Latest news with #survivalism
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Science
- The Guardian
Blue sky thinking: why we need positive climate novels
Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel, Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including Z for Zachariah by Robert C O'Brien and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, but there was no imperative to write about such things. These stories involved anomalistic catastrophes – a mutated virus, nuclear war – and they were very bleak. They resonated but also seemed unusual. At the other end of the scale, Ben Elton's Stark had comedically outlined the nature of oligarchic greed, resource consumption, and the ruination we were hurtling towards, while the Bezos and Musk equivalents could head off-world – not quite so funny now. The public knew about climate issues, though terminology often stressed them individually – ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, desertification, coral bleaching – rather than total Earth systems breakdown. Disparate, visionary science fictions didn't indicate a genre movement yet. There was a luxury of choice regarding stories related to nature – no elephant in the room (or polar bear), if you didn't tackle climate-change concerns. In the 2000s, while the scientific data was righting itself from hacks and attacks, a whole spate of alarming nonfiction books arrived, forecasting the devastating effect of global temperature rises, mass extinctions, and the chaotic world that would occur if our trajectory of fossil fuel consumption, industrial farming, deforestation and the like wasn't altered. Books like Six Degrees (Mark Lynas), A World Without Bees (Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum), and Half Gone (Jeremy Leggett) sounded the doom gong, loudly. As a news-hungry novelist, I responded, wringing jeopardy from these predictions to create a dire, possible future. Full-throttle dystopian speculation seemed to be appropriate. I wrote The Carhullan Army, which imagines female paramilitary resistance in a Britain destabilised by flooding and politically fascistic, where rationing and population control are the new norms. Looking back, I can see this story arrived out of pure, exhilarated fear about impending ecological disaster, the repressive systems which could arise out of it and their effect, especially, on women. It was an attempt to ring the same warning bell, to create a virtual, experiential realm for the reader out of their propositions. Fiction writers were turning towards the situation. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, perhaps the most horrific, cataclysmic fable of this era, while never explicitly naming its disaster, depicts, as George Monbiot noted, the extreme consequences of 'a world without a biosphere'. A decade later, The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, imagines a saturated, desolated England, with migration south to north as characters struggle to control their lives. Water shortages, drought and expanding sands feature in Claire Vaye Watkins' novel, Gold Fame Citrus, where countercultural Californians try to get to grips with a brutal new wilderness almost too big for human comprehension. Too big for comprehension, regarding the world's threatened environmental state, would become our existential sufferance. These issues were not, in fact, speculative, but live around the globe. The ensuing havoc and damages do not affect humans equally. The racial extrapolation of history and culture in relation to climate future is depicted in Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath. In it, the abandoned black population of an uninhabitable, cloud-shrouded America search for meaning, home, and connection. Who will suffer and how when the apocalypse descends as a result of society's legacy, is one of the fundamental concerns. If there are positive human adaptations or consolations to be found in these stories, they are transitory, vestigial or futile – distantly circling birds, an orphan fostered in hell, precarious love, sorority. Hope is dwarfed or excoriated by the monstrous new reality of planetary vastation. Tracking forward from Mary Shelley's The Last Man, anxiety around the loss of our habitat and safe, humane civilisation has been the operating key for dystopia. Cli-fi is now its own genre, and booming, its themes curated on bookshops tables. But is pessimism still the prevailing mood? Utopia, it's said, is difficult to write and perhaps less interesting to read. 'Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness,' George Orwell asserted. Darkness is attractive in so far as it's inherently dramatic to depict, provocative and recognisable. In the face of failure to politically cooperate, legislate and mitigate against Earth systems breakdown, nature-horror and environmental comeuppance might truly represent our feelings of fatalism. Perhaps dystopia serves a purpose, as a repellent. It's difficult to know whether it acts as a cautionary tale, deterring people from its pathways, or whether it simply provides disturbing entertainment while endorsing the worst-case scenario. But is Orwell's philosophy correct? Or might the premise be learned incapacity, a defeatist ideology that commits us to mess and devilry, rather than nurturing anything better? Might it hinder solution stories and contribute to a negative cultural paralysis? One man's utopia is very different from the next woman's. There have always been positive proposals in science fiction, too, such as the formidable work of Octavia Butler, which opposes the notion of destructive tendencies in our species and dares to dream up models of evolution. The narratives of Afrofuturism rise from experiences unlike Orwell's, exploring themes of black identity and agency and offering alternative, empowered versions of the future. Who is to say what literature can't be or do? So what is the fiction that needs to be written now? This is the question I grappled with over the decades of writing my novel Helm. Is it about signposting progress when it comes to environmental adaptation and damage limitation? Should writers try to offer a restorative or rousing spirit for the times we live in, an opposition to eschatology? Can literature actually be a tool to encourage something better – creating eco-topia on the page, so it might be imagined off it? Midway through the writing of the book, I took part in a British Council Nature Writing panel in Germany and this last question was asked by the audience. Robert Macfarlane, the chair, barely paused before saying: yes. I remained silent. Since the dystopian days, I had tried a hopeful version of environmental fiction, The Wolf Border, which is about nature recovery and the rewilding of Britain. A good kind of What If scenario, I'd thought. But its premise and its political conditions – Scottish independence and radical land reform – seem more fantastical