The Day Before the World Changes: Science Fiction and the Election and You and Me and Us and What Happens Next (Patreon)

Hello, my loves.

It is the day before Election Day here in the US, which means it is a crisp, moody, blustery day in November, full of golden leaves tumbling through the air like wishes and woodsmoke spiralling up through the New England clouds like dreams, and I want to throw up my soul.

I wanted to say this before it all happens, whatever happens. It feels important to me, though it may be trifling in the end. But it’s all I got in the store-room in terms of hope. So I’m opening this essay to the public, in case you need something more solid than wishes and woodsmoke and dreams.

Before I say everything I am about to say, I want to stipulate the following points so we don’t have to argue about them.

1. I am well aware that America was garbage long before 2016 and the Current Situation is a fairly logical outcome of what we have been and what we have done. Trash goes in the dumpster; now we live in the dumpster. We have all noticed the dumpster on different timelines, but one way or another, almost everyone sees it now. I am not a great waver of any flag, and I will not pretend there is some kind of time it is possible to return to where that flag should have inspired unalloyed pride in much of anything.

2. I am well aware that I have a certain amount of privilege along some axes: I am white, I am cis-gender, I make my living through art, I live in a blue district in a mostly-bluish purple state, I am reasonably healthy, I have enough of an audience that when I speak, people sometimes listen. Along other axes I do not: I am a woman, I am queer, I am a survivor of sexual assault, I am a survivor of homelessness, I am non-neurotypical, I am married to an immigrant, I have enough of an audience that when I speak, I am regularly harassed and called every name you can imagine and, usually, a few new and creative ones. However, when the math comes home to roost, in this country, I am not the person who gets to speak for the marginalized.

3. I am 41. I cannot claim to have the widest personal view on the history of politics. Wider than some, narrower than others. But I have been involved for almost all my life. My mother was a political science professor, and a student of such through much of my adolescence. Though my first election as an eligible voter was technically 2000, I first began volunteering for campaigns at age thirteen. Much that is considered new and shocking right now is not really either, and much that we have allowed ourselves to accept is. One lousy re-watch of the final season of the relatively recent The West Wing should tell you what we thought was career-ending not so long ago, and the very smallest inarguable point of change is that what is said aloud and done in daylight in 2020 was whispered, dogwhistled, and attempted behind closed doors for much of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Over and above all that, before we get too cynical about how shit things have always been, there are things we are experiencing right now that are unique and worth singling out—none of us are old enough to have endured a global pandemic before, at the very least.

There. Now we can get on with it.

Everything fucking sucks and I’m sick to death of it.

I was so confident on the day in 2016. I painted my nails red, white, and blue. I took pictures of my dog with my I VOTED sticker on her fur. We went out for tacos for dinner in honor of the infamous “a taco truck on every corner” comment, and then to the official Democratic Party Election Night shindig. I don’t really want to hear any wharrgarbl about this, but I was happy to vote for Hillary Clinton. She was my hero as a child. When she looked into the camera and said she didn’t intend to bake cookies, little 12-year old me adored her. I named my pet bunny rabbit Hillary, for fuck’s sake. I was happy to be voting for a woman, for this woman, for the future.

And I felt like such a fucking idiot the next day. Like I had reached deep to find whatever last vestige of optimism and Disney Princess wide-eyed belief in my neighbors and my world and the possibility of progress I had in the most recessed corners of my heart and those neighbors and that world took a huge, vicious, liquid dump on it.

My pet rabbit Hillary died when I was fourteen and I found her outside half-eaten by a dog and covered in ants and that’s how I felt sitting in front of the news that midnight.

I felt that low—and I had no idea how horrifying it was going to get. I cried on Election Night while everyone I knew tried to tell me I was overreacting, it wouldn’t be that bad, Congress and Ivanka (wtf) would keep him in check, he used to be a Democrat, we still have RBG, Roe isn’t going anywhere, we got through Bush, it’s all gonna be fine.

Spoiler: it was not fine.

But I thought something then, and I have thought it almost every week of the last four years, and I think it now before this most peculiar autumn Tuesday in which fate might go either way, and there may be a Wednesday and there may be a Walking Dead Civil War II nightmare of darkness and there is no way to know which. Usually when the world changes like that, it comes out of nowhere. It flies into a building, it shoots up a crowd, it melts down a reactor, it fires a missile, it drowns a city. But this time we know. We know everything changes tomorrow. And all we can do to affect it is check a little box in a booth.

