Unmanned (Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1)

I never was much of a comic book guy growing up. I have no explanation for this. Comic books seem like exactly the sort of thing I should have been into. But it’s too late now. But not too late to pick up the occasional anthology, such as Y: The Last Man. I’ve left these volumes idle on my shelf long enough that my interest and nagging sense of completion have peaked.

Unmanned is the first volume of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man series. In the first volume, we meet Yorick Brown and his monkey, Ampersand–the only male survivors on Earth.

Yorick, an unemployed amateur escape artist, is talking on the phone to his girlfriend when every male on the planet drops dead of an unknown cause.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? (Hamlet, V.i)

The arch of the first volume spans the first five comics in the series. At this point, we see only an introduction of the main players and themes of the series.

The players:

• Yorick and Ampersand
• Agent 355
• Dr. Mann
• The Government–official and unofficial
• The Amazons
• The Israeli military

While the story drops a few hints about what might have caused the catastrophe (Amulet of Helen leaving Jordan, human cloning), nothing is sorted out. The reader feels as clueless as those in the story itself.

Yorick definitely plays a jester-like character. He frequently drops one-liners and often appears unaware of the calamity around him. But the tragedy hits home at times for him, such as when he thinks of his father. The detachment is a coping mechanism from his old life tha serves him in the new world.The irony of his name–the Shakespearean symbol of mortality–is not to be dismissed. He is, after all, an escape artist.

A couple of other themes appear in the early phase of this story. First, violence. Like my other recent reads in the genre, Y: The Last Man shows how violence remains (and perhaps escalates) as a path to power after a calamity.

Second, old labels and power structures persist after the old mechanisms fail. It will be interesting to see if the old bureaucracies are restored or if something new will take place. How will society reinvent itself. I have not yet seen this explored, aside from tales where survivors regroup to carve out a society of survival.

Third, some women have had a complete reversal, damning anything their sex had sacrificed for men in the old world. As if women have been focusing on all the wrong things all along.

World Made By Hand (James Howard Kunstler)

James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand isn’t your typical novel of survival. There is no epidemic virus, no nuclear holocaust, no zombies to shoot. This world ended with fits and gasps, not with a massive singular explosion. The book begins several years after the apocalypse in an idyllic world of Union Grove. Robert, the protagonist, only describes how the world ended in vague bits and pieces. Quite simply, he doesn’t know. As governments failed and diseases spread, the flow of information was slowly cut off to this small town in upstate New York, until the survivors were left in a vacuum.

“Once the radio went off you could hear the roosters battling for supremacy of the village. Some people were annoyed by them, but I found them pleasantly reassuring.”

World Made By Hand is not so much a book of survival as it is of enduring. And the monsters are all very human.

The book opens to find Robert, a software executive turned carpenter, in Union Grove, New York. On the surface, this is a peaceful life. A deliberate, unprocessed, hard working life has replaced the our modern hurry. In the opening pages, it’s not much of a leap to think this kind of life might not be so bad. But as the book unfolds more, you start to see the sadness and strain just below the surface.

Everyone experiences the apocalypse in a different way. Some, like Robert, embrace it. Views his new life as much more honest than his old life.

“In the old days, as a corporate executive, I kept going on little more than continuous cups of black coffee until dinnertime. I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important, you were.”

But Robert is an unreliable narrator. Slowly, one begins to see how his acceptance of his life is a barrier to block out the grief from everything he has lost.

Others, like Jane Ann, are openly devastated by the new world. Even Loren, the town preacher and Robert’s best friend, often reminisces about the world before. To Brother Jobe,  a newcomer, the apocalypse opens an opportunity to build his new Jerusalem, to correct the wrongs of our past.

The early portion of World Made By Hand also displays a lot of survival pr0n. Kunstler describes how the people in Union Grove get along. How they grow vegetables, get water, make shoes. You gain an appreciation for how the people use their labor to directly contribute to their own survival and that of the community–a strict reversal of how most of us live our modern lives. It’s difficult not to think how our own communities would fare in the face of the apocalypse. I think this is Kunstler’s point.

However, even an island like Union Grove has problems. Society has regressed. Although we often view them as problematic, money and bureaucracies maintain order in our society. Without these mechanisms, charismatic individuals fill the power vacuums. Maybe they are preachers and men of God. Maybe they are low level criminals turned warlords.

“In normal times, Wayne Karp would have passed through life as just another lumpen American Dreamer, a hardworking consumer of shoddy products, chemically treated foods, and rude popular entertainments, a taxpayer subject to the ordinary restrictions of the social contract. But in the new era, he blossomed into a local kingpin.”

Society has changed on the personal level, as well. Promising young people have been reduced to serfs and laborers. A conversation between Robert and Shawn Waitling, a young man of Union grove, shows both Robert’s unreliability and the dissatisfaction many have with their lives. Robert describes Shawn:

“He was strong in a way you hardly ever saw in the old days, strong from real work, not from lifting barbells or aerobics classes.”

Shawn doesn’t see his life the way Robert does: “Jesus, Robert, look how we live. I’m practically a serf.”

But Robert is unconvinced:

“In fact, you could argue that people are better off now mentally than we were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We’re not all jacked up on coffee and television and sexy advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills.”

