The Lightest Object In The Universe asks, what if the apocalypse were a good thing?
Aux Features Book Review
If we’re honest, the collapse of civilization is probably only a few decades away. Science fiction writers came to this realization at least half a century ago, which is why our grandparents got the hopeful, technicolor Star Trek, while we get the nihilistic, drab Walking Dead. Pretty much everyone agrees the end of the world will be a bad thing for humanity, but a few recent novels—like Ling Ma’s Severance and David Williams’s When The English Fall—have challenged that assumption. Sure, the apocalypse will be horrific for a while, but could a planet-wide reset button be a good thing in the long run?
Kimi Eisele’s debut novel, The Lightest Object In The Universe, might be the most optimistic post-apocalyptic story ever written. It’s Sleepless In Seattle meets Station Eleven. Our Tom Hanks is a widower named Carson Waller, a high school history teacher on the East Coast. He’s in love with Beatrix Banks, a fair-trade activist on the West Coast. They’ve only spent about 30 hours together when the apocalypse hits—an economic disaster called the October Shocks, followed by a flu pandemic, extreme weather from climate change, and finally, complete power-grid failure across the United States.
“If for some reason everything implodes and the shit really hits the fan and we can no longer send words or speak to each other, I’ll come find you,” Carson writes in his last email to Beatrix before the power goes out. Armed with a flashlight, iodine tablets, and a map, Carson embarks on a cross-country journey on foot. He follows old rail lines west through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. He avoids Chicago completely (“Lead in the water supply had upended the city even before the grid went, and now there was nothing but mayhem”). He sleeps in abandoned train stations. Almost everyone he encounters is friendly and eager to share food.
Meanwhile, Beatrix stays put on the West Coast, banding together with neighbors to form an intentional community—reopening schools, tending gardens, and… launching a public radio station. Her story is less compelling than Carson’s quest narrative, but Beatrix is assertive, and she gets most of the book’s best lines. “The speed of this collapse astounds me,” she writes to Carson before “the darkness” wipes out the internet. “I guess I, too, believed in some kind of American exceptionalism, though I resented it enough to think I could destroy it. Now look. Maybe we did.”
Some people will find The Lightest Object In The Universe impossibly naïve. Instead of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Eisele gives us bicycle networks and community gardens. Chapter after chapter, just when you expect things to take a dark turn, red flags become red herrings. Surely this many people would never be so kind to strangers, especially in a future where everyone is unshowered and starving. But everyone is also grieving, and that’s where Eisele might have a point. When we only imagine violence in a post-apocalyptic future, are we underestimating the transformative power of grief?
The novel’s villain—a charismatic preacher named Jonathan Blue—haunts the first half of the novel with creepy radio broadcasts. He claims to have predicted the end of the world and welcomes survivors to join his people at “the Center,” a community somewhere in Wyoming that still has running water and electrical power. “You can leave the filth of your cities and neighborhoods and come here, where we are creating a new technology,” he extolls over the airwaves.
On his westward journey, Carson finds the Center and comes face-to-face with Blue. “You know, the darkness was a good thing for us,” Blue says. “We had become pixelated. Our selves had fragmented across the globe, across an illusory web, the internet.” But a few pages later, during a tour of the Center’s agricultural fields, a woman takes Carson by the arm. “Listen to me… There is more to it,” she whispers, and our deep mistrust of post-apocalyptic religious communities finally pays off.
That kind of tension is missing from too much of The Lightest Object In The Universe, which is perhaps 75 pages too long and 20 percent too preachy about capitalist greed. But the leisurely chapters are full of beauty, the characters are layered and nuanced, and the plot still moves at a faster clip than Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, another Odyssean novel about lovers separated by harsh geography. To be fair, there are plenty of horrors in Eisele’s version of the apocalypse. A lot of people die. But unlike The Road, The Lightest Object is mostly interested in the survivors who are kind to one another. If that sounds naïve, maybe Cormac McCarthy made us all too cynical.