But either way, I think the same thing. I think it always. It is my constant, the only thought I can hold against the last four miserable years of that tiny pearl of optimism getting repeatedly kicked in the face. It is the only thing that has gotten me through, the one silver rope that, hopefully, connects to something better on the other end. And that thought is this:

I know how to live through this. Maybe not happily, maybe not without despair or failure, maybe not even without grevious injury. But I know this country and I know how to survive in it.

Science Fiction taught me how.

I grew up reading about worlds like the one we live in now. Science fiction has always been about the future, and it was inevitable that eventually we would arrive in one of them. We did not, perhaps, expect so many of them at once, but there was a roadmap, issued in mass market paperbacks, one mile at a time.

Pandemic? Climate change? Deep isolation broken only by digital representations of other human beings? Oppressive technology companies determining our fates? Cults springing up everywhere convinced of utter madness and borderline magic? The digital network connecting us all turned out not to be such a great thing and got used to poison people’s brains and make them hate each other and themselves? Privation, rations, travel bans, artificial intelligence deployed to destroy nations, women’s bodies sacrificed on the altar of control and hate, a constant feed of millions of people’s unflitered inner monologues beamed directly into our eyes and homes, robots replacing humans at an ever-increasing pace, a chasm between socio-economic classes that dwarfs the Grand Canyon? A cruel despotic leader who attempts daily to change the very meaning of truth, memory, and reality?

Yeah. Those were my bedtime stories. Those were my comfort reading.

The Handmaid’s Tale came out when I was six and I read it breathlessly when I was twelve understanding completely that this was not like Rendezvous with Rama, this was something that could happen to me in my lifetime. We require Brave New World, Animal Farm, and 1984 in every high school in this country, and we only pretend they are about Europe and European unpleasantness.

Tons of SF is about the diverse rainbow of ways in which people are god-awful frightened weirdos who will do almost anything, accept almost any horror if, in exchange, they get to hand over the burden of everyday life to someone else, to give up the pain of having to constantly think and be aware and fight and stand up for each other. How easily humans will turn on their neighbors for the slightest of imagined infractions or superficial differences just to maintain that structure that relieves some of the sheer fucking weight of having to live in this world and look for meaning instead of having it given to you as a reward for conformity. Life is a void, and vast swathes of us will give almost anything to whoever is willing to stand between them and that big ol’ nothing.

Give us meaning and we will give you our entire soul.

Hardly anyone is ready to hear that we got here because a whole lot of mostly white, mostly well-off people got bored with their own prosperity and security, annoyed at having to be polite to the kinds of people their grandparents or they themselves used to get to walk all over, and genuinely preferred the excitement of becoming complete fucking psychopaths and tearing everything down. But that’s what happened. It’s not the poor or the desperate who chose this for all of us. The poor don’t have boats and AR-15s for their little parades. Those giant Trump flags on the backs of all those trucks cost $249.99 a pop, and most trucks have two. It’s not the marginalized and the suffering who are dropping $500 to advertise the precise contents of their assholes.

They wanted to escape a world in which they might not have been completely the most favored caste, but still got to keep the fruits of the past. It never pays to forget that there are many, many people still alive who lived through Jim Crow, and not all of those are Black. We talk about that a lot. Grandparents who couldn’t drink out of water fountains or go to school with white neighbors. We rarely talk about the grandparents who happily stepped on those neighbors and killed them for sport. Who grew up knowing no woman, POC, or gay person was even allowed to look them in the eye. They’re still around, too. You see them every day and don’t even think about it. They used to get out all their bad feelings on the backs of those who were legally forbidden to do anything but take it. If you don’t count people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, the last lynchings continued into the 80s.

And this country had the unmitigated gall to ask them to change. Hell, they’re not even supposed to beat their own damn kids anymore, what kind of bleeding heart SJW claptrap is that? What are you supposed to do with all those dark things you feel if there’s no one left that you’re allowed to brutalize to feel better about yourself?

These four years have made their lives more fun.

Don’t think we geeks and nerds and literati are immune, oh no. Or else what have we been doing for these decades when we joke about the “zombie apocalypse” and obsess about how we will fare in it? Life, regular life, adult life, middle class life, is too hard and complicated and too frequently boring. If it would all just go away, the bills and the loans and the weekly therapy and the ballot propositions and the taxes and the correct developmental toys for our children and counting calories and doing the dishes and commuting and pretending to like potatoes au gratin every year during the holidays when you really fucking hate them—if it could all just go away we would apparently accept with not a little bit of relish the violent, gory death of almost everyone we know and a life of brutal survival, the ripping away of all comfort and technology, constant death, rape, loneliness, and hunger plus also cannibalism.

