An Apocalyptic Trifecta!

My youngest daughter, Zoë, came into this world in May, 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall came down. And by 1991, the Soviet Union had dissolved, ending the Cold War. "How lucky for you, my wee one," I said to her between spoonfuls of apple sauce. "You and your sisters will live free from the threat of nuclear annihilation that your mama and papa have known since they were babes!" What soaring potentials would thus be freed for their millennial generation, I thought! Little Zoë must have been the wiser right off the bat. One sign: my post-Cold-War child had no trouble getting the dark humour of Dr. Strangelove when she saw it as a pre-adolescent.

I maintain, however, that I wasn't wrong about our millennials' potential. They have continued to amaze me with their accomplishments and character through these years. But how wrong I was about the threat, as we now see more clearly than ever on this first week and the second month of 2022. perhaps our last as the civilization we have known.,We teeter on the brink of not one, but at least three global cataclysms, all of them anthropogenic: Global climate change, Fascism and the threat of war between nuclear-armed superpowers in Europe that pales the Cuban Missile Crisis on 1962.

Point well-merited fingers at politicians, policies,  and ideologies all we want. It's pretty clear now that: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves," as quips Cassius right on the button, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

Hell or high water, I'm determined never to let a little thing like doomsday impede my writing. I've got plenty of neuroses to do that.  In any case, we writers have never shied away from dark scenarios, the apocalypse, any number of post-apocalyptic setting and the premise that people are no damn good. The hero plods on, taciturn, cynical, yet (like us) searching surreptitiously for those missing better angels.

 R. Scott Bakker

I have no choice but take this particular bitter end in stride like any post-doomsday science fiction and fantasy fan. I hope my kids survive me somewhere far from ground zero.There are lessons to be learned from stories set in  grey, survivalist, post-calamitous worlds. Right now, the relentless pessimism of dark-side literature ages quickly from hip to sourly self-conscious. The dark side loses its intellectual charm on brink of genuine planetary disaster that threatens each of us and our loved one personally..The darkness is cooler when you're young,  and feel immortal despite the cigarette dangling from your curled lips.

It's all in the writing. The best of this subgenre of much-lauded doom-fantasy-stylists carry the day with powerful poetic style that it is in itself -- contrary to their pessimism -- inspirational. Margaret Atwood comes to mind. After a while I want to read about the oppressed of Gilead taking up arms against their smug, oppressive patriarchy and by opposing, kill the fuck out of them!. 

Another Canadian fantasy author, R. Scott Bakker, revels in darkness seemingly for itself rather than making any points. He creates worlds along the way, as in his Unholy Consul, Aspect-Emperor Series 4. The Unholy Consult (2017) is the fourth and final entry in the series which is a follow-up to the Prince of Nothing Trilogy (2004-2006).

 Comet? What comet?

Bakker never shies away from the darkest depths, the black holes of savagery that human conflict can create - all in the name of "sacred" causes. As we've recently been reminded in our everyday world there seems no actions humans won't undertake take for what they believe in - steeped in the arrogant notion that their noble ends give them license to depraved means,

Nothing new, except in the degree to which Bakker portrays his characters' malevolence. Can human beings ever "learn their lesson?" I'm with my early hero Mark Twain who looked at slavery and colonialism, perceived the human comedy and said no. 

The question emerges: Does darkness beget more darkness or lead to enlightenment? I'd guess the former, contrary to science fiction tropes -- but in line with another genre: post-apocalyptic films. Traditional scifi leavens the implied optimism of its gee-whiz tech with a customary footnote alluding to a previous era of global destruction. Even the idealistic canon of Star Trek's mythical galaxy envisions a preceding apocalyptic era out of which humankind had to climb. Not so simple a task, as demonstrated convincingly by the black humour of Terry Gilliam's 1996 punk-surreal Twelve Monkeys.

       Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe: 12 Monkeys    

The multi-timeline premise of Twelve Monkeys seems even more plausible now -- after two years of Covid and its enabling demagogues. A human-caused, human-bungled pandemic has destroyed civilization. Willis' time travelling mission to snuff out its cause seems even more Quixotic now that when I first saw the movie. Back in the 1990s I still assumed that capable leaders would rise to the occasion, instead of the neo-Fascist thugs of our era who spun death and illness to their advantage.

Among its finer points, Dr. Strangelove endures because it belied the basic bullshit of the Cold War -- the self-serving characterization of it as a Manichean struggle between "the free world" and "godless Communism." In reality, there was chicanery, muddle-headedness and madess aplenty to go around. There still is. Humanity's current triple threat derives from a common toxic source overfed by the avarice of a few and the apathy of the many.  