Young people aren’t the only ones who have lost something. The role of women has regressed to the point where they are now subservient to men. In fact, the women in this book remind me of those in Alas, Babylon–a book displaying the cultural sensitivities of its time (the early 1960s). Women are mainly characters written as vehicles to reflect the values of the men in the story. After Shawn Waitling is killed, his wife Britney describes the options left for a widow in the new world:

“But I need a helping hand, and these are not normal times. I’m old enough to remember the difference…I don’t want to put in with that New Faith crowd and pray three times a day and have some busybodies raise my child. And I don’t want to put in with Bullock and be a damned serf. We can help each other, you and me.”

Some things in the new world do not change as expected. You might expect people who had survived a series of calamities to cherish all human life. However, the scenes of violence betray this. Perhaps violence is something instilled in our base humanity and not a fault of modern life. The violence is somehow more vulgar in contrast to the quiet description of Union Grove.

There are some mystical elements sprinkled throughout the book. Prophets, unexplained deaths, and so on. While never fully explained, these elements hint at some powers in the universe that are masked by modern life. Once the televisions are silenced, a little magic can come out alongside the roosters.

While it’s clear that the Union Grove of World Made By Hand isn’t ideal, there are some things we can learn about it to improve our modern lives.

Hole (David Lovato)

Hole, by David Lovato, is a short story (very short, think Kafka-short) about a man in a bomb shelter. More specifically, it’s the story about a man in a bomb shelter who also happens to be nearing the end of his rope.

Post-apocalyptic tales often describe the struggle for survival. Insert an unlikely hero into the end of the world and watch him struggle to survive. By the end, he’ll prevail while also overcoming his own personal demons. If there’s a girl around, he’ll get her, too. Not so with Hole.

In this story, Lovato asks, “Then what?”

What if the protagonist prepares and makes it through the calamity? What if survival isn’t the problem. What is the problem then?

Maybe the problem becomes how to face the world where no one else was prepared.

Nightfall (Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg)

Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, is the novelization of Asimov’s earlier short story by the same name. This is the tale of a world called Kalgash, which orbit six suns and enjoys perpetual daylight. However, once every 2049 years, the heavens align just right and leave the planet in total darkness for several hours. Every time this happens, civilization collapses. Nightfall tells the tale of a few individuals who discover what is about to befall their planet and their efforts to avoid the apocalypse.

I didn’t expect to enjoy Nightfall as much as I did. Even as I finished reading it. I liked the short story when I read it a couple of years ago, but the novel didn’t grab me and take me down for a death roll like the past couple of books I’ve read. And although it isn’t the best book I’ve read this year, Nightfall is compelling in the spin it places on the apocalypse.

First, unlike a lot of books in the genre, the world doesn’t end until halfway through the story. The first half of the book is all about people figuring out something very bad is about to happen to civilization and deciding exactly what to do with that information. The second half is when the action takes off.

“Very well, he told himself. So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange you beliefs then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.”

Second, the event has nothing to do with fault. There is no sin, no human ignorance, no theme of “messing about with things we shouldn’t” that brings about the end of the world. It’s just random (cyclic, really) cosmic action.

“Though they were half his age, or even less, they must be having as much trouble coming to an intellectual and emotional acceptance of the whole idea of another major heavenly body in the universe as he had had.”

Third, although the people are not to blame, human arrogance still plays a role. Maybe the people did not bring about the cataclysm, but they were responsible for its outcome because they were blinded to its possibility. The characters make several statements in the book that sound ignorant to the reader, but are in line with the experiences of their culture. It’s all about context. Society follows a belief until it becomes law. If this belief is flawed, society eventually implodes. To me, I feel it’s a reach for a couple of dark hours to result in worldwide madness. But this is coming from a guy who lives on a planet where it is dark every night. My own arrogance plays a role here.

“We simply aren’t adapted for it. Imagine, if you can, a world that has only one sun. As that world rotates on its axis, each hemisphere will receive light for half a day and will be entirely dark for the other half. Not us, though. We’ve evolved under conditions of perpetual sunlight, every hour of the day, all year round…Our minds, even the physiologies of our bodies are accustomed to constant brightness. We don’t like even a brief moment without it.”

Fourth, fire plays a huge role in the book. Mastery of fire was man’s first triumph. It’s somehow fitting that fire plays a roll in his downfall. Over and over again.

“Theremon whistled. ‘What an idea for a great Weekend Supplement piece! Two dozen suns in a universe eight light-years across! Gods! that would shrink our universe into insignificance! Imagine it–Kalgash and its suns just a little trivial suburb of the real universe, and here we’ve been thinking that we’re the whole thing, just us and our six suns, all alone in the cosmos’”

Fifth, one could argue it wasn’t the darkness that drove people mad, but the insignificance implied by the multitude number of stars in the night sky. Again, arrogance at work.

Finally, there is a bit too much random luck in this book. Although not everyone makes it out alive, I felt it was a bit too coincidental when characters kept just bumping into each other in the post dark chaos. Further, I did not like the end. I won’t give away the final detail, but suffice to say I was not satisfied with how the authors wrapped up one of the major conflicts in the novel.