by John Ginsberg-Stevens

I think a lot about the imaginative and conceptual elements that make SF (in the sense of broad speculative fiction in all of its forms) distinctive and fascinating. As a fan and a writer I am always trying to take ideas and tropes apart, to figure out what makes this array of genres so compelling and curious.  There are a lot of literary/cinematic devices, visionary aspects, and plot components that comprise the literary toolbox of SF, but there is one that is rarely considered: the annihilation of history. Why is it that works of science fiction and horror (and sometimes fantasy) have to pulverize or deconstruct history?  Why is it so effective, and why is it so appealing?

I love that most speculative works set in or springboarding from “the real world” annihilate history.  I’m speaking here of annihilation in the broad sense, as in “the act of reducing to nothing or non-existence; or the act of destroying the form or combination of parts under which a thing exists, so that the name can no longer be applied to it,” as delightfully defined in Webster’s 1828 Dictionary.  I am not merely talking about an act of pure eradication, but an act of reduction or alteration that changes the thing itself.  The thing in this case is history, our common, taken-for-granted understanding of the events and progress of the past, and what that past points toward for the future.

Far from being a problem, I think this is a vital engine in the creative mechanism of SF.  Whether there’s been a zombiepocalypse, an alien invasion, or a high adventure 10,000 years in the future, the genre thrives on messing with history, taking it apart, or brazenly dismissing it to focus on something else.  This applies to genre history as much as it does to actual history, as later generations absorb or break the past to fuel their own creations.  From Heinlein’s classic Future History

The Windup Girl
to recent works like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree, history is subjected to an act of destruction that may alter it into something new or unrecognizable, recombine it, or entirely eliminate it. This could be an Asimovian reformulation of the grand sweep of history, or the intimate breakdown and evocation of local history and folklore into something very different.

This act of destruction can produce a lot of creative energy, and can also focus the audience’s attention on what is important in a narrative. The new movie Daybreakers, for example, is a narrative that thrives on the annihilation of history.  The human past is swept away by the outbreak of vampirism, and the human race’s almost complete embrace of it essentially resets history.  What matters is not what people were or what they did before the outbreak; individual histories are nullified, much like the cancer that afflicted Sam Neill’s character Charles Bromley before he became a vampire.  The progress of human history is apparently halted, as the need for blood to survive becomes paramount.  No longer human, immune to disease and aging, most people fall into the rhythm of a static society that focuses on the preservation of unlife and must eliminate as many variables as possible.

The human past is rendered irrelevant by the needs of an entire planet of vampires.  The loss of life’s pulse necessitates that vampires disassociate from the natural world around them, but also extends to an erasure of any part of the past that does not assist them in maintaining their vampirism or enduring it.  Smoking is widespread because it cannot harm vampires and (it would appear) gives them some stimulation when many other avenues of satisfaction are cut off to them (including, one would surmise, the desire to hunt). There is also an ongoing metaphor of the characters choosing to not reflect on their state of being, particularly in the use of cameras to see themselves.  Furthermore, by selectively using and breaking the folkloric and genre rules of vampirism, the creators of Daybreakers keep the audience from using the history they know to consistently predict what will happen, and present a future that is both unlikely and unfamiliar, that unnerves the audience.

The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book achieves some similar effects of dislocation in a different way.  Rather than ignoring history, Gaiman simply annilhilates history-as-we-know-it by creating an alterate history, one of a world of magical beings, death, and wonders that exists in the peripheries of our world.  Bod is removed from the stream of regular human history and dropped into a world with a different past and rules.  History is important, but it is not history by the name we give it.  There are cities unknown, powerful things hidden away, and a parallel realm of magic and undeath that adjoins our own, yet maintains its own coherence.  The history we know has been left behind or to the side by the characters in this book, and knowing it provides little aid to the reader.

Bod is pulled into a milieu that stems from actual history, but that creates its own past.  We learn, as Bod does, what matters and what does not as he grows up, with few certainties in place to guide us.  But unlike the vampire world of Daybreakers, this is not a matter of stasis collapsing, but of maturation and change within a dynamic world.  While the ghosts do not change, a number of other characters do, and they alter the course of this other history.  This shadow realm intrudes on the real world in a number of instances,such as the “Dance of the Macabray,” but it does not become a part of standard history.  Bod must flee the real world and take sanctuary in the graveyard, but once that is no longer necessary Bod must return to the real world, to jump back into the stream of regular history.

Human history is not annihilated wholly in The Graveyard Book, but is seen as partial, its hubris at being real shattered by the impingings of this parallel world.  This other world annihilates actual history when it contacts it, creating illusion, amnesia, and sometimes destruction.  The world that we the reader live in is only part of the story of life, one that does not always recognize what exists alongside it.  But that life is the one that continues and changes, and it is the one that Bod must rejoin.  What the writer has annihilated for us reappears, but perhaps we look at a bit differently.

That realignment of perspective is what SF’s annihilation of history is all about.  Whether done gently or brutally, with great rigor or with surreal inconsistency, this rendering of history feeds speculative works by establishing not only an alternative tone or the parameters of a given setting, but by creating the sense of dislocation that sets the reader on an imaginative narrative path.  Breaking up assumptions and unmooring touchstones that we draw from history generates possibilities that the creator can use to take his or her story in peculiar directions that play on a reader’s necessary suspension of disbelief.  Stimulating that suspension with the destruction of actual history creates opportunity for the writer and (hopefully) interest in the reader to see what the act of annilhilating history generates.

John Ginsberg-Stevens is a writer, anthropologist, and bookseller who is in his fourth decade of being an SF fan and semi-professional geek. He is married to a red-headed fiddler and father of an infant geek apprentice, whose Jedi mind tricks are coming along just fine. He is working on a novel and is a biweekly columnist for Forces of Geek.

John’s writing blog is at www.eruditeogre.blogspot.com.

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