Leave 'Leave the World Behind' Behind

I thought I'd mention a couple of movies that have passed, via my retinas, to my brain over the last few weeks: 'Leave the World Behind' and 'Greenland'.  Neither is really science-fiction, but given the apocalypse is always SF-adjacent, and both deal with existential crises, it's in-scope as far as I'm concerned.

There's a lot to unpack about both movies.  Of the two, I'd steer you to Greenland.  It's a superior Saturday night beer-and-pizza movie, and superior overall to the heavier-weight Julia Roberts' vehicle which, I think, aims for inscrutable ambiguity but just comes across as annoying. (If you want to see that ambition realised, at least in terms of leaving loose ends flapping in the breeze, watch John Sayles' 'Limbo', a brilliant film my mind still flits back to a quarter of a century after my only viewing).

I could also mention that odd sense of scale and lack of consequence in LtWB.  A ship grounds on the beach, ploughing into sunbathers, and is less of a topic of conversation than if someone had seen a dog that looks like Benedict Cumberbatch. A passenger jet crashes a couple of miles up the coast from where the action takes place and, having done its duty story-wise in demonstrating planes are falling out of the air, has no impact thereafter on either witnesses or the environment.

Instead, I'd like to dwell on another aspect of both movies: where are all the people?  It's the end of the world. And it looks like only surnames P to Q got the memo.

Yes, Greenland has crowds outside the perimeter fence of the military bases (which always seemed to be half a mile off the highway - who knew?), but they reminded me of the moshpit at a 1991 Goodbye Mister Mackenzie gig at the Bristol Bierkeller I went to (the only time they played Bristol, I find - isn't the internet pointlessly brilliant?!), about three deep in pogo-ing fans ramming the stage and behind them - nobody... absolutely nobody. When Armageddon comes, it'll be standing room only all the way to the back. It'll be August 2021 in Kabul all over again.

Meanwhile, in LtWB you could see the city across the water, and neighbouring properties, but in terms of population per hectare it looked like somewhere the Unabomber may have holed up. For all I know, the distressed Latin woman Ethan Hawke drives away from may have been shouting 'I thought I was the last human left!' in Spanish.

Fact is, we're on a planet with a carrying capacity of, at best, four billion, with a population approaching 8.2 billion as I type. When it breaks - and it will - we'll need more extras than either production employed to portray it. Weirdly, if you look at which films employed the most extras to populate the biggest crowd scenes they are - with the more than honourable exception of Metropolis, and also Lord of the Rings - all historical epics, from when planet earth had way, way fewer people walking its surface. Christ, the Ten Commandments used 25,000 extras when the planet only had about 40 million people.

My story in Fission#4, 'Formula 719: A Cure for Ennui', deals with something very few people seem to have cottoned on to: every time we invent something that makes life easier, safer, longer, fewer people die which, apart from being a 'thoroughly good thing', means we are putting greater strain on the ecosystem that keeps us alive. A cure for cancer may kill us all. It's the ultimate catch-22. And on that cheery bombshell...

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My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms.

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).