Guest Editorial in Analog: “Someone Else’s Apocalypse”

wp-1480086295307.jpgI’m proud to have a guest editorial in the current issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact!

“Someone Else’s Apocalypse” is about what twelve years as a community organizer working with homeless folks has taught me about how we’ll all deal with the coming collapse of civilization. I wrote it back in May, when I was imagining that rising seas and global conflict over water would render us post-apocalyptic in a couple decades… and now, for some strange reason possibly having to do with the US presidential election, I am feeling like the apocalypse is significantly more imminent now…

Huge thank-you to Analog editor Trevor Quachri for soliciting this piece!

Here’s a taste. For the full thing, pick up the December 2016 issue of Analog!

William Gibson famously remarked that “the future is here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This is commonly understood to describe the juxtaposition between one part of the earth’s population existing in a “future” where technological and social advances have made many of science fiction’s most beloved dreams come true, and another part of the earth’s population existing in a “past” to which technological and medical advances have not yet trickled down, subject to hardships and sicknesses and that the developed world left behind long ago. Cell phone assemblers in China, for example, endure sweatshop conditions as bad as anything during the Industrial Revolution, in workshops so bad that some workers are driven to suicide, while the Silicon Valley executives whose products they put together work from lavish, high-tech fortress homes.

I suspect, however, that the William Gibson comment contains a certain degree of ominous prophecy. The “future“ that has already arrived, that snuck in without anyone noticing it, is not the tech-enabled utopia we spent the latter half of the twentieth century waiting for, the one we mostly see outside our windows, lacking only jetpacks and hoverboards and interstellar travel. The future is not the tech utopia where we carry computers in our pockets capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge at any moment.

That world, alas, is the past. The future that’s here, unevenly distributed, is the post-apocalyptic wasteland. The future is dystopia, and its population is growing.

Turn on the nightly news and you’re likely to see refugees. Displaced masses from Syria and Yemen and Afghanistan and more. People who’ve survived dangerous passages, and lost loved ones in that same process. Hungry, frightened, traumatized. Standing outside the gates of safe places they’re barred form entering.

But refugees from foreign countries aren’t the only ones living in their own personal post-apocalypse….

Posted on: November 25, 2016, by : Sam J. M.
File under: Blog, New Publications