Are the novels of tomorrow written for today?

Mass surveillance, environmental disasters, the rise of technology; do these sound familiar? They are not only features of our favourite post-apocalyptic tales, but realities of the 21st century.  Why is it that we are so drawn to stories about our status quo coming to an end? Perhaps it is because these stories tell us more about our present than they do about our future.

Was ‘The Hunger Games’ so successful because we saw something in it that reminded us of ourselves?

If you were to turn on the news today, you would probably see Donald Trump’s face flash across the screen, accompanied by images of people suffering from the bubonic plague in Madagascar, or even men in business suits discussing the threat of a nuclear war. And yet, if you were to turn the pages of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games or Stephen King’s The Stand, you would find the same images in their writing.

Collins has created an empire out of The Hunger Games franchise, novels in which children from poor districts are encouraged to fight to the death on live television for the entertainment of the upper class, as punishment for a previous rebellion. This version of post-apocalyptic America begs the question: how different is this from our present reality? The President of the United States is a former reality TV star who has turned the role of presidency into more of a show than an occupation. The violence that Collins is portraying is something we already see in our movie theatres, news reports and history documentaries. Was The Hunger Games so successful because we saw something in it that reminded us of ourselves?

King exemplifies an abuse of power we still find today in figures such as Trump…

In Stephen King’s The Stand, King portrays a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by disease in which the survivors must deal with the tyranny of Randall Flagg, a supernatural being who aims to control them. However, a nuclear bomb kills Flagg’s followers at the end of the book. The power of nuclear warfare and disease in this novel acts as a warning sign from King to his readers of the vulnerability of humanity. The threat of nuclear warfare is one that has existed before and after ‘The Stand’ was published in 1978. In Randall Flagg, King not only masterfully portrays a conniving villain, but also exemplifies an abuse of power we still find today in figures such as Trump. The novel poses these relevant issues in a way that allows its readers to escape in the fantastical, and yet be repelled by the evil that can exist within both fiction and reality.

Outside of Collins’ and King’s novels, there are hundreds of others that draw readers in with their depictions of post-apocalyptic worlds. Despite the pessimistic tone of these books, it is important to remember that they (almost) always end with the heroes and heroines surviving the villains, the zombies and the disasters. Despite our fascination with the world post-apocalypse, we also seem to crave the knowledge that no matter what happens, we will overcome it.