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Afterword

JOHN RINGO

“There is something about the destruction of civilization that connects with the modern reader.”

—Gary Poole


Humanity has become a mass of ciphers gathered together in huge lumps called cities and countries. No individual human, from a person working in a mall to the President of the United States has any real control over his or her existence and even presidents have little long-term effect on history.

People go through life affecting little or nothing save, if they so choose, by having children who may or may not have more effect. By the same token they live lives of quiet ineffect in relative security and generally free from violence. This is the nature of a truly “good” civilization. That it is boring and humdrum. When it ceases to be so it is by definition “bad things happening.”

But humans are not designed for “boring.” We evolved in small tribes, constantly on the ragged edge of destruction and scrabbling for survival against both the environment and other humans. In World War Two, the height of human misery and violence since the Age of Agriculture, approximately five percent of the planet’s population died due to violence. The current rate, despite how it might seem, is below one percent.

Early human hunter-gatherers on the other hand died from violence twenty percent of the time, four times the rate during the years 1937–1945, and for hundreds of thousands of years. The history of the Paleolithic is a history of constant warfare to make Mad Max pale in comparison.

It is also a history of small groups gathering together to defeat well-nigh impossible odds. It is that, in my opinion, that is the resonance to every “post-apocalyptic” story, a harkening to an age when things were simply do or die and everyone in the group knew each other and had the choice of cooperate to survive or die.

There is no “every man a cipher” aspect to post-apocalyptic fiction as there was none to those early tribes. Good guys or bad guys, every character knows every other character, their good side and bad, their strengths and weaknesses. Every individual of the tribe must strive with their last ounce of everything to ensure the tribe’s survival. Every character is important to the survival, for or against, of every other.

Apocalyptic is pre-medieval.

Apocalyptic is…primal.

Thus as long as humans maintain boring, humdrum civilization, post-apocalyptic or apocalyptic fiction will remain popular. Because it is who we are in our hearts.

At our core, we are all savages.


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