and remote now than when it was written. The truth is, as I sat quietly on that panel, I felt corseted by old ideas about fiction: that gloom is our territory, that fabricators have a different role to factualists, that novelists aren't obliged to help steer society out of a negative mindset. My luxury to choose an environmental mode felt hollow. For nonfiction writers, the presentation of issues and ideas is central. They encourage literal engagement with a subject. They can brilliantly advocate, use literature to protest and campaign for conservation. They might move the dial politically, like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did, prompting the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. They can reconstruct biased, racialised environments as the cultural geographer Carolyn Finney does. In her book Black Faces, White Spaces, she examines the relationships between African Americans and the natural world, white privilege, historical access to and ownership of the great outdoors, broadening perspectives on the environmental justice movement. With fiction, it is harder to present issues without it being on-the-nose; there are so many moving parts in a virtual world: characters, plots,landscapes, themes. A story might foreground the environment, it might even be about the environment, but it isn't a manifesto. It is galvanising to see writers such as Monbiot tackling the issues behind industrialism that drive pollution and depletion – neoliberalism, capitalism, the internalised narratives that make us believe consumer economic systems are set and unchangeable – then suggest alternatives. I've been struck too reading Wild Fell by Lee Schofield, which imagines the future blossoming of ecological work he's undertaken in the same location where Haweswater and The Carhullan Army are set. I was struck, because I'd never imagined an optimistic vision for my home turf; it seemed like a literary gear I didn't possess. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion How wonderful, this kind of righteous sightedness; how mindful a contribution towards systems change. And there's a wild, inspiring proliferation of books written by women regarding human synergy with nature: hawks, hares, mountains, common land, rivers. These works begin to overcome the immense scale of fatalism. So can fiction. The Overstory by Richard Powers demonstrates the genuine power of collectives in the fight to protect nature. Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour finds, alongside the shocking planetary transformation affecting all species, a beauty in transition. These novels invite scientists to shout louder and readers to participate more. This became the imperative for Helm. It is a book about a unique aerial phenomenon, Britain's only named wind, far older than humans and perhaps imperilled because of us. After more than a decade of stalls, rewrites and re-examinations of the topic, I had begun wondering if I should imagine ways up and out of doom scenarios instead of just describing the conflict within them. The answer was yes. The novel tackles issues of climate change, but its tenor is different. Perhaps the very nature of its subject helped: air, levity, mercurial otherness. Nature narrating itself is not new in literature, but remembering that our human story is not separate from nature's story is timely. The wind, whose biography the book attempts to capture, is a mischievous puckish storyteller, entertained by humans and impervious to its own destruction, so the tone is a bit 'tea-party at end-times'. A beautiful indifference is one option for dealing with environmental ruin, if you've no agency to alter it. But the character of Selima, a contemporary meteorological researcher studying microplastics in clouds, is more serious and culpable. Selima has the weight of awful facts on her shoulders, along with interference from climate deniers. Her existential crisis is, I think, a version of what we all may feel as isolated individuals, given the overwhelming issues we face. Yet she remains defiant and collegiate; she keeps on going with her work. The end of her story is still speculative, but it leaves room for activism to triumph. There are lots of stories in the novel about how mankind has tried to control the elements over millennia, via industry and religion; how we've consumed and damaged nature as our 'manifest destiny'. But there are also stories about ways of existing holistically, recognising our place in nature and its place in us. These are mostly the female characters' stories; they prevail against bad operators, and they are companionable with Helm. The Helm's-eye overview gives a whimsical perspective of human endeavour, our significant anthropogenic moment on the planet, our solipsism and minimalism in the scheme of things, and a sense of: what next? This allowed for a fundamental shift in spirit towards buoyancy and a rescaling. In the end, it felt as meaningful and right to try to imagine positive countervailing ideas around our ecological impact as the dystopias had previously felt. Helm is far from eco-topia. But I hope the book is a constructive offering for our current moment. I've always believed fiction can be vital in allowing readers to apprehend and experience other versions of the world. I'm starting to believe it can play a part in encouraging healthier visions of the environment, by depicting our benign proclivities, and imagining that marvellous natural phenomena like the Helm wind can be saved.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Science
- The Guardian
Blue sky thinking: why we need positive climate novels
Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel, Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including Z for Zachariah by Robert C O'Brien and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, but there was no imperative to write about such things. These stories involved anomalistic catastrophes – a mutated virus, nuclear war – and they were very bleak. They resonated but also seemed unusual. At the other end of the scale, Ben Elton's Stark had comedically outlined the nature of oligarchic greed, resource consumption, and the ruination we were hurtling towards, while the Bezos and Musk equivalents could head off-world – not quite so funny now. The public knew about climate issues, though terminology often stressed them individually – ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, desertification, coral bleaching – rather than total Earth systems breakdown. Disparate, visionary science fictions didn't indicate a genre movement yet. There was a luxury of choice regarding stories related to nature – no elephant in the room (or polar bear), if you didn't tackle climate-change concerns. In the 2000s, while the scientific data was righting itself from hacks and attacks, a whole spate of alarming nonfiction books arrived, forecasting the devastating effect of global temperature