Thursday, June 12, 2003
Regarding Plagues, Vampires and Novelas
Lets start with a quick review of the novel I am Legend by Richard Matheson. First of all, 170 pages and two inch margins with thirteen point font, do not a novel make; I am Legend is squarely located in the literary banana republic that is the NOVELA (I'll always love Elaine for giving me that analogy). Novelas are fine, the word itself when written out looks like a classy Spanish noun describing female genitals... "I love to touch my novelas when no one is watching..." (Don't forget to pronounce the "v" as "w"); however, Matheson's opus is billed as a full length novel, and then stealthily packaged with eight short stories to pad the thickness. Once I got past this bitter dissapointment, I enjoyed the tale of the last human on Earth as he battled an entire world overrun by vampires. Matheson's main character was deeply flawed, yet sympathetic and there were no shortage of cinematic moments which I hope they recreated for Charlton Heston in "The Omega Man." How they got the title "Omega Man" from I am Legend, I cannot fathom, for while there's a rather lame attempt at a pseudo-scientific cause of vampirism in the book, it's far removed from actual sci-fi; more of a post-apocalyptic-gothic-horror-Swiss Family Robinson.
I am Legend, with a revision or two, could have been a full length novel; but I felt impatience on Matheson's part. He spends the entire novela in Robert Neville's head, and poor old Robert spends most of the novella alone and slowly going insane. As a reader I would have liked to see more about the dissolution of society under the massive vampire plague, or the society the rises up out of the new vampiric population. I was confused by the pseudo-science, and never understood the difference between the 'living' vampires and the 'dead' ones... a distinction that is vitally important to the end of the book and which, as it is explained, brings the logic behind 90 percent of the story into question.
So while I am Legend was a genre buster for its time, the plot holes and surface treatment make it less than satisfying.
But it did spark my imagination and get me thinking about one of my favorite topics: the end of the world as we know it (and I feel REM is overrated). In the interests of full disclosure I will tell you that I am an evil, misanthropic, hypocritical, media addled, apathetic, part-time depressive; so take my death wish for humanity with a grain of salt. The advent of SARS gave me a tickle, thinking that this could be the super disease that government scientists underestimated and by the time they realized thier mistake it was too late. Only they didn't underestimate it, they overestimated it, and the casualties are limited to a few thousand people in China and the Toronto tourism industry. According to NPR, consumtion (read: TB)... that old standby, still kills more people in China than SARS. SO much for modern super diseases. West Nile doesn't spread person to person, and isn't terribly fatal, and the new, exciting monkey pox is far too silly to wipe out 99.9% of the world's population (The world will never be laid low by pet prairie dogs).
This is the part where I qualify my genocidal ranting with a mix of personal ethics and moral relativism (see Moral Relativism: May 10, 2003). Everybody dies. I will someday die, and this weblog may be the only evidence of my existance on this planet. But in the wider view, all life on Earth will someday stop, so that even if I publish a novel that becomes a cult classic and is read for millenia (like the Oddessy or Harry Potter) all the cultural achievements of all cultures will cease to exist. Therefore, all human achievement is ultimately futile.
Does that make me a nihilist?
Not at all. I'm a happy cheery person... look at my dimples! I think that the end of civilization would be cool: a chance to make up your own rules, build the only library left in the world and fill it with nothing but your own teenage angst poetry, no more clocks, all the time in the world to read (stock up on multiple pairs of reading glasses). If you're the last man in the world, women no longer have excuses not to sleep with you, if you're the last woman, you are by default, the new standard of beauty. There would be peace in the middle east (or if not, we wouldn't hear about it), everyone would have guns but there'd be no more NRA. You could start a new religion and appoint yourself god, tell your decendants to save your DNA and clone you once the world leaves the new dark ages and looks like Star Trek. You could start a crazy society where cannibalism is OK, but flossing is heresy (eww... put myself off lunch with that one).
In short, where others see the end of Mall culture, television, and the fiat system of exchange as the end of the world; I see a new world of brilliant possibilities. All it will take is a bug... if the bug turned people into vampires, that just makes things more exciting.
