This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
ASK.
![After the Apocalypse
by Maureen F. McHugh (2011)
“The music was disco. The beat was thumping. I went out and I started dancing, too. My head was still kind of light and as I was dancing, I felt lighter and lighter. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. I thought about those girls in the bathroom. And what it would be like to be able to decide to go to Hawaii. About what it would be like ot be them, or to have gotten the other kind of injection”
—from “Honeymoon”
[…]
“‘The didn’t know anything about the woods, just two guys up from Biloxi or something, kind of guys who, you know, manage a copy store or a fast-food joint or something, thinking that now that civilization is falling apart they can be like the hero in one of their video games.’”
—from “After the Apocalypse”
Often, the most interesting thing about a post-apocalyptic work (or really any half-assed speculative work) is the world itself—the overgrown weeds, broken glass, and the precious caches of looted canned goods. The characters are mere avatars. Look at Cormac McCarthy—the man, his son aren’t real people. They’re the eyes we use to look down the road at the horrors that await. We turn pages with the same detachment that links the trigger of a gun to the R1 button on a PS3 controller. But McHugh’s characters are all living (or dying), breathing people with names and histories, selfish, horny, hungry, stupid. This shit is all deeply satisfying.
“After I moved to Los Angeles, I realized that I had written a book about bad things happening and I didn’t have an earthquake kit. This could be embarrassing—Writer of Apocalyptic Fiction Unprepared For Earthquake. This is exactly the kind of thing I am trying to figure out in my writing. What can I be prepared for and what is basically out of my control and how awful is what is out of my control going to be?”
—Maureen F. McHugh And The Earthquake Kit](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_matkq7FtIG1qb4dk8o1_500.jpg)
After the Apocalypse
by Maureen F. McHugh (2011)
“The music was disco. The beat was thumping. I went out and I started dancing, too. My head was still kind of light and as I was dancing, I felt lighter and lighter. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. I thought about those girls in the bathroom. And what it would be like to be able to decide to go to Hawaii. About what it would be like ot be them, or to have gotten the other kind of injection”
—from “Honeymoon”
[…]
“‘The didn’t know anything about the woods, just two guys up from Biloxi or something, kind of guys who, you know, manage a copy store or a fast-food joint or something, thinking that now that civilization is falling apart they can be like the hero in one of their video games.’”
—from “After the Apocalypse”
Often, the most interesting thing about a post-apocalyptic work (or really any half-assed speculative work) is the world itself—the overgrown weeds, broken glass, and the precious caches of looted canned goods. The characters are mere avatars. Look at Cormac McCarthy—the man, his son aren’t real people. They’re the eyes we use to look down the road at the horrors that await. We turn pages with the same detachment that links the trigger of a gun to the R1 button on a PS3 controller. But McHugh’s characters are all living (or dying), breathing people with names and histories, selfish, horny, hungry, stupid. This shit is all deeply satisfying.
“After I moved to Los Angeles, I realized that I had written a book about bad things happening and I didn’t have an earthquake kit. This could be embarrassing—Writer of Apocalyptic Fiction Unprepared For Earthquake. This is exactly the kind of thing I am trying to figure out in my writing. What can I be prepared for and what is basically out of my control and how awful is what is out of my control going to be?”
Who “we,” white man?
Ursula K. Le Guin
http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2012/06/18/le-guin-s-hypothesis/
“And [Scott] spends the whole time ogling these stuck up gay high school kids and saying how he wants this one or that one, and how the person who loves him should never love anybody else. Then he reads me out this article in a gay paper that was in there about gay marriage and how important it is for gays to realize how necessary the right to be married is. And be sexually and psychologically responsible, because we’d been through AIDS already. And I’m sittin’ there thinkin’, I don’t want one guy. I want maybe nine or ten. And I want each of them to bring home another nine or ten, and we’ll all fuck: little guys, big guys, black guys, white guys, Chinese guys. In the library basement bathroom, a month ago, I had a feller what only had one leg. He was Filipino or somethin’ and didn’t speak no English. We practically tore down the stall. I thought were gonna come in and catch us. I been lookin’ for that motherfucker ever since. I ain’t never known nobody with AIDS—”
“I have, mostly back when I was your age. But some things have changed. Though if you hang around with black folks—”
“Hey, I like old guys, fat guys, hairy guys, black guys, white guys—yeah, I wouldn’t mind somebody like me, too. But Scott wants to be safe and happy and…monogamous. He doesn’t even life the guys he sucks of on the team. But it’s like there’s a fucking rule—”
Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
The pulp hero, though he may be a renegade, is a guy who doesn’t feel. Anything. Ever. And for the adolescent male — pummeled by emotions left and right, whether arising from sexuality or resulting from his necessary encounters with authority — this hero is a blessing, a relief and a release. The world he lives in, where feelings are totally under control, looks to the adolescent boy like heaven! This hero’s lack of feeling — like Star Trek’s Spock — is what allows him to be a genius, or allows him to shoot the bad guys and/or aliens, without a quiver to his lip.
Samuel R. Delany, interviewed by Scott Westerfield.
If gay people did not exist, heterosexual people would have had to invent us.
—Samuel R. Delany
Outsiders In/Of Science Fiction and the Fantastic
James Tiptree, Jr.