32 Comments
I think the violence coded in our narratives of societal/infrastructure collapse is partly an honestly conceived attempt to reckon with the darkness in human nature (a darkness I do not doubt!), but also largely about establishing a just-so scenario where fantasies of justified violence, and the fantasy of violence as a justifying, clarifying force, can take flight.We have mini-models for what happens in societal/infrastructure collapse, in what happens during enormous natural disasters before outside relief can take over. We know a fair amount about what life was like at various earlier stages of technological development (though not at all of them), to which we might imagine falling back in a post-”apocalyptic” scenario. They’re not great. There’s violence and danger. But they generally don’t look like the fantasied war of all against all, human nature stripped to its predatory core, red in tooth and claw. We succeed through cooperation.
Problem is there are *orders of magnitude* more people than their were in earlier eras – and most of the people in those eras lived in perpetual fear of starving. If modern systems for generating and distributing food fail, I think “war of all against all” isn’t far from what a million starving people would act like.
Well said. This was one of my big problems with the Walking Dead once it got a couple seasons in. It seemed pretty unrealistic that there wouldn’t be more places where people had gotten together and formed pretty functional, peaceful communities instead of everyone supporting unstable, violent, autocratic weirdos like the Governor, Negan, and Rick.
Well the thing turned out to be that habitable islands HAD appeared. Alexandria, and eventually the community from the end of the series where life wasn’t all Mad Max all the time. I think there’s something to the idea that without newspapers or phones or TV or working cars, there could be a city of a thousand people just 50 miles away that you’d NEVER know existed.
One thing that’s coming up in the Walking Dead universe is that big organized society that makes our protagonists look like ants fighting in the dirt.
Those mini-models are all dependent on a stable system to help them afterwards. And given what we’ve seen, it only takes one grifter to prey on scared people and mobilize them to do stupid, terrible things.
Yeah, I don’t want to undersell how bad it COULD be, at certain stages. From what I gather of the description in this review it seems like the events are so soon after the failure of the power grid, and the travelogue intentionally avoids major cities – indeed, points out that Chicago has fallen into chaos – that a relatively optimistic take on human behavior doesn’t seem unrealistic to me. But there’s just so much narrative content out there that seems to essentially posit that, from the moment of “collapse,” it’s just murder forever. A corrective seems nice.
I wholeheartedly agree it’s not murder *forever*. But any optimistic post-apocalyptic story is going to need to gloss over the deaths of a few billion people, which is a degree of protagonist-centered-morality I can’t stomach personally.
That’s understandable, but(1) Most of the violence-focused post-apocalyptic fiction I’m aware of isn’t really about THAT either; it’s about fending off some guy with a gun that wants to steal your food, not about hundreds of millions of would-be-refugees from a drowning/burning Indian subcontinent starving in concentration camps while people in Beijing and Paris and Washington try not to pay attention.(2) The material conditions of my life are propped up by people living lives most of the people on this comment section (including me) would find intolerable. We’re all living in Omelas except it’s not just one person who suffers. I try not to be unaware of that, but I find I can still stomach fiction about other things.
I like these thoughtful takes of yours, including your original comment. I just wanted to say that because I felt the little star wasn’t enough. And nice Omelas reference as well.
Most post-apocalyptic novels don’t get the incredible rapid die off of people correct unless there is a pandemic on the order of the Black Death of 1340 and 1350s. When the power goes out and the water works shut down most people will be dead in 3-10 days. Three days if they don’t get fluids, ten days if they drink polluted water and contract an illness. It doesn’t even have to be typhus or cholera, it could be the oh, so common e. coli or one of the various streptococcus strains. People might fight each other for the first few days to get water and food, but by day three of going without people will be too weak to fight each other. If you have not seen the listlessness that sets in when people go without food and water for a couple of days, then you can’t properly imagine a collapse of civilization.
“If we’re honest, the collapse of civilization is probably only a few decades away. Science fiction writers came to this realization at least half a century ago…”
Someone’s never read the Book of Revelation. Every generation thinks it’s the last. 😛
there were a bunch of people got REALLY angry that the fictional creature isn’t being played by someone who’s the right color, so I’d say we’re overdue for a little collapse.
are you sure that during a collapse those same people won’t be out literally murdering people of color instead of just complaining about them online?