rises, mass extinctions, and the chaotic world that would occur if our trajectory of fossil fuel consumption, industrial farming, deforestation and the like wasn't altered. Books like Six Degrees (Mark Lynas), A World Without Bees (Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum), and Half Gone (Jeremy Leggett) sounded the doom gong, loudly. As a news-hungry novelist, I responded, wringing jeopardy from these predictions to create a dire, possible future. Full-throttle dystopian speculation seemed to be appropriate. I wrote The Carhullan Army, which imagines female paramilitary resistance in a Britain destabilised by flooding and politically fascistic, where rationing and population control are the new norms. Looking back, I can see this story arrived out of pure, exhilarated fear about impending ecological disaster, the repressive systems which could arise out of it and their effect, especially, on women. It was an attempt to ring the same warning bell, to create a virtual, experiential realm for the reader out of their propositions. Fiction writers were turning towards the situation. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, perhaps the most horrific, cataclysmic fable of this era, while never explicitly naming its disaster, depicts, as George Monbiot noted, the extreme consequences of 'a world without a biosphere'. A decade later, The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, imagines a saturated, desolated England, with migration south to north as characters struggle to control their lives. Water shortages, drought and expanding sands feature in Claire Vaye Watkins' novel, Gold Fame Citrus, where countercultural Californians try to get to grips with a brutal new wilderness almost too big for human comprehension. Too big for comprehension, regarding the world's threatened environmental state, would become our existential sufferance. These issues were not, in fact, speculative, but live around the globe. The ensuing havoc and damages do not affect humans equally. The racial extrapolation of history and culture in relation to climate future is depicted in Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath. In it, the abandoned black population of an uninhabitable, cloud-shrouded America search for meaning, home, and connection. Who will suffer and how when the apocalypse descends as a result of society's legacy, is one of the fundamental concerns. If there are positive human adaptations or consolations to be found in these stories, they are transitory, vestigial or futile – distantly circling birds, an orphan fostered in hell, precarious love, sorority. Hope is dwarfed or excoriated by the monstrous new reality of planetary vastation. Tracking forward from Mary Shelley's The Last Man, anxiety around the loss of our habitat and safe, humane civilisation has been the operating key for dystopia. Cli-fi is now its own genre, and booming, its themes curated on bookshops tables. But is pessimism still the prevailing mood? Utopia, it's said, is difficult to write and perhaps less interesting to read. 'Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness,' George Orwell asserted. Darkness is attractive in so far as it's inherently dramatic to depict, provocative and recognisable. In the face of failure to politically cooperate, legislate and mitigate against Earth systems breakdown, nature-horror and environmental comeuppance might truly represent our feelings of fatalism. Perhaps dystopia serves a purpose, as a repellent. It's difficult to know whether it acts as a cautionary tale, deterring people from its pathways, or whether it simply provides disturbing entertainment while endorsing the worst-case scenario. But is Orwell's philosophy correct? Or might the premise be learned incapacity, a defeatist ideology that commits us to mess and devilry, rather than nurturing anything better? Might it hinder solution stories and contribute to a negative cultural paralysis? One man's utopia is very different from the next woman's. There have always been positive proposals in science fiction, too, such as the formidable work of Octavia Butler, which opposes the notion of destructive tendencies in our species and dares to dream up models of evolution. The narratives of Afrofuturism rise from experiences unlike Orwell's, exploring themes of black identity and agency and offering alternative, empowered versions of the future. Who is to say what literature can't be or do? So what is the fiction that needs to be written now? This is the question I grappled with over the decades of writing my novel Helm. Is it about signposting progress when it comes to environmental adaptation and damage limitation? Should writers try to offer a restorative or rousing spirit for the times we live in, an opposition to eschatology? Can literature actually be a tool to encourage something better – creating eco-topia on the page, so it might be imagined off it? Midway through the writing of the book, I took part in a British Council Nature Writing panel in Germany and this last question was asked by the audience. Robert Macfarlane, the chair, barely paused before saying: yes. I remained silent. Since the dystopian days, I had tried a hopeful version of environmental fiction, The Wolf Border, which is about nature recovery and the rewilding of Britain. A good kind of What If scenario, I'd thought. But its premise and its political conditions – Scottish independence and radical land reform – seem more fantastical and remote now than when it was written. The truth is, as I sat quietly on that panel, I felt corseted by old ideas about fiction: that gloom is our territory, that fabricators have a different role to factualists, that novelists aren't obliged to help steer society out of a negative mindset. My luxury to choose an environmental mode felt hollow. For nonfiction writers, the presentation of issues and ideas is central. They encourage literal engagement with a subject. They can brilliantly advocate, use literature to protest and campaign for conservation. They might move the dial politically, like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did, prompting the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. They can reconstruct biased, racialised environments as the cultural geographer Carolyn Finney does. In her book Black Faces, White Spaces, she examines the relationships between African Americans and the natural world, white privilege, historical access to and ownership of the great outdoors, broadening perspectives on the environmental justice movement. With fiction, it is harder to present issues without it being on-the-nose; there are so many moving parts in a virtual world: characters, plots,landscapes, themes. A story might foreground the environment, it might even be about the environment, but it isn't a manifesto. It is galvanising to see writers such as Monbiot tackling the issues behind industrialism that drive pollution and depletion – neoliberalism, capitalism, the internalised narratives that make us believe consumer economic systems are set and unchangeable – then suggest alternatives. I've been struck too reading Wild Fell by Lee Schofield, which imagines the future blossoming of ecological work he's undertaken in the same location where Haweswater and The Carhullan Army are set. I was struck, because I'd never imagined an optimistic vision for my home turf; it seemed like a literary gear I didn't possess. