Tag: apocalyptic fiction

Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday

Monday morning after two consecutive nights of insomnia. It’s been so long since I’ve had it–the night after my surgery was the last time, but it didn’t really affect me terribly much because I wasn’t really all that mobile anyway–but this morning I am fatigued. My body just feels exhausted. I didn’t feel well all weekend, and while I do feel somewhat better this morning in that regard, I am so physically tired that I am not really sure how I am going to get through the day–I have PT this morning–let alone return to the office tomorrow. Hopefully I will sleep tonight. It’s also cold this morning–not even fifty degrees, with the high predicted at sixty, so I had to switch it from air conditioning to heat when I got up. I also feel a bit nauseous, which is going to make PT a lot of fun this morning. Paul had a bug of some sort late last week, something similar to this–his was mostly fatigue–which of course has me worried about being sick before I return to work. But it may be just dehydration again; so I am going to try to get myself as rehydrated today as I can–I always forget how shitty being dehydrated makes you feel and I have the symptoms of that again (cottonmouth, dark urine, etc.). I’m working on eating a bagel slathered with cream cheese right now, and those carbs have already made me feel somewhat better already. I don’t think I am eating enough, either…which is probably not smart while recovering from a surgery.

I was exhausted all day yesterday, so spent most of it in my easy chair. I did read for a while, but mostly just was laying there, unable to do much of anything or to focus at all. Paul got another tattoo yesterday, and when he got home we watched the Mother God documentary series on MAX (it really is amazing what people will believe) and then Leave the World Behind on Netflix, which is an apocalyptic story, but focussed mainly on the small cast of characters, thrown together when everything starts to go bad, and what it would be like to be in that situation–not knowing what’s going on, but knowing something is and it’s bad–and it has a good cast who are great in their roles. These kinds of movies are interesting to me because I inevitably wonder how well I would do in that kind of situation–and then I laugh at myself because the default is, of course, that you would be a survivor who’d find a way to get through it…when the truth is most of us wouldn’t do well. I can barely handle the heat here when the power’s out in the summer, let alone living without power for an extended period of time. My stove is electric, so without power (they still have power in the movie, by the way) I wouldn’t be able to even cook anything.

Although I think my favorite thing about the entire movie is it opens with Julia Roberts basically booking a vacation rental for her family on the spur of the moment and when asked by her husband (Ethan Hawke) why, she goes on this little tear about how awful people are and she hates them all and wants to get away from them for a little while. The movie also plays into one of my primal fears; that I’ll be away from home when something terrible like this happens…Bouchercon being in San Diego over Labor Day weekend a few months ago had me all kinds of stressed–what if there’s a hurricane while I’m gone? How would I ever get home? What about Paul? My anxiety doesn’t make those sorts of things any easier on me, either.

I am also changing medications, and I can’t help but wonder if that has something to do with the not feeling well–but i changed the meds starting yesterday, so that had no impact whatsoever in my not feeling well Saturday and not sleeping well that night, but it could be why I had trouble sleeping last night and why I feel so out of it this morning. My brain isn’t tired, and can focus, but my body just feels exhausted and walking around has been tiring–which means the PT, which is deceptively tiring, may wear me out today and make me useless for the rest of the day, which just can’t happen, you know? Being sick this weekend basically lost the whole weekend for me–I thought I’d worn myself out running errands Saturday morning, but it was definitely more than that.

And now it’s time for me to fly. Wish me luck with my PT, and I’ll check in with you again later.

Also Sprach Zarathustra

Yesterday was a day.

Never mind why–it is simply too tedious for me to get into any detail and trust me, you’d be bored to tears–but the one nice thing about it was once it was finally over and donw with and I was safely inside the Lost Apartment and in my LSU sweats, with a purring kitty sleeping in my lap, I was able to rate rested and relaxed and now, hopefully I’ll be able to get my life back under some kind of control. That would be so lovely.I work a longer day now on Fridays–five hours instead of four–but shifting to coming in later in the day was an extremely smart move.

But the good news is that I was able to finally finish reading Rob Hart’s wonderful novel, The Warehouse.

the warehouse

Well, I’m dying!

A lot of men make it to the end of their life and they don’t know they’ve reached it. Just the lights go off one day. Here I am with a deadline.

I don’t have time to write a book about my life, like everyone has been telling me I should, so this’ll have to do. A blog seems pretty fitting, doesn’t it? I haven’t been sleeping much lately, so this gives me something to keep myself occupied at night.

Anyway, sleep is for people who lack ambition.

