“I think you’re right,” he told little Elise, pulling his radio free. “I think everything’s gonna be just fine . . .
A History of the Darkest Yarns
Is the world a good place or not? Is it safe or is it dangerous? Beyond the horizon, are there more wonders or more terrors?
These questions haunt us, whether we’re aware of them or not. They determine whether we love to travel to foreign lands, or if we feel better staying home. They influence how we feel about immigration, how we feel about other countries, other states, even other neighborhoods. Some of us dread the future, while for others it can’t get here soon enough. Some people long for the days of the past, while others see nothing but progress.
Many of us vacillate between the two extremes, hope and dread flowing and ebbing like the tide. Some days we want to venture forth, other days we want to stay in bed with the covers over our heads. We have at times felt everything in between.
I’ll never forget the first time I sailed to Cuba, back when I was twenty-five. I was captaining a steel trawler for an Australian client who was sailing to Hong Kong. A dozen miles off the north coast of Cuba, we started picking up radar contacts of Cuban ships. The VHF squawked with Spanish chatter. We were approaching Havana with little knowledge of what would greet us there.
My whole life up to that point had been one of anti-Cuban propaganda. Like the most effective propaganda, the first germs were based on slivers of truth. There was indeed a history of conflict between our two countries. Here was the site of perhaps our nearest brush with nuclear war, and communists were the enemy in all my favorite childhood action films. These people wanted me dead. I fully expected warning shots to be fired across our bow. I expected hostility. This journey was surely a mistake.
Cuba is a complex place, an island of paradoxes, but one thing it most certainly was not was dangerous. Nor was it a place where Americans were unwelcome or loathed. We were greeted with open arms everywhere we went. My months spent in Cuba over the years have been an absolute delight. My childhood perception of Cuba could have kept me from visiting. Fortunately, I made the decision to go see for myself.
This idea of needing to see with my own eyes was a foundational idea for Wool and the books to follow. The wallscreens are our televisions, our web browsers, our search engines, our newspapers, the local news, our cellphones. We are bombarded constantly by talking heads telling us what the world is like. They say it’s mostly car wrecks, traffic jams, murders, war, hurricanes, and things that might kill your children, which we’ll tell you about at eleven.
The temptation might be to blame the media, but we’re the same people who slow down traffic even when the accident is on the other side of the median. We have to look. We are captivated by the awful. We want to know if it’s something we should be concerned about. It makes perfect sense: we are descendants of a million generations of humans, apes, shrews, and lizards who were better safe than sorry. In nature, optimists taste great.
The modern challenge has been to overcome our base instincts and look at the world with rational eyes. Or, even more challenging, dare to look with hope.
As I write this, I’m sitting in Portugal while the United States enacts travel restrictions and quarantines. Spain, our neighbor on all sides, is shutting down. Italy is closed for business. The world is dealing with a pandemic that has already claimed more lives than the morning of September 11. Fear, needless to say, is rampant.
One would be crazy to have hope in these times, and yet some of us do. Some of us see countries rallying together to battle this disease. There are nurses and doctors everywhere being superheroes. There are Italians singing from their balconies to keep each other company and to keep each other entertained. Zion Williamson, a nineteen-year-old NBA rookie, is pledging to cover the lost wages of those who work in his arena as professional sports shut down. And all these closings are signs that we have the courage to win this fight. The actions being taken are ones of hope. Already in China, Singapore, and South Korea, we can see signs that this hope is not without reason.
For me, Wool has never been a story about the end of humanity. It’s been a story about humanity prevailing against all odds. And the heroes of this story are those who go against the grain of pessimism, fear, doubt, and despair. The heroes are Allison, who will not trust a single screen to tell her what’s out there. And Juliette, who believes that anything broken can be repaired.
The first self-published edition of Wool was dedicated: For Those Who Dare to Hope. To this day, I commonly sign these books with my name and a simple: Dare to hope! as a reminder of what the story is really about. I’m not always as brave as I’d like to be. I falter and fail and give in to the screens in my life. And yet, sailing across vast oceans and into ports unknown taught me something vitaclass="underline" there is nothing out there as dark as our doubts, nor as dangerous as our inaction. Go out. See for yourselves. And if what you find there is broken, know that together we can fix it.
Despite all the reasons we should have hope, it seems we are instead obsessed with stories about the end times. Post-apocalyptic tales and disaster flicks dominate our popular culture.
At the time I wrote Wool, Hollywood was inundating us with stories about floods, monster waves, and tornadoes full of sharks. We got earthquakes and asteroids destroying the Earth, snakes hijacking planes, aliens raining hell down upon us, and zombies doing zombie things. The Empire State Building has been particularly accosted over the years, going down to UFO strikes and meteors and volcanoes and Superman. It was a terrible time to be planet Earth or a very tall building.
In this climate, Wool became kind of a big deal. The book went to auction at publishing houses and got snapped up by Ridley Scott for a film adaptation. I landed a literary agent (Kristin Nelson, the best in the business), and we started doing deals around the world. I was asked to do interviews and give talks all over the place, and foreign publishers were flying me to far-flung locales to sign books and do yet more interviews and signings.
Everywhere I went on book tour, I kept getting the same questions from fans and media alike: Why are we obsessed with these stories? What is up with this fad? And when will it end?
I didn’t have a good answer. But as it kept coming up over and over, time and time again, I realized I needed to have something decent to say. So I mulled it over. I wondered why I wanted to tell a story about the end of times. What did that say about me? Or the fact that I love reading stories like this and watching movies where the Empire State Building fares poorly. I’m a happy, optimistic guy. What gives? What was so unique about the world we were living in that this trend emerged and came to dominate popular culture?
This last question about the uniqueness of our place and time helped unlock the answer. I’ve learned over the years to reject any question that gives preeminence to a particular place or time. This bias of our centrality almost always leads us astray. It took forever to accept that the Earth is not the center of the universe, or that our solar system is one of many, or that those fuzzy spots among the stars are entire other galaxies, or that our universe might be part of a multi-verse, or that it’s all a simulation with some really crappy coders.
We have an even stronger bias toward the time we live in. Part of this is egocentrism, but it’s mostly that we know far more about present events than we do a past that we barely study. The pace of innovation, for instance, feels like it’s moving at its swiftest pace ever, but there is a good argument to be made that the world was changing more rapidly a century ago than it is today. Cries of record partisanship and nastiness in politics ignore the fact that politicians once shot each other in the streets and had fist fights in congress.