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion How wonderful, this kind of righteous sightedness; how mindful a contribution towards systems change. And there's a wild, inspiring proliferation of books written by women regarding human synergy with nature: hawks, hares, mountains, common land, rivers. These works begin to overcome the immense scale of fatalism. So can fiction. The Overstory by Richard Powers demonstrates the genuine power of collectives in the fight to protect nature. Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour finds, alongside the shocking planetary transformation affecting all species, a beauty in transition. These novels invite scientists to shout louder and readers to participate more. This became the imperative for Helm. It is a book about a unique aerial phenomenon, Britain's only named wind, far older than humans and perhaps imperilled because of us. After more than a decade of stalls, rewrites and re-examinations of the topic, I had begun wondering if I should imagine ways up and out of doom scenarios instead of just describing the conflict within them. The answer was yes. The novel tackles issues of climate change, but its tenor is different. Perhaps the very nature of its subject helped: air, levity, mercurial otherness. Nature narrating itself is not new in literature, but remembering that our human story is not separate from nature's story is timely. The wind, whose biography the book attempts to capture, is a mischievous puckish storyteller, entertained by humans and impervious to its own destruction, so the tone is a bit 'tea-party at end-times'. A beautiful indifference is one option for dealing with environmental ruin, if you've no agency to alter it. But the character of Selima, a contemporary meteorological researcher studying microplastics in clouds, is more serious and culpable. Selima has the weight of awful facts on her shoulders, along with interference from climate deniers. Her existential crisis is, I think, a version of what we all may feel as isolated individuals, given the overwhelming issues we face. Yet she remains defiant and collegiate; she keeps on going with her work. The end of her story is still speculative, but it leaves room for activism to triumph. There are lots of stories in the novel about how mankind has tried to control the elements over millennia, via industry and religion; how we've consumed and damaged nature as our 'manifest destiny'. But there are also stories about ways of existing holistically, recognising our place in nature and its place in us. These are mostly the female characters' stories; they prevail against bad operators, and they are companionable with Helm. The Helm's-eye overview gives a whimsical perspective of human endeavour, our significant anthropogenic moment on the planet, our solipsism and minimalism in the scheme of things, and a sense of: what next? This allowed for a fundamental shift in spirit towards buoyancy and a rescaling. In the end, it felt as meaningful and right to try to imagine positive countervailing ideas around our ecological impact as the dystopias had previously felt. Helm is far from eco-topia. But I hope the book is a constructive offering for our current moment. I've always believed fiction can be vital in allowing readers to apprehend and experience other versions of the world. I'm starting to believe it can play a part in encouraging healthier visions of the environment, by depicting our benign proclivities, and imagining that marvellous natural phenomena like the Helm wind can be saved.
The Guardian
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Catastrophe! Heroism! Paranoia! The dangerous romance of survivalist stories
The man who claimed to have coined the word 'survivalist' called himself Kurt Saxon. The sinister godfather of survivalism was actually born Donald Eugene Sisco, a former journalist who spent the 1960s floating between far-right groups in California before deciding that none of them were serious enough. Sisco's passion for making his own bombs, which he advocated using on student demonstrators, cost him the fingers of his left hand. He liked to say that he was the reincarnation of a soul whose previous lives included a Roman legionary, a Nazi stormtrooper and the revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine. Survivalism, or prepping, is experiencing a boom, from Silicon Valley billionaires to users of the Reddit board r/collapse. Elon Musk's entire career, for example, has been partly driven by apocalypse anxieties and his conviction that he alone can save the human race (details to be confirmed). The scenarios vary – climate catastrophe, renegade AI, another pandemic, nuclear war between authoritarian regimes – as do the responses. Some claim to be making rational preparations to survive in the event of civilisational collapse, while others seem unnervingly keen to see the world turned upside down. This can feel like a very 21st-century obsession, stoked by online conspiracy theories and the doomerism produced by 24/7 news, but Sisco was pioneering the doom business 50 years ago. During the 1970s, rising crime and soaring inflation convinced Sisco that America was headed for an almighty crash and that he had better be ready for it. In 1976, he launched a magazine called the Survivor, which offered subscribers an unnerving combination of tips on self-sufficiency (how to make candles, blow glass, grow cucumbers) and ghoulish predictions of a cataclysmic event known as Collapse Day. 'America's irreversible collapse should be apparent to anyone by 1980,' Sisco wrote in the first issue. In an interview, Sisco summed up the survivalist's blend of excitement and genocidal misanthropy: 'I'm quite thrilled by the prospect of civilization ending. It is an adventure and a great culling that has to come.' Yet despite Sisco's claims, the word 'survivalist' actually originated in fiction – specifically Giles Tippette's 1975 novel The Survivalist. It is the story of Franklin Horn, a middle-aged man with similar, though less fascistic premonitions of doom to Sisco. Horn believes that the city he lives in is on the verge of collapse and tries to convince his wife and friends to join him in building a fortress in the Ozarks (where Sisco would move in 1980). 'I'm not a humanist,' Horn says. 