Is it any wonder others are willing to accept fascism on the hope that their boredom and anger with modern life might also be blown away? Their fantasy is a Civil War, but that’s not so different—still requiring headshots that annihilate familiar faces and the thrilling idea of simply taking that which we covet from our neighbors. Or the Rapture. Or the Singularity. It’s the same ideation. The same longing for magic to come and sweep away our mundane troubles. Before 2016, I would have said the Civil War version is simply the realist one while the zombies are speculative…but these days people in power are spouting the story of an army of satanist illuminati pedophiles that drink the blood of children to remain ever-young, against whom someone named after a literal Star Trek character is the only hope, so realism took a long, all-expenses-paid, and possibly permanent vacation some time ago.

But of course, the doomsday preppers didn’t enjoy this dry run of the apocalypse. It was too quiet. They weren’t hailed as saviors. Other people’s skills turned out to be more important—sewing, baking, maintaining social connections. They just had to wear a mask and stay inside to save humanity and weren’t allowed to kill anyone or set themselves up as warlord-kings of Maple Drive. That wasn’t what they wanted at all. It wasn’t exciting enough. They lost their bars and movie theaters and didn’t get to murder even one person. No fair. So they decided it wasn’t real and got their murder after all, breathing death everywhere they went.

I think the only thing science fiction got wrong, really, is that we all kind of assumed that to pull this off, the powers-that-be had to be…you know…smart. Or maybe that was just the restrictions of good writing, good dialogue, the confines of needing to make villains compelling and complex in order to keep the reader’s attention, the assumption that we, the common people, have been through enough and understand ourselves sufficiently that in order to fool us into chains, malevolence had to be coupled with intelligence, wit, competence, a rhetoric of goodness, and a sweet sense of fashion.

Turns out Stupid Evil is just as effective as Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. Perhaps even more so, because we thought nothing that stupid could pull it off. We listened to Hitler’s speeches in German and so assumed they were each and all of them great oratory, and we believed the Nazi’s own myth of superiority in technology, economy, engineering, strategy. I was taught all throughout my schooling that the trains in Germany ran on time, that they were brilliant, if evil, organized, strong, unified, prosperous, cruel geniuses. Hollywood told me that too. It made them better villains. It made the victory more exciting. Nowhere was I taught about the meth and heroin addled idiots in charge of that Dipshit Empire who couldn’t stop trying to grift each other, get their dicks seen to, and stuff their own pockets with money, who believed in all kinds of ridiculous occult Mad Libs nonsense and whose military strategy began to crumble the millisecond other war economies were able to catch up and they encountered anything they couldn’t just bulldoze with numbers. That so many of the rank and file and officers alike were both cruel and stupid, with only a couple of Eichmanns to make it all run, that in fact that if you make a list that includes the Jews, the Communists, the LGBTQ, the disabled, the Roma, and any who resisted in print or in deed, you have also made a list of the most educated, brilliant, kind, empathetic, loving, community-minded, and cultured of Europe at that time. And that list will always be the first problem the new baddies need to solve.

Nowhere in my textbooks that were so careful to explain that there were Good Germans, that people just wanted the economy to improve (so economically anxious, don’t you see), that it was understandable to go along with someone who offered strength, was it mentioned that one by one, anyone competent was murdered or exiled and Hitler’s own military mind was a plate of fried dough, that he easily spent as much time trying to bang his niece as take over the world, that he was a failure at everything except telling people to embrace their own worst selves and enslave their neighbors to get rich, which doesn’t actually take much in the way of genius, fucking OBVIOUSLY. I was even told that Mein Kampf is a well-written book and it fucking is not I am here to tell you. If you enjoy the Unabomber’s Manifesto, I guess. Otherwise it’s just another tired, punctuationless, masturbatory terrorist’s dream journal.

And a lot of science fiction was based on that nightmare, this myth of that nightmare’s superior intellect, so we thought you had to be smart to build a dystopia. Even the Mule was clever.

But nah. You just have to give hateful people permission to put their thoughts into action without social consequence. You just have to not give a shit about anything but yourself. You just have to tell 40% of a country that they are better than anyone else, that they were right all along in even their most feverish imaginations, that they are heroes and what they have always wanted is what is now required. You just have to promise that apocalyptic fantasy, that all the drudgery of modern life is going to go away if only you’re willing to kill, or stand by while someone else kills, a few of the neighbors you never liked anyway, and believe that the conditions to be “one of the good ones” will never change so that it will be you on the other end of that equation. And though its our election that looms, this isn't just an American thing, either, anymore than it was just a German or Italian thing before. It's happening all over, for the same reasons, with different faces.