That was my point. I wasn’t say that we were overdue like it was a good thing. More like it’s a waiting game at this point.
Have you seen the people that complain about such things? If they start murdering people of color, they’re going to quickly realize that people of color can murder them right back, and things won’t go from there quite like they envisioned.
‘If we’re honest, the collapse of civilization is probably only a few decades away.’lol
https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html
Yeah I know. I understand the climate thing but I think predictions of civilization ending are exactly as premature as they are every other time.It’s easy shorthand for ‘I think everything sucks because I don’t understand how bad things actually were 100 years ago’.
Tell you what: I’ll offer $10 now in exchange for all your financial assets 30 years from now.
Make it 100k and you’ve got a deal
Sorry, the risk that an AV Clubber in a non-collapsed civilization still having less than $100k in assets is too high.
Few decades? More like one.
Maybe there could be a happy medium of post-apocalyptic scenarios, that could be not as grim as The Road but a bit less rose-colored hippie glasses colored that this
“Station Eleven” was mentioned. This was recommended to me by a bookstore clerk, and it’s worth a read. In fact they should make a movie of it.
They’re planning a TV show: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/06/station-eleven-hiro-murai-warnermedia-tv-show-1202153050/
A novel centering around major events in October, that is anti-religious, pro-Goodness of The Working Man, pro-collectivist…Seems a lot like Communist Idealism to be quite honest. Which is a (relatively) new and interesting dressing to put on the window of the post-apocalypse.My only problem with the premise is that the events described don’t seem to be enough to put a city like Chicago into unpassable chaos. Chicago and cities like it were a major center of commerce and trade well before the internet and electricity and a simple power-grid failure isn’t going to stop the know-how of major cities from figuring out their own power-generation, and forming their own bubble economies. Add to it that Chicago itself is (mostly) immune to large-scale nature disasters and I just don’t see it.
Harsh winter and food supply would be the issues here.
Winter is harsh, yeah, but again with the know-how that exists in many big cities I’d think they’d manage to set up their own grid pretty quickly. As for food supply Chicago is in the the gateway to one of the largest agricultural regions in the world and all them cows in Wisconsin ain’t gonna eat themselves. Of the big cities I’d say it’s probably the best located to survive an event like this.
I haven’t read the book, so I’m speculating, but from the description of the things that took society down it seems logical that the transportation networks broke down as well, meaning that getting sufficient food in isn’t going to be easy at all. And there’s no way “setting up their own grid” would be remotely easy under any circumstances, but I’m generally fine with hand-waving explanations of why some places have power in stuff like this.
I haven’t read the book either, I just like to be pedantic and speculative on the internet. It doesn’t really seem like the transportation networks should have been that affected, but I don’t know the extent of these natural disasters mentioned I guess. I just think Chicago would still be able to maintain a grasp on it’s vast railroad feeders even with some of the lines being cut.No, setting up power grids isn’t “easy” per se but the hardware is all there still and given the resources at hand in big cities I think they’d be able to set up pockets of power fairly quickly. Illinois also has one of the largest collections of nuclear power plants in the US which means less need to immediately find resources like coal or gas and more time to focus on things like setting up a power network from each individual plant.
The embrace of the apocalyptic might very well be the thing that will bring it on. Our creatives are failing to imagine anything better, lazily settling for a world that will crash. Now, we’re getting a genre that justifies ending the world because it “could be a good thing.”
There is nothing new about apocalyptic thinking. There have been many eras and many groups who predicted an end to the world as we know it, not through change and evolution, but through world-ending disaster. It predates Revelations. It happens with alarming frequency. But this modern loss of hope is a failure of imagination. We cannot imagine anything better. Now we cannot imagine anything better than an apocalypse to get us to a better state. The author of this piece cannot imagine it as anything other than a looming certainty.
All positive change comes about because of people who imagine the world better than it is now. The idea that people should not be enslaved was radical. It made the world better. The idea that women are more than the property was radical. It made the world better. The idea that industry did not mean grey air and burning rivers was radical. It made the world better. The idea that gay people are not mentally ill and deserve to have families was radical until quite recently. It made the world better. Imagine better, people.