Today with Soviet communism long gone, we see a non-ideological, hyper-nationalist. petro-Fascist Russia led by gangster Putin corrupting democracies worldwide while it uses his laundered billions to empower Thug-Trump and Kremlin-slime-ball Lukashenko, the disputed president of Belarus. With capitalists like these who needs communists?  I'll take Marx any day -- served up as social democrats, please.

Why does Russia -- or the United States or China -- for that matter, play at superpower games in the 21st century at all? It's plain that no matter where you live, the greatest challenges to existence - global pandemics, war and climate change -  are global. They can only be met through global cooperation.  

It's an inconvenient truth for many who hold national power. They distract us from solutions that might affect their bottom lines by continuing their power games. Russia would thrive as a partner in Europe instead of it's Grampus monster. Witness how better off are Spain, Britain, France and Germany, each of them once an imperial superpower mostly at war with the others. How silly the UK seems for even edging towards the exit. For what?  These former superpowers squabble but basically get along. Meanwhile the Kremlin crew hasn't changed its world view since Ivan the Terrible -- Marx be damned. 

The dispute between Russians and Ukrainians has a long history. Vladimir Sakarhov, the Russian double agent whose memoir, High Treason, I co-authored in 1981, revealed how the Soviet Union was already rife with ethnic division that eventually led to the empire's breakup -- inevitable on its own, by the way, without Reagan's and Thatcher's sabre-rattling. 

Sakharov explained to me that the Russian professional class in which he grew up, despised the thug-Kremlin leadership under President Leonid Brezhnev and his cronies -- preponderantly Ukranian. "The tail wags the dog in the Soviet Union," he told me. "Russians suffer privations in order to keep the cliques in the other republics happy." It's typical that only an empire's elites prosper while the folks at home go without. Would everyday Russians want that again if Putin succeed in crushing Ukraine's independence?   

Post-Trump United States meanwhile, teeters on civil war, with asymmetric warfare by right-wing, racist, Trumpista terrorists' escalating bombings and threats - including by ex-president Donald Trump himself at recent rallies. It's advantageous for the few and disastrous for the many.

All three of our doomsday Trifecta tickets -- war, plague and climate collapse -- have been issued by the same over0priviliged bunch. We know who they are: Hell, they know who they are and don't give a damn!

1. War: Today's smug, racist, authoritarian, petro-oligarchs from Texas to Riyad to Moscow look about to bungle us into nuclear annihilation like so many 1914 Austro-Hungarian generals.

2, Pestillence: They extend their wealth and power by corrupting and dis-empowering our civil societies, dividing people, and weakening their governments against natural disasters and pandemics.

3. Climate Calamity: They continue to sabotage efforts to forestall climate disaster to protect their bloated coal, oil and gas assets, running out the clock on preventing runaway damage to our planet's habitability. 

I'd say we're all victims of this plantation peerage, but for the fact that they derive their power and wealth from us -- particularly from the most ignorant of us wearing red hats of intolerance that single them out for exploitation. Let's not get all romantic about "the people," at least until we see more awakening from their manufactured illusions.

As a journalist I used to naively think that informing people would free them. It's not that easy. Now I like to inform in order to disturb their keepers.The recent apocalyptic film Don't Look Up illustrates our information illusions. Two astronomers discover a "planet-killing" comet headed towards earth. Humankind has the technology to divert the threat, but not the capability to comprehend and evaluate information undiluted from the opioids of politics and self-serving illusions. Crash: World ends; The end.

Maybe none of this is real -- and the conventional sense. There's always The Matrx revelation that our reality is but a simulation (actually hypothesized in artificial intelligence studies) or some other such metaphysical slight-of-hand. I ask,then, who runs the projections, God?. Neo? The Wizard of Oz? The Wachowskis? It appeals to multiverse theorists and my writing imagination that keeps weaving a novel entitled "The God Machine" involving such devices. Maybe I'll finish it one day, or in one universe or another.

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Umberto Tosi's recent published books include the highly praised Phantom Eye, Frank Ritz noir detective novels, Sometimes Ridiculous, Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published widely, most recently in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His nonfiction has been published widely in print and online. He began his career as a journalist for Los Angeles Times and an editor for its prize-winning, Sunday magazine, West, and as editor of San Francisco Magazine. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to several of its anthologies, including Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult children. He resides in Chicago.

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Enjoy my Hollywood noir detective thriller: The Phantom Eye (a Frank Ritz Mystery) newly released in paperback and ebook by Light Fantastic Publishing - soon to be followed by Oddly Dead and Death and the Droid.

 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Portable Veblen.

"... reminds me of Chandler's The Little Sister, and The Big Sleep of course." - Actor playwright Gary Houston.  

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