'I'm a survivalist.' When they decline to sign up to his paranoia, he goes it alone and finds himself stalked by an antagonist who raids his supplies and tries to kill him. In fighting back, Horn realises that man cannot live alone in fear and shamefacedly rejoins the civilisation he rejected. Tippette repudiated in advance Sisco's lurid fantasies of apocalyptic adventure. Novelists have been imagining the challenges of survival for decades. If survivalism can be seen as a form of storytelling that consumes the storyteller, then fiction can help us understand the mentality and the dangerous places it can lead. From Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1719 to Ridley Scott's movie The Martian almost 300 years later, audiences have been captivated by tales of resourceful individuals who find increasingly ingenious ways to survive a hostile environment until they can return to civilisation. They are adventure stories in which heroism consists of relentless problem-solving rather than conflict. The difference between a survivor and a survivalist is that one is a temporary condition and the other a permanent identity. The survivalist actively wants to be estranged from civilisation – craves, in fact, the destruction of civilisation itself. After all, it would be a waste of effort if society refused to collapse. In the 1970s, some called themselves 'retreaters', having in effect resigned from society. Though framed as an ugly necessity (people would try to steal your stuff), violence was part of the appeal of this bare-knuckle libertarianism. The survivalist is not content with maintaining a vegetable patch and whittling a bow and arrow to hunt for food. He wants guns, and people to use them on. The survivor and the survivalist go head-to-head in William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of schoolboys stranded on an island during a nuclear war. Their initial leader, Ralph, wants to preserve a skeleton of social norms and solidarity until help arrives. The fire he maintains is both a signal to rescuers and a symbol of civilised values: 'The rules are the only thing we've got!' His challenger, Jack, however, turns himself into a tribal chieftain, exerting power through violence, barbarism and superstition. For him, catastrophe is liberation. Why would he ever want to go home again? Subsequent catastrophe novels such as John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956) and Charles Eric Maine's The Tide Went Out (1958) proposed that most people thought of themselves as noble Ralphs but would soon turn into brutal Jacks once the going got tough. The fictional survivalist who first expressed the ominous politics of survivalism appeared in HG Wells's 1890s phenomenon The War of the Worlds. Amid the chaos of a Martian invasion, the narrator meets an artilleryman with a plan: humanity will regroup and rebuild in underground sewers and tunnels in order to wage guerrilla war against the invaders. The artilleryman is drooling with anticipation because he is a eugenicist and – 20 years before the fact – a fascist. He contrasts 'able-bodied, clean-minded men' with the 'weak and silly' who deserve to die: 'It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.' Decades later, in a 1982 interview with the Sacramento Bee, Sisco argued that anyone with an IQ below 110 should be sterilised to save America from degeneracy. Survivalism went mainstream during the first half of the 1980s. Newspapers profiled survival businesses and the isolated communities they served, finding characters much like the artilleryman. Their lurid fears included nuclear war, foreign invasion, environmental disasters, race war and food shortages due to overpopulation. The sociologist Richard G Mitchell Jr spent more than a decade talking to survivalists for his 2002 book Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times. He found that most of them felt impotent and overwhelmed in their day-to-day lives and were empowered by imagining themselves the main characters in a greatly simplified world without rule of law – or WROL in survivalist parlance. 'Survivalism,' Mitchell observed, 'is a way to accomplish the creative renarration of the self and often one's companions into tales of aesthetic consequence.' It gave their lives meaning. It was in 1981 that Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior popularised the hitherto obscure word 'post-apocalyptic'. 'Mad' Max Rockatansky is not technically a survivalist, because he never expected or wanted society to collapse. A former police officer, he sides with the vulnerable neomedieval community rather than the feral biker gang. But the movie inspired a more aggressively rightwing genre that the writer Mike Davis called 'armageddonist'. That same year, Jerry Ahern began publishing The Survivalist, a series of pulp novels about John Rourke, a former CIA officer who battles Soviet invaders, mutants and cannibals in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Ahern published as many as four volumes a year (titles included The Doomsayer, The End Is Coming and The Savage Horde), which tells you something about their quality. More notable for the loving attention Ahern gives to various firearms (he later founded his own gun company) than for their characters or ideas, they sold millions of copies. At the same time, survivalism merged with the far-right militia movement to produce hundreds of real-life John Rourkes. The far-right, anti-government militia group the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord conducted an End Time Overcomer Survival Training School – and practised assassination skills on its 224-acre (91-hectare) armed compound in Arkansas – before one member killed a Black police officer and attracted the attention of the FBI. A related white nationalist group, the Order, murdered the Jewish radio host Alan Berg and was also shut down by the FBI – a story told recently in Amazon Prime's The Order. All of this overt Nazism and homicidal violence made survivalism a dirty word, leading Sisco to insist that real survivalists do not shoot police officers. 