The rise in popularity  in dystopian fiction since the turn of the century isn’t really that difficult to understand; the world is kind of on fire and each day we seem to be inching our way to the inevitable collapse of civilization as we now know it. I do recognize how pessimistic that thought is, but it’s one I’ve been finding myself having more and more as the years have passed since the century dawned with so much promise back in 1/1/00. Remember how exciting the new century seemed back then, when it was fresh and new and full of promises? Yeah, well. Who knew? I wonder if people felt the same way in 1919…but given they’d just gotten through the first world war and the Spanish flu pandemic that killed millions, probably.

Early in the 1990’s, as queer equality issues began to become more and more mainstream–with the inevitable holier-than-thou nasty religious pushback–I wrote down many pages of thoughts and ideas I had about a dystopian future world, one in which queer people finally obtained equality only for there to be a horrific and horrendous pushback, similar to the one depicted in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that pushed back against feminism and women’s equality. I saw an America where evangelical Christianity was encoded into our law; where people of color and other undesirables began to disappear as they were blamed from everything wrong with modern society and the economy; and where those unaffected by those prejudices and legalized bigotry turned a blind eye to the suffering of fellow Americans as long as they could pay their bills and buy nice things for their family. Since that original idea–which was easy to scoff at by friends I talked about it with, as they weren’t queer or marginalized–I’ve come back to that idea, time and again, as the idea sometimes seems to be taking root in reality. I tend to avoid dystopian fiction, as a general rule; I’ve read Brave New World, 1984, The Stand, Alas Babylon, The Handmaid’s Tale and many others; I’ve watched the Mad Max films. I generally try to avoid it, to be honest; I find our the dystopia evident in our reality far more frightening and oppressive than anything I might find in fiction.

But I couldn’t get into The Hunger Games  or any of the others published in the twenty-first century to great sales and acclaim; just had zero to no interest. I got into the zombie apocalypse stuff for a while, with The Walking Dead, but even it eventually devolved into misery/torture porn and I lost interest.

But Rob Hart’s The Warehouse…I don’t know; for some reason as soon as I heard the concept behind it, months before its publication date, I knew I wanted to read it. Part of the exhausting frustration I’ve felt over the last few weeks as I slogged away at the volunteer project has partly been due to my inability to spend more than twenty minutes or so at a time with the book; the one good thing, as I said already, about today’s errands was the ability to sit in a waiting room for long stretches of time with nothing to do other than read–and occasionally delete emails from my phone.

What a wonderful, frightening, and all too realistic book Rob Hart has gifted the world with!

The Warehouse is set in a world in the not-too-distant future where almost everything has collapsed. This collapse of functionality of the general society isn’t explained; but it has to do with climate change and economic shifts and rising seas. One company, Cloud, which allows everyone to buy everything they need on-line and have it delivered quickly via drones, with MotherClouds scattered all over the United States, has pretty much monopolized means of production and delivery; their employees are given free housing and so forth and live in climate controlled dorms that are all connected with the warehouses and entertainment complexes; enclosed cities, where your every move and your every purchase is monitored. There’s health care and communal bathrooms and showers and you need your Cloud wristband to get anywhere or do anything.

Sound all too frighteningly familiar?

The story is told from three different points of view; the book opens with with a blog entry from Gibson, the man who thought up and founded Cloud and became worth billions as he essentially took over the United States; Paxton, a small business owner who invented a thing called Perfect Egg, so that you could make a perfect hardboiled egg in the microwave and peel it perfectly every time, a business that flourished until Cloud’s demands for deeper and deeper discounts eventually forced him out of business and has now landed a job there; and Zinnia, a young woman we don’t know much about who is also starting work there, but she has an ulterior motive. Zinnia and Paxton eventually cross paths, become friends, and as he works security, she begins manipulating him for information as she also starts to develop feelings for him.

It’s a terrific story, very well told, with very smart things to say about capitalism, consumerism, and how easy it is to compromise your principles in exchange for security. Bright and intelligent and well-written, you can’t help rooting for both Paxton and Zinnia to somehow make it through everything and somehow come out on top.

Most dystopian tales deal with the aftermath of nuclear war, or Big Government taking over, or some kind of religious fascism, but rarely, if ever, has the dystopia arisen out of capitalism and consumerism, and Rob Hart hits the bull’s eye squarely with this one. (Well, also Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, but Ayn Rand deserves many posts all by herself, and she wishes she had one tenth of Rob Hart’s story-telling skill)

This is destined to be a classic, and I do hope Ron Howard does the story justice on film.

In closing this, I’d like to thank Rob–and other writers like him, like Ben Winters and Adam Sternbergh–for pushing the envelope of the crime genre, melding crime and speculative fiction in clever, innovative stories that broaden our genre and enable them to tell bigger stories than we customarily see in crime fiction. I loved this book from start to finish, and it’s so layered and clever–the development of Gibson, through his blog entries, his justifications for his egotism and so forth, was chillingly genius.

Read this book. It’s amazing.