If we hadn’t been so concerned with good writing, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten that part wrong. Maybe we’d have more than Idiocracy and the absurdists to point to to explain how we got here.

But everything else?

Science fiction told us it was coming. It told us most people would go along with it. It told us we wouldn’t be socially ready for any single advance in technology. It told us there is always a dark lord in the wings waiting to crush society into an imitation of itself, that dystopias would always be that, carefully shaped motifs and images and rhetoric molded after the likes and dislikes of the despot. The ships are always shaped like the aliens themselves. Our ship is shaped like him, which is the worst of us: narcissistic, vain, violent, crude, sadistic, impulsive, bigoted, slovenly, gluttonish, somehow both over and undersexed, angry, self-indulgent, controlling, and thick as a box of bricks.

And this is all just depressing as fuck. There is no time off from it. There is no going back. We are in the zombie apocalypse—our neighbors hearts are dead but their bodies are alive and in thrall to their most base and relentless hungers, they look the same as they always did (maybe a little more dishelveled, but aren’t we all) but something has gotten into them and replaced their regular morning coffee with the desire to cause and witness the pain and suffering of others, Main Street is boarded up and we’re afraid to leave our homes, we wake up every morning and read the death tolls, our leaders are literally hiding their rotting limbs behind their backs and telling us there’s nothing to worry about.

We are living the zombie apocalypse and it’s not exciting at all, it fucking sucks ass.

No, not the zombie apocalypse. The Story Apocalypse. Where all the disparate stories every section of society has been telling themselves to justify and escape our various unhappinesses, from the simple story of progress toward justice to the story of a dawning techno-dystopia to the story of blood-guzzling demons who must be stopped from giving everyone health care, they’ve all busted on out of the lab and are brawling in the streets for primacy.

But for all the ways science fiction patiently explained how it could and would go wrong, it also explained how to live in it. Because people are always living in it. It’s a story, it requires people. And science fiction, generally, gives you two roads, diverging, so to speak, in a wood.

You can turn your brain off and conform, take whatever pleasures are offered by the regime, soma or two minutes of hate or a little butter to moisturize your skin, tell yourself you like it and work to make that true, eventually becoming so integrated that you will fight and die stop anyone who wants something more, something better. Please note: this path is only open to those of the regime’s favored demographic, and/or those outside it willing to carry its water and turn on their own. Please also note: this favored demographic is subject to change at any time. That you have four legs today will be meaningless in the reign of two legs coming tomorrow.

Or you can do what I have held on to for these years. What every science fiction novel tells us is the way through and past.

Do not locate your identity in what the regime tells you you are. Do not locate your sense of personal freedom in what can and can’t be done to you by external forces. Be free in your mind always. Resist. Question. No one is coming to save us but us. Gather those you love close and protect them. Remember that there was a world before the regime and there is a world after. Remember that the side of right is always the side of the unselfish, the caring, the helping, the diverse, the accepting, the kind. Stand up for yourself and for those who cannot stand up. Speak truth to power. Hold onto art, because it makes us human, and it is always one of the first things to burn. Hold on to facts, because they make us strong and aware and awake. Hold on to empathy, because it is the core of what they seek to eradicate. Hold on to history, because it puts proof to all lies told to maintain control. Hold on to each other, because no regime can do a goddamn thing to stop us loving and striving and finding warmth and comfort in our communities, even if they must be secret. Decry injustice everywhere. Risk harm to do so, even in small ways. Provide shelter. Run supplies. Tend to the weak and sick and hunted, even if you are all three, there is always someone weaker and sicker and more hunted. Be clever, be canny, be careful. Do not fall asleep. Do not accept the regime as inevitable. Do not collaborate. Do not be silent. Use the skills you have the best you can for the greatest good. Laugh and be happy when you can, happiness outside their approval is an act of defiance, laughter is a weapon.

Know that even doing all this, you may fail, but someone, someday will not.

Flee if you have to. There’s no shame in it. Take others with you if you can.

Don’t give up. The Big They can harm you, but they cannot take your soul away without your permission.

Wear a fucking mask.

And when there is a chance to fix it, even a small one, even a dubious one, even a rigged one, even against all odds and possibly doomed to fail, take it without hesitation. And then take the next one when it comes along.

