Friday, July 30, 2021

the near-impossibility of communication as a feature of the age

Before I was an adult living in a time marked by active crisis, I had ideas about what it would be like.

I was the kind of kid whose imaginative life thrived on material like Alas Babylon, A Canticle for Leibowitz, On the Beach, and Earth Abides. I could go on listing apocalypse fiction for a while, but you get the idea.

If the conservative middle-American Lutheranism I was raised in didn’t exactly share the prophetic model or general sensibility of the evangelical/fundie Left Behind crowd, it was all the same a faith with some real end times vibes.

In between the SF&F and the religion, I soaked up family stories about the Great Depression, the dust bowl, the era of the world wars.

The tail end of the Cold War era in America, the moment when I was first becoming aware of culture at large, was saturated in nuclear pop-eschatology. A thing that now seems almost invisible to people who didn’t live through it, and has been forgotten by a lot of the people who did.

It turns out most of my ideas were wrong, some more subtly than others. Science Fiction and Christianity both offer some

p1k3 / wip / communication