life and daily routines—that is, they affect not isolated individuals but rather people who are embedded in networks of social relationships.” (Facing Hazards and Disasters: Understanding Human Dimensions, National Academy of Sciences, 2006). Humans do not, under the pressure of an emergency, socially collapse. Rather, they seem to display higher levels of social cohesion, despite what media or government agents might expect…or portray on TV. Humans, after the apocalypse, band together in collectives to help one another—and they do this spontaneously. Disaster response workers call it ‘spontaneous prosocial helping behavior’, and it saves lives.
Spontaneous mobilization to help during and immediately after an apocalyptic shock has a lot of forms. Sometimes it’s community-sourced rescue missions, like the volunteer boat rescue group who call themselves the Cajun Navy. During Hurricane Harvey, the Cajun Navy—plus a lot of volunteer dispatchers, some thousands of miles away from the hurricane—used the walkie-talkie app Zello to crowdsource locations of people trapped by rising water and send rescuers to them. Sometimes it is the volunteering of special skills. In the aftermath of the 2017 Mexico City earthquake, Mexican seismologists—who just happened to be in town for a major conference on the last disastrous Mexico City earthquake!—spent the next two weeks volunteering to inspect buildings for structural damage. And sometimes it is community-originated aid—this New Yorker article about 2018’s prairie fires in Oklahoma focuses on the huge amount of post-disaster help which flowed in from all around the affected areas, often from people who had very little to spare themselves. In that article, the journalist Ian Frazier writes of the Oklahomans:
“Trucks from Iowa and Michigan arrived with donated fenceposts, corner posts, and wire. Volunteer crews slept in the Ashland High School gymnasium and worked ten-hour days on fence lines. Kids from a college in Oregon spent their spring break pitching in. Cajun chefs from Louisiana arrived with food and mobile kitchens and served free meals. Another cook brought his own chuck wagon. Local residents’ old friends, retired folks with extra time, came in motor homes and lived in them while helping to rebuild. Donors sent so much bottled water it would have been enough to put out the fire all by itself, people said. A young man from Ohio raised four thousand dollars in cash and drove out and gave it to the Ashland Volunteer Fire Department, according to the Clark County Gazette. The young man said that God had told him to; the fireman who accepted the donation said that four thousand was exactly what it was going to cost to repair the transmission of a truck that had failed in the fire, and both he and the young man cried.”
These behaviors match the roles and responsibilities that members of a society display before the apocalyptic disaster. Ex-military volunteers reassemble in groups resembling military organizations; women in more patriarchal societies gravitate towards logistics and medical jobs while men end up taking more physical risks; firefighters travel to fight fires far away from their homes. The chef José Andrés served more than three million meals over three months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Humans all over the world display this behavior after disasters. They display it consistently, no matter what kind of disaster is happening or what culture they come from.
What really happens after an apocalypse? Society works better than it ever had, for a brief time.
The writer Rebecca Solnit wrote an entire book about this phenomenon, and she called it A Paradise Built in Hell. She points out that it is really the fear on the part of powerful people that powerless people will react to trauma with irrational violence that is preventing us from seeing how apocalypse really shapes our societies. Solnit calls this ‘elite panic’, and contrasts it with the idea of ‘civic temper’—the utopian potential of meaningful community.
Apocalyptic science fiction tells us so much about how the future is going to hurt—or could. But it can also explore how the future will be full of spontaneous helping; societies that bloom for a night, a few weeks, a month, to repair what has been broken. The human capacity to give aid and succor seems to be universal, and triggered quite specifically by the disruption and horror of disaster. Science fiction might let us see that utopian potential more clearly, and imagine how we might help each other in ways we never knew we were capable of.
This article was originally published in November 2018. You can find the original version here.
Arkady Martine writes speculative fiction when she isn’t writing Byzantine history. She is overly fond of borders, rhetoric, and liminal spaces. Her novel A Memory Called Empire is available from Tor Books. Find her on Twitter as @ArkadyMartine.
Predators will be predators in any situation, just as good people will be good people. In the up close and personal disasters I’ve been involved with, I’ve seen this every time. For all those good people helping, con men and thieves will also be out helping themselves. On a larger scale, I certainly agree that humans are awesome as a collective force for good, but it’s foolish to believe that people will change who they are because of a disaster.
MB: True, but you also sometimes see criminals participating in relief efforts just because they’re in the same boat as everyone else affected. After the 1995 earthquake that devastated Kobe there were yakuza handing out bottled water long before the Red Cross arrived.
Actually, you see that dynamic in fiction as well: villain characters who try to prevent the apocalypse just because hey, it’s their world too and they weren’t done with it! Some favourite examples are Zelazny’s ‘A Night in the Lonesome October’ and Eve Forward’s ‘Villains by Necessity.’
“Look for the helpers…”
ISTM that apocalyptic SF is a very different case from the examples cited; when one small part of the world is crushed everyone with energy to spare can assist. The closest we’ve come to an apocalypse in the First World in modern times may be the “Spanish” flu pandemic; I’ve seen bits and pieces recently about both care and stupidity (at least) at that time. Over the entire world, the Syrian and Yemeni wars are the obvious examples — but those are ongoing, where both the essay and apocalyptic SF look at what happens after the disaster has abated. This does not mean that apocalyptic SF is guaranteed to be true; it’s a guess written for dramatic purposes.
I have to agree with @@.-@.CHip: This article makes a lovely and valid point – that we tend to pull together in the even of disaster (or even of Disaster), but it is important to remember that Apocalyptic Fiction does not tend to deal with a local phenomenon but with a global and ongoing process of disasters, in which not just local systems but Civilisation as we know it has gone kaput.
We haven’t seen anything like that in a long while and – God Willing – will not see anything like that for a long time yet to come. †
There’s a scholarly work on disaster response that makes the point people react much better in the face of disaster than they expect. There are figures to prove it.
I’ve heard about similar studies that show humans are good at being “heroes” but not as good at doing the necessary work to prevent disasters or provide the safety net.
Still, I do hope humanity will show it’s better side here. I do believe we can.
Highly-contagious-disease epidemics and pandemics are different from most other disasters. Instead of bringing people together in a literal/physical sense, they force us to separate and be isolated from each other wherever possible. The internet is now helping people in some parts of the world stay connected in order to try to meet each others’ physical needs along with providing emotional support, a tool we haven’t had for most of history, but what we can safely and legally do to help each other is exceedingly restricted.
Maybe elite panic exists because elites need to believe that society would collapse without elite guidance.
@9, Very likely!
There’s a superhero novel, In Hero Years I’m Dead, that addresses the phenomena of positive civilian reaction to crisis. The climax is a battle of heroes against villains in the streets. Our protagonist wonders briefly where everybody is, as they aren’t fleeing en mass as he’d expect. He eventually learns that what they’re doing is keeping under cover but darting out to drag wounded to safety or standing guard against looters or evacuating damaged buildings. When the shooting stops they come out to tidy up the damage, round up henchmen and applaud the heroes. He and the other heroes are suitably impressed.