On the Zeerust Apocalypse
October 14th, 2008So in looking over some of my pile of much-loved post-apocalyptic crap, I’ve been noticing some trends in the universes they depict. A lot of them, particularly in the game world, seem to incorporate (or even base themselves around) Zeerust ethics and tropes. Why is that?
First of all, let’s take a look at what zeerust is. Named (by the esteemed Douglas Addams) for a town in South Africa, zeerust is also known as retro-futurism, Googie architecture, and occasionally World Of Tomorrow!. Essentially, it’s a combination of that Jetsons-style a-robot-in-every-bubble-home mentality that neatly encapsulates what people in the 1950s thought the future would look like: on the one hand, you get robot maids, hover cars and pills that solve every problem; but on the other, computers are still the size of rooms, screens are still run by cathode ray tubes and nobody knows what terrorism is. In a lot of ways, this zeitgeist (for lack of a better word) epitomizes a particularly American brand of optimism about the future. That’s probably what makes it so satisfying, on a culturally psychological level, to tear it down and stomp all over it. Fallout (which I’ll admit got me thinking about it in the first place) is a particularly good example of this: the overriding design ethic of both games (and, from all looks of it, the soon-to-be-released sequel) is sort of what you’d get if you took the background characters from Mad Max and put their society in a junkyard filled entirely with the detritus of that kind of culture.
To come at it a little more obliquely, someone asked one of the original game’s designers why the environment was a blasted (desert) wasteland, considering that carpet bombing with nuclear weapons would lead to nuclear winter as dust choked the air. The response was pretty simple: the game’s entire universe was governed by the rules of zeerust. That is to say, even the science in Fallout worked the way popular views assumed science worked, back in the 50s. As he put it, it’s not science; it’s Science!.
But there are plenty of eras in American history that were rife with unbridled optimism about the future, and they’ve all had their turns being deconstructed in stories; Bioshock did it with art deco and Ayn Rand, Chicago did it with 1920s flapper culture, Bladerunner did it with 1980s robots. And plenty of post-apocalyptic stories have gone with other feels; Bioshock again, Children of Men with the War on Terror, the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz with monastic culture. So what is it about zeerust that I love seeing in ruins so much?
Simply put: it calls back to the history of post-apocalyptic fiction itself. “Modern” post-apocalyptic fiction follows a few general rules, as a subgenre: the apocalypse is generally always relatively sudden and climactic, killing most people off within a few weeks, months or (rarely) years; the narrative generally focuses to some extent on the difference in the way of life before and after the disaster; and, somewhat by virtue of the subject matter itself, it generally involves some degree of specific criticism or allegory of the pre-collapse failed way of life. Those elements were being combined well before the nuclear age - the oldest one I can think of is Mary Shelley’s the Last Man - but it didn’t take off as a genre until - that’s right - the 50s. Starting with 1951’s relatively famous Earth Abides - which, interestingly enough for the time period, didn’t involve nuclear weapons at all - the 50s was overflowing with post-apocalyptic fiction. The concept and potential of sudden, catastrophic loss of entire civilizations entered the cultural mindset in the era as it never had before. In a way, zeerust itself was the optimistic, vaguely manic counter to the looming potential of sudden, catastrophic… apocalypse.
The 1950s were in a way a big psychological struggle between the zeerust ideal of The Future! and the very real potential that literally any day could be the end of that very future. Science was a two-handed god in the 50s, capable of either utterly destroying everything or making our lives ones of pampered luxury. In history, that struggle pretty much simply went obsolete without any conclusion either way; we didn’t end up bombing Moscow to radioactive sand, but we also didn’t get our matching jumpsuits and robot maids (well… not the way they envisioned them, anyway). So a big part of the reason why the zeerust apocalypse is so appealing is simply because it’s an alternate history where the culture didn’t suddenly take its own drastic shift, where that superweapons vs. washing machines duel actually did end up playing out to the bitter end.
Hindsight shows us that neither outcome (total nuclear war or Jetsons family homes) was ever going to happen, not the way people in the 50s thought they would - science just doesn’t work the way they thought it did. Instead of blasted wasteland, war with the Soviets or flying cars, we have global warming, the war on terror and microchips. So they were almost right - but all those things ended up looking very different from how they thought they would. The zeerust apocalypse is, simply, the acknowledgment that neither that love nor that fear of science and progress could have existed without the other. It fulfills both the greatest national dream and the greatest national fear in American history, and in doing so reminds us that you can’t just take the good parts of science, and of power, and whitewash over the consequences - nor can you take just the bad parts and ignore the potential those things offer.
To put it another way, it’s an ironic wish fulfillment from deep in our national psyche. Because, as great as Science! was, I’m glad it didn’t end up working the way they thought it did at the time.