'A survivalist is simply one who anticipates the collapse of civilisation and prepares to survive it,' he protested. One peculiar product of this fraught period was The Survivors, a flop 1983 comedy starring Robin Williams as a paranoid dental supply executive who joins a survivalist camp in Vermont. A more serious one was David Brin's 1985 novel The Postman. Brin's hero, Gordon Krantz, dons a dead postman's uniform and delivers his abandoned mail to bring a little hope and order to post-apocalyptic Oregon. His foes are a 'loose, macho, hyper-survivalist' militia called the Holnists, whose antisocial savagery he blames for America's desperate state: 'It was the same solipsistic philosophy of ego that had stoked the rage of Nazism.' Brin was rebuking the violent, self-aggrandising survivalism that ran through post-Mad Max fiction and spilled over into real life via the Covenant and the Order. In The Postman, society is something priceless that should be mourned and rebuilt, not a sandcastle to knock down. After the militia movement was associated with atrocities such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, survivalism's reputation sank further. But in 1998, one user of an internet message board about the Y2K bug introduced the synonym 'prepper'. It sounded more modern and more reasonable than 'survivalist', with an emphasis on the practical details of preparation rather than daydreams of post-apocalyptic gunplay. The National Geographic series Doomsday Preppers, which launched in 2012, became the channel's most watched show to date. Despite the rebranding, preppers are still usually treated as sinister or absurd in 21st-century fiction. Closer in spirit to Tippette's The Survivalist than Ahern's The Survivalist, these stories puncture what Brin called 'little-boy wish fantasies about running amok in a world without rules'. Cormac McCarthy's crushingly bleak 2006 masterpiece The Road is often praised on prepper websites but it presents survival as a gruelling slog rather than an adventure. 'There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead,' McCarthy writes of his unnamed protagonist. The most acclaimed episode of HBO's The Last of Us meanwhile features a misanthropic survivalist (played by Nick Offerman) who admits: 'I used to hate the world and I was happy when everyone died.' But his hard shell is cracked open when he falls in love with an unexpected visitor and is reminded that people matter after all. While Offerman's character represents the old-fashioned hermit survivalist, other stories satirise the new billionaire preppers: people like Peter Thiel, who spend vast amounts of money on luxury bunkers, private islands or refuges in New Zealand. While traditional survivalism is a power fantasy for the powerless, this version is an escape route for elites who are partly responsible for the social and environmental instability that terrifies them. 'Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?' asked the economist Robert A Johnson in the New Yorker. 'What does that really tell us about our system?' They are retreaters. The popular suspicion of the survival industry dates back to the fallout shelter craze of the early 1960s, when The Twilight Zone showed neighbour turning on neighbour in The Shelter; Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove ranted about creating a postwar master race in the mineshafts; and Bob Dylan mocked bunker dwellers in his song Let Me Die in My Footsteps. The shelter business all but collapsed within a year when most Americans decided that not only would they probably not survive a nuclear war but that they would not want to. Subterranean shelters are ripe for parody once more. The recent satirical TV series Fallout, based on the hit video game, contrasts the suffocating conformism of the Vaults with the perilous freedom of the wasteland. In American Horror Story: Apocalypse, a billionaire socialite and her entourage shelter from a nuclear winter in the luxurious bunker Outpost 3 but the situation turns nightmarish as food supplies run out and paranoia flourishes. In season three of the post-apocalyptic sitcom The Last Man on Earth another socialite hides out from a pandemic in her dead friend's well-appointed bunker and slowly loses her mind. Whether it is the menace of desperate companions, a sinister regime or maddening solitude, an apparent refuge becomes a prison to be escaped. We sympathise with Robinson Crusoe or Matt Damon's character in The Martian because they have been forcibly estranged from the human race and are desperate to reconnect. But from the Ozarks compound to the New Zealand bunker, survivalists choose to sever themselves from humanity at large. No wonder we enjoy seeing them fail. All stories of catastrophe and survival contain a verdict on human nature. Most texts about survivalism, from prepper handbooks to The Road, promote a Hobbesian view of humanity: civilisation is a thin skin stretched over an abyss of animal brutality. 'Men have always had urges towards dominance which are basically stronger than urges towards cooperation,' John Christopher said when asked about the pessimism in The Death of Grass. But is this true, or does survival fiction encourage us to believe the worst? While nobody knows what would happen if everything collapsed, Rebecca Solnit demonstrates in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster that in the aftermath of real catastrophes the looters and marauders are vastly outnumbered by people trying to help and save each other. Far from being a liberal delusion, mutual aid is a powerful human instinct. 'Everybody was your friend and you in turn everybody's friend,' recalled one survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. 'The individual, the isolated self was dead. The social self was regnant.' Whether for political reasons or simply the need for narrative excitement, conventional survival fiction endorses the idea, as David Brin put it, 'that humanity in general is dreadful and therefore only individual heroes matter'. But in novels such as Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959) or Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), post-apocalyptic survival is achieved instead by solidarity and collaboration. Problem-solving is a collective endeavour and selfishness spells doom. These stories are worth telling, too, and they may be closer to reality. Dorian Lynskey is the author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
The Guardian
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Catastrophe! Heroism! Paranoia! The dangerous romance of survivalist stories
The man who claimed to have coined the word 'survivalist' called himself Kurt Saxon. The sinister godfather of survivalism was actually born Donald Eugene Sisco, a former journalist who spent the 1960s floating between far-right groups in California before deciding that none of them were serious enough. Sisco's passion for making his own bombs, which he advocated using on student demonstrators, cost him the fingers of his left hand. He liked to say that he was the reincarnation of a soul whose previous lives included a Roman legionary, a Nazi stormtrooper and the revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine. Survivalism, or prepping, is experiencing a boom, from Silicon Valley billionaires to users of the Reddit board r/collapse. Elon Musk's entire career, for example, has been partly driven by apocalypse anxieties and his conviction that he alone can save the human race (details to be confirmed). The scenarios vary – climate catastrophe, renegade AI, another pandemic, nuclear war between authoritarian regimes – as do the responses. Some claim to be making rational preparations to survive in the event of civilisational collapse, while others seem unnervingly keen to see the world turned upside down. This can feel like a very 21st-century obsession, stoked by online conspiracy theories and the doomerism produced by 24/7 news, but Sisco was pioneering the doom business 50 years ago. During the 1970s, rising crime and soaring inflation convinced Sisco that America was headed for an almighty crash and that he had better be ready for it. In 1976, he launched a magazine called the Survivor, which offered subscribers an unnerving combination of tips on self-sufficiency (how to make candles, blow glass, grow cucumbers) and ghoulish predictions of a cataclysmic event known as Collapse Day. 