Subgenres of the Apocalypse
How survivalist sci-fi and grimdark fantasy seek to justify modern police states
by Colin Broadmoor
Imagine.
A year from now the state has collapsed. There are no police, no National Guards, no authorities. You are unarmed but for a heavy bag of canned food. It’s dark. You hear footsteps gaining on you.
Are you afraid? Are you relieved?
Mark Fisher explained capitalist realism with the quote “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” However, pop culture increasingly conditions us to equate the end or absence of capitalism with the end of the world. The failure of capitalism becomes the “apocalypse” of which so much of our literature and film is post-.
In the past, science fiction and fantasy offered our best chance for imagining alternatives to capitalism within mass media, but in recent decades the increasing popularity of the “grimdark” and survivalist subgenres threatens to poison the radical potential of fictional worldbuilding by embracing a reactionary anti-solidarity message. Both grimdark fantasy and survivalist sci-fi create a sense of capitalist nostalgia within audiences, offering a vision of an antisocial apocalypse stripped of the structures of the modern security state in a way designed to be deliberately frightening.
When Aristotle teased out the differences between tragedy and comedy, genre categories served as a basic recognition of commonalities between narrative patterns. In the millennia since, genre existed as a semi-useful typology for criticism and analysis, but since the advent of marketing and the marriage of capitalism to mass media, reified genre categories, constraints, and expectations limit the expression of art and, by extension, human imagination.
Under capitalism, a work of art must pass through multiple gates and filters—agents, publishers, producers, printers, streaming platforms, to name a few—before it can be disseminated to a mass audience. At each such gate, institutional arbiters select for pro-capital messages and weed out anti-capital possibilities. We might think of this as a parody of biological evolution with natural selection based on environmental conditions swapped out for ideological selection based on market forces. Only those artworks most aligned with the logic of capitalism will be selected to survive until production, reproduction, and distribution in media.
Though we might be tempted to dismiss the reification of genre as simply an ideological issue that can be rendered irrelevant by a change in material conditions, the codification of genre in media trains us to embrace capitalism and fear its alternatives on a physical level. Not only are generic forms limited by the themes and tropes they contain, but the very structures of these works reprogram the body’s affective response to art. Most blockbuster films have roughly the same run time. Most science fiction novels fall within a word-count range different from that of a mystery or romance novel. Combine shared length with the pervasiveness of the three-act structure in modern storytelling and you end up producing a signature rhythm of emotional tension and release within works of a given genre.
This effect is amplified by genre’s reliance on shared recognizable tropes to the point where habitual consumption of genre fiction results in an almost Pavlovian level of biological conditioning. The classic example of this dynamic is the horror film “jump scare.” We do not need to consciously anticipate the jump scare, our body does it for us. Without realizing it, we recognize countless invisible signals in the film that trigger muscle-tensing and adrenaline release before the jump. We know when the jump scare is coming—even if we don’t know how we know—and that is because our body has been trained to expect and react to these signals by bypassing our conscious thought.
Only those artworks most aligned with the logic of capitalism will be selected to survive until production, reproduction, and distribution in media.
Media literally reprograms our bodies to experience a fear response through certain narrative stimuli (as anyone who still watches local news affiliates can attest). The fictional scenario at the beginning of this essay strikes us as ominous precisely because we have seen and read this story so many times before and our bodies have been taught to respond to it with a sensation of insecurity. Whenever we consume a work of post-apocalyptic fiction in which the protagonists find themselves at the mercy of other people, we feel relief that we, ourselves, are protected from a similar fate by the security apparatus of the capitalist state (this effect is diminished but still present even among communities who have disproportionately suffered at the hands of those security forces). We are cowed into accepting the logic of “law and order” that posits all human beings, if left to their own devices, will devolve into rapist-murderers and psychopathic sadists. If it were not for the systematic violence of the state, so the logic goes, you would be subject to the unpredictable violence of humanity.
The logic of the police state collapses with the most basic scrutiny. If, without fear of punishment by enforcers of law, humans would all revert to their “natural” state of rapist-murderers, and law enforcement must be chosen from the ranks of humanity, then we only end up creating an empowered class of rapist-murderers by giving them guns and badges. But we are not meant to dwell long on the logic of the security state; instead, we are intended to embody it in our fears and our docility. Even the promise of security offered under capitalism is unrealistic, as we are constantly at the mercy of other people—and if violence is committed against us, then the police will, at best, arrive after the fact.
