by Eric Del Carlo
Eric Del Carlo writes about the unique combination of influences that inspired him to write stories with post-apocalyptic themes set in deep outer space. “Mudfoots” is his latest, and you can read it in our [November/December issue, on sale now!]
The apocalypse used to be fun. I relished it. In pre-streaming, pre-cable, pre-VHS days I would wait the year round for The Omega Man to come around on broadcast television. Channel 40 out of Sacramento would run it. Our tv didn’t get the best reception for this station, but the picture was still watchable. And there was Charlton Heston, combing through a deserted LA, watching Woodstock alone in a theater, making quippy remarks to himself, all while hunting menacing characters in black robes. I imprinted on this film. I was swept up by Ron Grainer’s haunting score; I bled with Robert Neville through his every trial and tribulation; I wanted to create something like this one day. Not a movie. From a very young age I wanted to write. Could I make a story that summoned the same feelings this 1971 film aroused in me?
More post-apocalyptic movies and books followed as I consumed science fiction through grade school and high school. The Road Warrior, Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer, Genesis II and the even cooler Planet Earth (those Kreegs, in steam-powered junk cars!), No Blade of Grass (film and book), Earth Abides, et cetera, et cetera. I wanted to see the fictionalized collapse of civilization, the degradation of society, a world where order was gone and barbarity ruled the day.
Why? Probably because I was forlorn adolescent and the end of the world seemed preferable to the one I was living in.
I fed this urge when I began selling my science fiction and fantasy, starting in 1990. I made small press sales, each one a triumph to me. Looking at my records, I see those stories which directly addressed my fascination with crumbled futures. It wasn’t just nuclear catastrophe which enthralled me. There were lots of ways to bring about the fall of humankind: plagues, technology gone amok, alien invasions. And then there were the dystopias. These were almost equally fascinating. Films like Escape from New York, A Clockwork Orange, Brazil, many others, all depicting near-futures where something had gone cataclysmically wrong with the underlying social structure. SF literature had mined this vein for decades: The Sheep Look Up, Fahrenheit 451, Make Room! Make Room! Hundreds more, every imaginable bleakness. I devoured all of this. And I put up my own versions, my own visions.
Then COVID-19 was loosed upon the land.
Suddenly, the end of the world wasn’t so very entertaining any longer.
I had to reset. Could I still write these grim near-futures, which had become my stock-in-trade? More to the point: did I still want to? Deaths counts rising, uncertainty creeping into every aspect of daily living. Was I living in The Stand or some other equally apocalyptic tale of a worldwide pandemic? Not quite. But this still wasn’t any place I wanted to be. When bad things befall me, I generally write about them in some altered form with the idea that someone will eventually give me money for what I’ve written, thus compensating me for the unpleasant experience. But . . . this? This was too real, too gruesome.
I recalibrated my sights. I didn’t have to write about Earthbound near-futures, after all. Science fiction provided plenty of other options. So, I looked to the stars.
This was not really my milieu. I’d sold stories set on starships and alien worlds, but these did not transpire in my comfort zone. Now I reconsidered. I had over the years identified the groove I liked to work in: tales of desperate people, under pressure, usually being chewed up by whatever societal system I had created; I didn’t often write about people in high positions, because leaders didn’t interest me, nor kings, nor Chosen Ones. I went to grittier characters, ones struggling just to survive. If I started writing earnestly about far-futures and deep space, I would have to write space opera. Wouldn’t I? Or at least brush up against it. But this wasn’t a genre which really reached me. Square-jawed captains and massive space craft, wars carried out over the yawning dark between the worlds, great attention given to technical detail. None of that was in my wheelhouse.
Yet I could see the advantage writing in this realm would give me. I could shake off the immediate horror I was living in and go tell my stories against backgrounds so removed from the present that I wouldn’t even have to acknowledge anything currently happening in the world. This was my way out.
But I still had to tell my stories, my way. Marginalized characters, people forced into perilous situations by unforgiving circumstances. I wasn’t going to write epics. I wouldn’t extol the glories of galactic warfare. I’d set my grubby folk into these glittering distant futures of world-hopping and stardrives, and let them get up to the sort of mischief I was familiar with. It wasn’t space opera, because none of it was grand or melodramatic or titanic in proportions. I have always told “small” stories, though just as often these are placed against big sweeping backdrops, so that the reader sees what epic events do to those who aren’t working the levers of power. But if it wasn’t space opera, what was it?
Spaceopera-punk. Sure. Why not? The mania for adding “punk” to any kind of subgenre was already established. It denoted a certain reckless writerly spirit, a touch of nihilism, the puncturing of stuffy traditions. Or something like that.
I took to the idea. I started writing—and selling—stories set hundreds of years in the future, when Earth is oftentimes a distant memory, and humans are up to all sorts of shenanigans in the deep black of space and upon kaleidoscopic worlds. There were ample stories to tell, I found. No surprise there. I probably shouldn’t have been so squirrely about the notion in the first place.
Here on Earth, in this particular polity in which we dwell, we are currently living in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. (Actually, it would be more accurate to say this is a Norman Spinrad story.) So the near-future dystopia, like the just-over-the-horizon apocalypse, isn’t much fun to write about currently. Not for me, anyway.
But the galaxy, fortunately, is big. So very big. I can get far away from this present reality, and yet still write about those ideas I care about. I have done just this with my current story in Asimov’s, “Mudfoots.” It was very satisfying to write; hopefully it will be a pleasant read for those who give it a look. In my mind it’s pure spaceopera-punk.
From Earth to the Stars 