THE DAY AFTER EARTH DAY: Hope Springs Eternal: Alan DeNiro and Total Oblvion, More or Less

Post-apocalyptic worlds don’t always fit into a neat divide between utopia or dystopia. Often, there might be little pockets throughout the world that has one or the other, with a great muddle of a wasteland between them. This makes sense–after the “normal” world has fallen apart, most people (and the institutions that remain) are too busy trying to survive than to enact a grand or exceedingly dark vision of the perfect society. However, the catastrophes of an apocalypse are largely narratives of regret and poignancy, and a writer can reflect upon the pre-apocalyptic world (that is to say, ours), when survivors actually hope to make a better world for themselves. The reader can see himself or herself through the travails one mired in a decimated society. From film, Wall-E can be considered a classic example of a post-apocalyptic story, in which a hard-won earthly renewal takes place only after repudiating the worst excesses of the culture that destroyed the planet in the first place.

It’s not usually easy for survivors, by any means. In my own novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less, ancient European tribes invade America from the north; technology stops working, and surreal plague ravages the populace. A mysterious empire from the south launches a counter-invasion against the Scythians and other tribes, and by the time the novel starts in earnest, things are very, very different in the world. This is an allegorical fantasy of one sort, a magic realist fantasy of another sort, but throughout I tried (through the voice of the narrator, a 16-year-old girl named Macy) to keep a close eye on how the remaining Americans see themselves, see their lost country, and how they want to rebuild. In the midst of a lot of heartache and suffering, there IS hope. It takes a lot of hard work for that hope to be realized in even a small fashion, especially since there are plenty of…very dystopian forces, both old and new, trying to remake the new world in their own image (the oil companies try to wield their power in an age without any motorized vehicles). Neither of the societies–empire nor Scythian–is perfect by any means, yet neither are they the uniformly villainous overlords trying to subjugate America just for the sake of it. They have their own hopes and fears.
Macy, in a way, tries to create a mosaic from the broken pieces of her past life, when she was merely trying to get through high school. The raw materials for this mosaic come to her through many adventures on a long, long journey, but throughout, she struggles to keep that hope alive–and not to devolve into nihilism and violence for the sake of it. Even in the midst of catastrophe, she still tries to fuse the pieces together, and her journey is one of discovering what she should keep, and what she should discard of her past– a process of renewal that, in very small ways, we all go through each day.
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Alan DeNiro was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the College of Wooster and received an MFA in poetry writing from the University of Virginia. His collection of short stories, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, was published by Small Beer Press. It was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and a finalist for the Crawford Award. His short fiction has appeared in One Story, Crowd, Interfictions 2, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. He lives outside St. Paul, Minnesota with his wife Kristin, a dog, and three cats.