The function of police/law enforcement/security forces is to enact highly visible performances of state violence to justify our belief that law and order exist in the capitalist state. We see video of the police using extreme force on “lawbreakers” and we feel relief that persons and property are being “protected,” but we also experience a shiver of fear as we imagine suffering the same fate should we step out of line. In this way, police brutality and the most spectacular acts of state violence must be seen as features and not bugs of pro-capital law enforcement.
Policing works as a sort of mass-delusion under which select episodes of dramatic violence convince the general populace that a powerful entity watches and judges their behavior and will strike them down if and when they transgress against the law. Before the development of modern militarized law enforcement, religion frequently served this function. As long as enough natural calamities could be attributed to divine justice, belief in the power of the deity facilitated decentralized social control—we were policed by our own “conscience.” Now, the police are our plagues of locusts and slayers of the firstborn and society places its faith in their violence. Fortunately for the forces of police abolition, this system is fully reliant on our belief in particular narratives of violence and authority—and as the transition from fear of divine wrath to fear of batons and tear gas demonstrates, the more positive aspects of social control and social organization can be maintained by offering people an alternative narrative. Unfortunately, the genres best suited to imaging such narratives, science fiction and fantasy, have been colonized by reactionary values.
Traditionally, works of fantasy fiction romanticized pre-capitalist and pre-industrial “pasts.” One need look no farther than the “Scouring of the Shire” in Tolkien’s The Return of the King to see that resistance to these forces of “modernity” was baked into the foundational works of the genre. But resistance to capitalism is not tolerated in modern media, hence the absence of the Scouring of the Shire from Peter Jackson’s film version. Instead, fantasy’s ability to imagine a world without capitalism has been perverted via grimdark tropes into a space for producing a feeling of capitalist nostalgia.
Fantasy’s ability to imagine a world without capitalism has been perverted via grimdark tropes into a space for producing a feeling of capitalist nostalgia. .
As the popularity of “trad” accounts and primitivist orientations suggests, the West increasingly looks to its pre-capitalist past for a sense of possibility and purpose lost under capitalism. To foreclose on this imaginative function of fantasy, the near-infinite gatekeepers of media select for narratives that stress the “benefits” of the modern capitalist state. Most people would rather be a wizard or butter churn repair technician than work several part-time minimum wage retail jobs, so our economic realities under capitalism are difficult to present as an improvement over those of traditional fantasy. Likewise, even our relationship with modern technology is at best ambivalent and, in fantasy, science is easily replaced with magic. So, to create a longing or nostalgia for capitalism in its audience, the grimdark subgenre stresses the absence of the security state and law and order.
Though grimdark is most often thought of as developing in the 1990s with writers like George RR Martin, the grimdark philosophy really comes out of the neoliberalism and Reaganism of the 1980s and is best expressed with Margaret Thatcher’s quip: “There is no such thing as society.” Grimdark justifies its worst excesses with an appeal to “realism,” but its sense of the real is steeped in the antisocial assumptions of the modern police state.
Beginning in the early 1980s, Joel Rosenberg wrote the early grimdark series, Guardians of the Flame. The characters in Guardians of the Flame are college students who play fantasy RPGs and who get magically sent to a “real” fantasy world only to find it full of slavery, exploitation, and random violence because there is no organization powerful enough to enforce law and order. In essence, it’s what you would get if you added frequent gang rapes to the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Rosenberg’s obituary quotes his wife as saying that the series was his “million-word love letter to the industrial revolution.”
George RR Martin often claims the historical basis of the War of the Roses for the violence and cruelty in A Song of Ice and Fire. The implication is: that if it’s historical, then it must be “realistic”—but that is a selection error. Historical chronicles from a period when recording current events meant skinning an animal and hand-copying a manuscript focus primarily on outliers. Extrapolating average rates of medieval violence from histories of the War of the Roses is like concluding crucifixion was a leading cause of death among Judean carpenters because you read the Bible.
In contrast to the claims of grimdark authors, we actually have texts written by medieval men and women that present a different “reality.” Even the Icelandic sagas, which are full of violence and feud, are really about how random acts of meaningless violence can be transformed into socially meaningful sequences of organized violence so that, ultimately, a formal peace is brokered. Likewise, Chaucer’s boringly allegorical Tale of Melibee is a treatise on how social bonds are restored after an act of extravagant violence. The lesson of much medieval literature is: “Yes, society exists and through it we can solve the problem of violence.” Medieval communities realized that, for better or worse, they were all in it together and they would have thought the antisocial message of grimdark to be dangerously individualist and selfish.