'America's irreversible collapse should be apparent to anyone by 1980,' Sisco wrote in the first issue. In an interview, Sisco summed up the survivalist's blend of excitement and genocidal misanthropy: 'I'm quite thrilled by the prospect of civilization ending. It is an adventure and a great culling that has to come.' Yet despite Sisco's claims, the word 'survivalist' actually originated in fiction – specifically Giles Tippette's 1975 novel The Survivalist. It is the story of Franklin Horn, a middle-aged man with similar, though less fascistic premonitions of doom to Sisco. Horn believes that the city he lives in is on the verge of collapse and tries to convince his wife and friends to join him in building a fortress in the Ozarks (where Sisco would move in 1980). 'I'm not a humanist,' Horn says. 'I'm a survivalist.' When they decline to sign up to his paranoia, he goes it alone and finds himself stalked by an antagonist who raids his supplies and tries to kill him. In fighting back, Horn realises that man cannot live alone in fear and shamefacedly rejoins the civilisation he rejected. Tippette repudiated in advance Sisco's lurid fantasies of apocalyptic adventure. Novelists have been imagining the challenges of survival for decades. If survivalism can be seen as a form of storytelling that consumes the storyteller, then fiction can help us understand the mentality and the dangerous places it can lead. From Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1719 to Ridley Scott's movie The Martian almost 300 years later, audiences have been captivated by tales of resourceful individuals who find increasingly ingenious ways to survive a hostile environment until they can return to civilisation. They are adventure stories in which heroism consists of relentless problem-solving rather than conflict. The difference between a survivor and a survivalist is that one is a temporary condition and the other a permanent identity. The survivalist actively wants to be estranged from civilisation – craves, in fact, the destruction of civilisation itself. After all, it would be a waste of effort if society refused to collapse. In the 1970s, some called themselves 'retreaters', having in effect resigned from society. Though framed as an ugly necessity (people would try to steal your stuff), violence was part of the appeal of this bare-knuckle libertarianism. The survivalist is not content with maintaining a vegetable patch and whittling a bow and arrow to hunt for food. He wants guns, and people to use them on. The survivor and the survivalist go head-to-head in William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of schoolboys stranded on an island during a nuclear war. Their initial leader, Ralph, wants to preserve a skeleton of social norms and solidarity until help arrives. The fire he maintains is both a signal to rescuers and a symbol of civilised values: 'The rules are the only thing we've got!' His challenger, Jack, however, turns himself into a tribal chieftain, exerting power through violence, barbarism and superstition. For him, catastrophe is liberation. Why would he ever want to go home again? Subsequent catastrophe novels such as John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956) and Charles Eric Maine's The Tide Went Out (1958) proposed that most people thought of themselves as noble Ralphs but would soon turn into brutal Jacks once the going got tough. The fictional survivalist who first expressed the ominous politics of survivalism appeared in HG Wells's 1890s phenomenon The War of the Worlds. Amid the chaos of a Martian invasion, the narrator meets an artilleryman with a plan: humanity will regroup and rebuild in underground sewers and tunnels in order to wage guerrilla war against the invaders. The artilleryman is drooling with anticipation because he is a eugenicist and – 20 years before the fact – a fascist. He contrasts 'able-bodied, clean-minded men' with the 'weak and silly' who deserve to die: 'It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.' Decades later, in a 1982 interview with the Sacramento Bee, Sisco argued that anyone with an IQ below 110 should be sterilised to save America from degeneracy. Survivalism went mainstream during the first half of the 1980s. Newspapers profiled survival businesses and the isolated communities they served, finding characters much like the artilleryman. Their lurid fears included nuclear war, foreign invasion, environmental disasters, race war and food shortages due to overpopulation. The sociologist Richard G Mitchell Jr spent more than a decade talking to survivalists for his 2002 book Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times. He found that most of them felt impotent and overwhelmed in their day-to-day lives and were empowered by imagining themselves the main characters in a greatly simplified world without rule of law – or WROL in survivalist parlance. 'Survivalism,' Mitchell observed, 'is a way to accomplish the creative renarration of the self and often one's companions into tales of aesthetic consequence.' It gave their lives meaning. It was in 1981 that Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior popularised the hitherto obscure word 'post-apocalyptic'. 'Mad' Max Rockatansky is not technically a survivalist, because he never expected or wanted society to collapse. A former police officer, he sides with the vulnerable neomedieval community rather than the feral biker gang. But the movie inspired a more aggressively rightwing genre that the writer Mike Davis called 'armageddonist'. That same year, Jerry Ahern began publishing The Survivalist, a series of pulp novels about John Rourke, a former CIA officer who battles Soviet invaders, mutants and cannibals in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Ahern published as many as four volumes a year (titles included The Doomsayer, The End Is Coming and The Savage Horde), which tells you something about their quality. More notable for the loving attention Ahern gives to various firearms (he later founded his own gun company) than for their characters or ideas, they sold millions of copies. At the same time, survivalism merged with the far-right militia movement to produce hundreds of real-life John Rourkes. The far-right, anti-government militia group the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord conducted an End Time Overcomer Survival Training School – and practised assassination skills on its 224-acre (91-hectare) armed compound in Arkansas – before one member killed a Black police officer and attracted the attention of the FBI. A related white nationalist group, the Order, murdered the Jewish radio host Alan Berg and was also shut down by the FBI – a story told recently in Amazon Prime's The Order. All of this overt Nazism and homicidal violence made survivalism a dirty word, leading Sisco to insist that real survivalists do not shoot police officers. 