Because the last thing science fiction (and fantasy and horror too, even, sometimes, realism) tells us is absolute bullshit on one level, pablum I personally rant against all the time, but on another level is grossly, disgustingly, awkwardly, idiotically true.

Love actually does conquer all.

Even them.

Love is this wild and uncontrollable human thing, a variable that cannot be controlled for. Regimes fear it, they do not understand it, they cannot tolerate it except to try to channel it toward themselves alone. It is the reason even the most unconscionable monster suddenly comes around on gay marriage or civil rights when their child comes out or their own grandchildren aren’t white as the driven snow. Because real love doesn’t allow prejudice and loathing and violence and oppression into the room. No one willingly lets those things breathe the same air as the ones they love. And conservatives know that very well, too, which is why they don’t want anyone to be able to come out or marry outside their race or live any life beyond what they prescribe without severe punishment: because if these things are allowed to flourish in sight of the faithful, even the faithful will almost always, sooner or later, choose love over the rules.

People will do absolutely mad things to protect their loves, to be together with them, to spare them pain, to give them a future. The lack of love causes more of our problems as a species than anyone can begin to get their heads around. You can outlaw it, you can say it’s weakness, you can try to redirect it toward the Dear Leader, you can focus your whole power structure on elevating the kind of people who are so broken that they can only ever feel it for themselves, but you absolutely cannot ever stop human beings from feeling love and acting extraordinarily on it.

Love is a force of creation and destruction. If you try to limit it or hoard it for the use of the state, it will eventually destroy you rather than be thwarted.

And that is where we are. Whatever happens in the unknown world of tomorrow, this will not be over, and that is how we are going to get through it, the way we have been writing ourselves getting through it for virtually all of our sentient existence: with cleverness and truth and love and each other. Nobody wants to live in a dystopia, it’s fucking dumb in there, but since there’s no such thing as utopia, we almost always are, to one degree or another. And even when things seem okay to you, someone right next to you is very likely living in a nightmare.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, don’t you know.

Science fiction, at least old school science fiction, also taught me that there’s a clear good and evil side to the struggle. And that’s just not so. Modern SF corrects for it. Shows greyer moralities. More compromised choices. Less perfect outcomes. More pessimistic odds. An understanding that the fight never ends.

Usually.

But this is a pretty simple one we find ourselves in just now. There’s a regular guy who likes trains and his kids and his wife and tries to do the right thing and admits his mistakes and wants to let everyone live as they like alongside a strong woman who had to fight to be seen and cares what happens to us and there’s an oligarch who worships death and pain and hates almost everyone, though some distinctly more than others, and publicly delights in bloodshed, corruption, and horror alongside a man who wants to electrocute gay children and can’t be alone in a room with a woman. There’s the guy who gets called Mr. Rogers as an insult, and the guys who think calling someone Mr. Rogers is an insult.

There’s the future, and there’s death.

I don’t know if you can vote out evil. But I do know that there have always been times when people could have said no earlier and avoided much. When other choices could have been made, other voices elevated, other alliances forged. When there was a simple choice and humans didn’t rise to make it when they needed to. No one had to vote for any of the nightmares of the 20th century, but they did, over and over. If they’d voted the other way, maybe it would have happened later or less or never at all.

I know we have to try.

I know science fiction says we have to try. That you don’t pass up a shot, however small, however unlikely, however different from shooting womp rats back home, to rebel and resist and affirm your right to live uncrushed. I know science fiction says one voice is enough. More is better. But one can do it, if they have to. Can turn the lights back on when the world let itself believe the darkness was natural and right and all there had ever been or could be. The fight never ends, but that doesn't mean it's unwinnable.

So I’m not painting my nails tomorrow. I’m not getting tacos. I’m not smiling. I am going to stand in that booth and cry. I am afraid. I feel alone. I feel hopeless. I feel like they’ve fixed it all in the shadows so nothing I do matters.

But I am going to stand in that booth.

Because science fiction tells me now is when it turns around. Now is when everyone cries out together, believing we are alone, and finds that was only a lie they told to keep us apart. Now is when the cavalry shows up, and everyone we thought had turned on us hits their redemption arc, and somehow, despite all that’s happened, we save each other. That there is a tomorrow. There is always a tomorrow. Eventually, we do find one that's better than today. Fighting for that horribly precious and loving tomorrow is what science fiction has told me to do since I was a child.

And science fiction has been right every step along the way. Its earned a little faith. A little erring on its side.

So I’m not gonna let science fiction down now. And neither should you.

See you tomorrow.

*Art by Matt Dixon