We find a similar reactionary mechanism at play in the subgenre of survivalist post-apocalypse sci-fi. Early post-apocalyptic science fiction like Richard Jeffries’s After London (1885) actually depicted the post-industrial world as idyllic and predicts our own pandemic’s “nature is coming back” memes. Social re-organization passes rapidly through 19th- and 20th-century “stages of civilization” in these works, but their overall message tends to suggest humanity will find a way to survive and thrive through community. After the Second World War—when much of Europe really was in a functionally post-apocalyptic state with destroyed infrastructure and societies—so-called “cosy catastrophes” such as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) imagined a post-capitalist world in which the protagonists largely enjoyed the same quality of life after the apocalypse as they did before it, though they had to deal with new factional violence and killer fauna. It was only after the outbreak of the Cold War that survivalist post-apocalypse sci-fi began to establish itself (though the seeds of it might be seen in the way The Day of the Triffids blames part of its apocalypse on Soviet bioweapons).
The essential tension of survivalist sci-fi derives not from mutants and radiation, but from the threats of scarcity (the end of consumer culture) and human violence (absence of security state).
Sometimes survivalist sci-fi will explicitly invoke the Cold War, often through the trope of “the bomb,” such as in Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog. But the essential tension of these stories derives not from mutants and radiation but from the threats of scarcity (the end of consumer culture) and human violence (absence of security state). The survivalist subgenre likely reached its pinnacle in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where life after capitalism is distilled into an experience of slow starvation and absolute paranoia. We can see spillover from survivalist sci-fi into horror in works like Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and almost all post-Night of the Living Dead zombie films. It’s art with the lessons: Everyone is against you. Trust no one. You are surrounded by enemies. There are no authorities to save you. This messaging is inextricable from its context as American Cold War propaganda and its anti-solidarity message is just one front in a broader post-war attack on social relations under capitalism—consider the difference between American survivalist sci-fi and the ending of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (sorry, no spoilers).
Grimdark and survivalist fictions claim “realism” and “history” necessitate sensational acts of cruelty and eroticized sexual violence. But really, these performances are demanded by capitalism to satiate the appetites of an audience who only understand social relationships in terms of exploitation and degradation. Content creators insist on including constant acts of random violence in pre- and post-capitalist settings in the name of verisimilitude when they would not feel the same obligation if writing a scene of “ordinary life” under capitalism. This is because the intent is to characterize alternatives to capitalism as inherently violent and insecure and, ultimately, to induce a sense of alienation and paranoia that renders solidarity impossible.
So, as leftists, we are left to watch as the genres most likely to envision alternatives to capitalism are gradually cannibalized by reactionary subgenres into which capitalist media pours its resources (how many GoT clones can you think of?). But there is no time for us to be defeatist about it. Armed with the knowledge that grimdark fantasy and survivalist sci-fi are designed to produce feelings of capitalist nostalgia, distrust of our comrades, and faith in the violence of police, we can avoid wasting time by creating more works within those ideological frameworks. This is not to say that we may not enjoy films or books in that vein, but we must acknowledge that these subgenres cannot produce a way forward from capitalism. Likewise, art that produces feelings of solidarity or that offers a compelling alternative to capitalism will never be given a platform in media except in the most bastardized form. This means we need to find ways to create and disseminate revolutionary art outside the systems of mass media. Anti-capitalist presses and publications, writing workshops, and reading groups should play an important part in building a new infrastructure so that we might imagine a better tomorrow and share it amongst ourselves.
A first step to this process is reclaiming the radical possibilities and potential offered by post-capitalist worldbuilding. We must unlearn the reactions our bodies are conditioned to by grimdark and survivalist media. We must learn to look for hope in one another and, yes, in the “apocalypse.”
A year from now the state has collapsed. There are no police, no National Guards, no authorities. You are unarmed but for a heavy bag of canned food. It’s dark. You hear footsteps gaining on you. You turn and see a woman holding out a dented can.
“You dropped this. Are you delivering that to the food bank?”
You nod.
“I’ve got a cart. We can throw your bag on too if you’ll help me push it. I’m actually glad I ran into you. I was afraid there wasn’t anyone around to help me.”
Imagine.
Colin Broadmoor is a recovering anthropologist who writes about mass media, technology, and cyberculture.