'A survivalist is simply one who anticipates the collapse of civilisation and prepares to survive it,' he protested. One peculiar product of this fraught period was The Survivors, a flop 1983 comedy starring Robin Williams as a paranoid dental supply executive who joins a survivalist camp in Vermont. A more serious one was David Brin's 1985 novel The Postman. Brin's hero, Gordon Krantz, dons a dead postman's uniform and delivers his abandoned mail to bring a little hope and order to post-apocalyptic Oregon. His foes are a 'loose, macho, hyper-survivalist' militia called the Holnists, whose antisocial savagery he blames for America's desperate state: 'It was the same solipsistic philosophy of ego that had stoked the rage of Nazism.' Brin was rebuking the violent, self-aggrandising survivalism that ran through post-Mad Max fiction and spilled over into real life via the Covenant and the Order. In The Postman, society is something priceless that should be mourned and rebuilt, not a sandcastle to knock down. After the militia movement was associated with atrocities such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, survivalism's reputation sank further. But in 1998, one user of an internet message board about the Y2K bug introduced the synonym 'prepper'. It sounded more modern and more reasonable than 'survivalist', with an emphasis on the practical details of preparation rather than daydreams of post-apocalyptic gunplay. The National Geographic series Doomsday Preppers, which launched in 2012, became the channel's most watched show to date. Despite the rebranding, preppers are still usually treated as sinister or absurd in 21st-century fiction. Closer in spirit to Tippette's The Survivalist than Ahern's The Survivalist, these stories puncture what Brin called 'little-boy wish fantasies about running amok in a world without rules'. Cormac McCarthy's crushingly bleak 2006 masterpiece The Road is often praised on prepper websites but it presents survival as a gruelling slog rather than an adventure. 'There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead,' McCarthy writes of his unnamed protagonist. The most acclaimed episode of HBO's The Last of Us meanwhile features a misanthropic survivalist (played by Nick Offerman) who admits: 'I used to hate the world and I was happy when everyone died.' But his hard shell is cracked open when he falls in love with an unexpected visitor and is reminded that people matter after all. While Offerman's character represents the old-fashioned hermit survivalist, other stories satirise the new billionaire preppers: people like Peter Thiel, who spend vast amounts of money on luxury bunkers, private islands or refuges in New Zealand. While traditional survivalism is a power fantasy for the powerless, this version is an escape route for elites who are partly responsible for the social and environmental instability that terrifies them. 'Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?' asked the economist Robert A Johnson in the New Yorker. 'What does that really tell us about our system?' They are retreaters. The popular suspicion of the survival industry dates back to the fallout shelter craze of the early 1960s, when The Twilight Zone showed neighbour turning on neighbour in The Shelter; Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove ranted about creating a postwar master race in the mineshafts; and Bob Dylan mocked bunker dwellers in his song Let Me Die in My Footsteps. The shelter business all but collapsed within a year when most Americans decided that not only would they probably not survive a nuclear war but that they would not want to. Subterranean shelters are ripe for parody once more. The recent satirical TV series Fallout, based on the hit video game, contrasts the suffocating conformism of the Vaults with the perilous freedom of the wasteland. In American Horror Story: Apocalypse, a billionaire socialite and her entourage shelter from a nuclear winter in the luxurious bunker Outpost 3 but the situation turns nightmarish as food supplies run out and paranoia flourishes. In season three of the post-apocalyptic sitcom The Last Man on Earth another socialite hides out from a pandemic in her dead friend's well-appointed bunker and slowly loses her mind. Whether it is the menace of desperate companions, a sinister regime or maddening solitude, an apparent refuge becomes a prison to be escaped. We sympathise with Robinson Crusoe or Matt Damon's character in The Martian because they have been forcibly estranged from the human race and are desperate to reconnect. But from the Ozarks compound to the New Zealand bunker, survivalists choose to sever themselves from humanity at large. No wonder we enjoy seeing them fail. All stories of catastrophe and survival contain a verdict on human nature. Most texts about survivalism, from prepper handbooks to The Road, promote a Hobbesian view of humanity: civilisation is a thin skin stretched over an abyss of animal brutality. 'Men have always had urges towards dominance which are basically stronger than urges towards cooperation,' John Christopher said when asked about the pessimism in The Death of Grass. But is this true, or does survival fiction encourage us to believe the worst? While nobody knows what would happen if everything collapsed, Rebecca Solnit demonstrates in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster that in the aftermath of real catastrophes the looters and marauders are vastly outnumbered by people trying to help and save each other. Far from being a liberal delusion, mutual aid is a powerful human instinct. 'Everybody was your friend and you in turn everybody's friend,' recalled one survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. 'The individual, the isolated self was dead. The social self was regnant.' Whether for political reasons or simply the need for narrative excitement, conventional survival fiction endorses the idea, as David Brin put it, 'that humanity in general is dreadful and therefore only individual heroes matter'. But in novels such as Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959) or Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), post-apocalyptic survival is achieved instead by solidarity and collaboration. Problem-solving is a collective endeavour and selfishness spells doom. These stories are worth telling, too, and they may be closer to reality. Dorian Lynskey is the author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
