Every generation thinks it lives in unique times. This bias is almost always wrong.
And yet the explosion in popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction was difficult to deny and required some sort of explanation. It really was everywhere, from The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner to World War Z and Armageddon. How could I argue that no time in history was all that unique or special under the onslaught of so many stories in which our world ends?
I was thinking about this during the west coast swing of my big Wool book tour. Flying over the Rockies, I looked out the window at the rough terrain and thought about the unbelievable challenges that American settlers faced. That was when I realized that westerns had once been a cultural obsession similar to post-apocalyptic fiction. In the first half of the twentieth century, pulp westerns were being published at a frenzied clip, and western films were far more numerous than the dystopian and apocalyptic fare of the twenty-first century. From 1930 to 1954, nearly three thousand western films were made!
Suddenly, both of these cultural obsessions made perfect sense. Westerns are also stories about survival along the edges of civilization. They are stories about barely getting by in new lands where laws are tenuous, strangers are dangerous, and harsh conditions bring out the best in our heroes and the worst in everyone else.
It occurred to me in that airplane that there might be something bigger here, something old and universal that provides an insight into the human condition. Did the pattern go back further than westerns?
As someone who used to live on a sailboat in my twenties, I’d long been fond of lost-at-sea stories. There were a lot in my local library to choose from, even among the classics. Because when humans began to travel across the ocean, we became obsessed with tales of piracy, sunken treasure, shipwrecks, uncharted and deserted islands, and all that can go wrong at sea. The ocean was the great frontier at the time. It was a place where civilization ended and the wilds began.
What about before that? Of course! It was the spooky tales of being lost in the woods, the “Hansel and Gretel” stories, tales of witches and demons, the underworld, the wrath of gods. It was Dante’s Inferno, Gulliver’s Travels, The Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Throughout human history, we have told stories as much for warning as for entertainment. Don’t stray too far from safety because bad things might happen. An expression of our internal fears and external exhortations, the disaster story became a fixture. There is reason to suspect that the origin of storytelling lies here. Our lives have always felt tenuous. We depend on each other and on our technology. But we also rely on our cleverness and guile. Disaster stories are horrors wherein we are separated from the former, but also fantasies where we are rescued by the latter. We wonder if we were left alone in the wilderness with nothing more than our courage and our imaginations, would we survive? It’s almost like we would really enjoy a TV show about being naked and afraid in the middle of nowhere, or a reality show where strangers are dropped on a deserted island and forced to knock each other off one by one.
If we’ve always been obsessed with wilderness and survival stories, why have we moved on to world-ending tales and post-apocalyptic fiction?
I believe it’s because we no longer have a wilderness on Earth to explore and fear. It’s all been mapped and photographed from orbit. The exceptions to this prove the rule: Lost with its island that is magically uncharted. The Martian, where if we can’t have a wilderness on this planet we can always head next door. These days, when we want to tell a wilderness story, we have to look beyond horizons of distance and think about horizons of time. We need to imagine a future where we might be exploring other worlds, or a future where our world returns to the wilderness that we fear.
Seen in this light, the popularity of apocalyptic fiction makes perfect sense. We are simply removing the social bonds and the tools that we rely upon and asking how we would fare with our wits alone. It’s a wonderful problem to explore, and one that has served us as a species for thousands and thousands of years. It keeps us sharp, alert, and mentally trained. Our oldest and fondest stories are of just this sort.
The Odyssey tells a story of the wilderness, the sea, wrathful gods, all our physical and emotional worlds ending, and how our hero can somehow survive and prevail in the end. It’s a story as old as time. The reason this story resonates with us today, even though it was written millennia ago and was told in a different language by people from a different culture, is because no era and no people are all that unique. Which is a marvelous thing.
It’s a lesson I learned in my own Odyssean travels as I sailed around the world. I met people on hundreds of islands, and I found far more in common than unique among us. We are not special . . . which is special. We have the same fears, the same hopes, the same love of overcoming odds, the same addiction to our fellow man and our tools, such that the loss of them fills us with the greatest of dreads. That’s what makes us human. That’s our story. And it’s a story as old as time.
So it’s not surprising that I wrote a story about humanity on the precipice. These stories have always been popular. What is very surprising is that it ever became the novel you currently hold in your hands. The simple truth is this book should not exist. In fact, when I see a copy, I marvel at how it got there.
This disbelief does not come from the twenty years I tried in vain to write my first novel, giving up after a few chapters every single time. Nor does it come from the fact that I was in my thirties, working in a bookshop in North Carolina, writing in my spare time, self-publishing my science fiction, when I came up with the story.
No, the reason this book should not exist is that I never even considered it a novel.
Which is strange, because everything is potentially a novel for me. Every news story, every wacky idea, every morning dream. I have more book ideas than I know what to do with. At any one time, at least a dozen full-formed novels are tossing around in my head like a pack of caffeinated Jack Russell Terriers.
But this was not one of those ideas. When I sat down to write Wool, I was already in the end stages of writing my next novel, which would’ve been my sixth published work. Wool was just an idea for a short story. It was a bit of therapy following the death of my beloved dog, Jolie. I wanted to write something dark; I wanted to wallow in my misery; I wanted to craft a story where the ending was obviously going to be a good and happy one, but in the twist of all twists during a twist-happy time in our culture, the twist in this twisted tale was that there was no twist after all.
Things are bad. Good people die. The end.
I’ll never forget the feeling I had when the first line came to me. It just felt right. It captured my mood. I dashed it off to myself in an e-mail on my lunch break at work: The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death. Naivete and gaiety as a suicide shuffles by. The beginning of life and the end of life. Possibility and the collapse of wave functions. Kids skipping rope while a man ponders graver uses.
I’ve always been a positive guy. Even in the wake of that death (which only non–dog owners will dismiss as simply being the loss of a pet), I was keeping my chin up and knew that life would go on and continue to be amazing. But the absence of my best friend was palpable. I felt her missing every time I came home. There was a pocket of air just her size at my feet while I wrote. The fact that I would never get her back tormented me. That was the origin of this story. It was also its conclusion.