How do we deal with warnings received? Do we take action and are suddenly stimulated by the alarm? Or are we, as Jessie Greengrass wrote in her novel The High House, "It's like a static [tune] it"? Or, as Jenny Offfill said in her Orwell Award shortlisted novel "Weather," continue to sit in "Twilight," refusing to participate in what we know, But would rather ignore it?
With the arrival of the end of the world, there are fewer and fewer words on these issues. After COP26-the United Nations Climate Conference, known as our world's "best last hope", declared failure shortly after it ended-it feels like we are on a one-way road to the end of the world. We have been on this road for some time. Crisis after crisis has plunged us into normalized turmoil: 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the 2008 economic collapse, devastating earthquakes and tsunamis, political turmoil, the arrival of data-driven surveillance capitalism, the COVID-19 virus And an environmental disaster is leading to the sixth mass extinction on this planet. These are just the recent global upheavals that have led to a relentless, accelerated collective feeling of doom.
How do we understand our own death when we sit and groggy like frogs in the boiling water? The rent expires next week and the avocados in the store are sold out. We are all trying to create some kind of normalcy only after nearly two years of the pandemic. How can we start dealing with all these disasters?
Writers always respond to the world around them, and this is no exception. In 2021, a large number of novelists will respond to environmental, political, and technological disasters through novels. When we are about to end another year, how doomsday life on earth has become, we look back at some of the novels of this year, these novels fight our collective "Twilight City" and the future of the future.
From the end of the world-"the crisis slides from a distant threat to an imminent possibility," young Carlo described this way-Greengrass's novel "The Mansion" is set in a rural village in Suffolk. Although the world ignored the imminent environmental disaster until it was too late, Carlo's stepmother, an outstanding scientist, prepared a house for the whole family in accordance with the careful plan of the doomsday preparers. Away from floods and mudslides, Caro and her family are now in a situation similar to that of the wealthy in the north of the world. "We are all at the mercy of the weather, but to varying degrees," thought Carlo at the beginning of the novel. As the climate crisis continues to rage, geography and wealth will save or kill most of us. This book evokes Noah's Ark, explores the responsibilities of parents during environmental disasters, and raises a disturbing question: What is the ethics of bringing children into a burning world?
The Danish writer Ursula Scavenius also explored this theme in her collection of short stories "Dolls" (Jennifer Russell translated into English, published by Lori). Opening with the sound of the violin and the fall of ashes, the story of the series takes place in a European world that may be the 20th or 22nd century. "The bow of the violin bites the strings like we bite the bones of a chicken," the young protagonist recounted as the music played mercilessly. The narrator is a little girl in a wheelchair. She feeds her sister through the cellar grille as they play with dolls with sticky hair.
Scavenius' writing is ruthless, and The Dolls is a story full of post-apocalyptic horror. A monster called a "machine" where the girl's parents work, hoping that they can be alone and continue to roll closer to home. Every time the narrator looks away and then looks back at the machine, it will come closer until it is almost above them. Like the climate crisis of The High House, the story of Scavenius is about the normalization of imminent terrible disasters. The Wawa family did not flee, but accepted the rolling regime and adapted to its horror until it was too late.
The Dolls captures the fate that has been shrouded in life for the past ten years: when 20 fossil fuel companies are responsible for one-third of all carbon emissions, what is the point of recycling? What difference does one vote make in an election? Why fight against big data capitalists who sell our actions, desires, and ideas to us? Wouldn't it be easier to give up and embrace any damn future that is coming?
In the midst of endless and normalizing disasters, recent dystopias can provide us with a clear focus. In Ros Anderson's novel The Hierarchies, sex, power, and desire are commoditized in the form of futuristic sex dolls. When the box was just opened, one of the dolls, Sylv.ie, was designed to be the perfect "wife" of her master, and this man is simply referred to as the husband. Sylv.ie's life revolves around sex, but she can also have witty and polite conversations and play chess — of course, always let her husband win.
Like Westworld and The Stepford Wives, The Hierarchies explored the intersection of technology and patriarchy and described concerns about gender bias in software. In the novel, Anderson stripped off the acting gender—the dolls were put on makeup and could shed real tears in order to play the idealized “woman” for the host—and also positioned sex and capitalism as coming from the same impulse: social power.
Sylv.ie's downfall (or "becoming") began when she wrote a diary and gained awareness beyond her programming settings. She understands the social movement fighting to empower the "enhancers" and the real reason for her existence: the desire to outsource sex, just like all labor areas in The Hierarchies world. In her groundbreaking 1985 article "The Robot Manifesto," technical feminist Donna Haraway wrote: "Robots" are a question of fiction and life experience that changed women in the late 20th century. experience of. This is a struggle between life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. "
As Haraway called in her manifesto, Sylv.ie broke the so-called strict boundaries between humans and non-humans, wives and machines, consciousness and software. Although the technology-driven world of The Hierarchies is not the feminist utopia envisaged in the Haraway Manifesto, this novel proves the point of this article: We created the Cyborg, but we also created the Cyborg-born world. If we do not take action, the future world will only be a version of the unequal and unjust social hierarchy that currently exists.
Technology is also the core crisis of Ishiguro's eighth novel, Clara and the Sun. The narrator, the girl AF Klara, an artificial friend, lives in the showroom and looks at the world through the window. She talks with AF colleagues every day and observes the sun (powering their technology) passing through the sky in her daily journey. Klara is the latest version of Alexa or Siri in her world: complex technology of human shape, designed through software to recognize emotions and provide companionship for children. Throughout the novel, Clara deals with feelings in more and more subtle ways until she does not simply recognize them, but feels them herself.
Ishiguro constructs his world through Clara's limited perspective, leaving readers with a lot of room for imagination. Clara and the Sun may happen in 2021 or 2081: the characters are designated as "premium" by their clothes, and the children spend time staring at the "rectangle." After buying Clara for a sick young girl named Josie, she is both a servant and a friend, a toy and a tutor, a product and a parent. "Are you a guest anyway? Or do I treat you as a vacuum cleaner?" said a word to Clara.
Like Anderson, Ishiguro is interested in portraying slowly deepening consciousness. Clara and Sun share many similar themes with his early beloved novel Never Let Me Go, in which orphan clones grew up in a British boarding school and then collected organs for their organs. But since "Never Let Me Go" was published 16 years ago, the world has become more cruel. In Clara's world, technological progress makes people "unemployed", and scientists are arguing about what makes humans: "Part of us refuses to let go," a character thoughtfully. "I want to continue to believe that each of us has some unreachable parts in our hearts. The unique things will not transfer."
"Clara and the Sun" is about a crisis of consciousness. As Clara's understanding of her world—and her role in it—expanded, she became more and more humane, relying on misguided beliefs, dignified martyrdom, and the burden of parental responsibility to guide her The consciousness enters the light. Ishiguro reversed the hierarchy of humans and non-humans to ask: What happens when AI becomes more humane than humans? What happens when robots bear the burden of human suffering? What kind of beautiful new world can technology lead us to?
Fiction is very powerful, especially when most of us are already living in multiple online and offline worlds and the debate about what is "real" and "false" is still going on. Disaster always looms over us, but the "Twilight" state where many of us have sat comfortably for too long is coming to an end. These fictitious post-apocalyptic worlds about technological, environmental, and social crises do not simply provide an escape from reality, but provide us with something better: exploring the space of hypothetical futures from dystopia to utopia. See where we can go, these stories say. See what kind of people we can become.
End: Surviving the imaginary disaster the world has now withdrawn from 404 ink