Looking back on 2021 through an apocalyptic lens

What do we do with the warnings we receive? Do we take action, suddenly spurred into motion by alarm? Or do we, as Jessie Greengrass writes in her novel The High House, “[tune] it out like static”? Or, as per Jenny Offill in her Orwell Prize-longlisted novel, Weather, continue to sit in a “twilight knowing”, a refusal to engage with what we know, but prefer to ignore? 

These questions are becoming less rhetorical as the end times roll on. Post-COP26 – the UN climate conference that was called the “best last hope” for our world and, soon after it finished, declared a failure – it feels like we are on a one-way road to the apocalypse. We’ve been walking this road for a while now. Crisis after crisis has thrown us into a state of normalised turmoil: 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the 2008 economic crash, devastating earthquakes and tsunamis, political upheaval, the arrival of data-driven surveillance capitalism, the COVID-19 virus and an environmental catastrophe that is bringing about the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet. These are just recent global upheavals contributing to a collective feeling of relentless, accelerating doom. 

As we sit, stupefied like frogs in slowly boiling water, how can we comprehend our own demise? When the rent is due next week and the shops are out of avocados and we’re all just trying to carve out some sort of normality after nearly two years of a pandemic, how can we even begin to process all of this disaster?

Writers have always responded to the world around them and now is no different. 2021 has seen an abundance of novelists tackle environmental, political and technological disasters through fiction. As we come to the end of another year that has highlighted just how apocalyptic life on Earth has become, we look back at some of this year’s novels that grapple with our collective “twilight knowing” and the futures that could be ahead.

Beginning as the world ends – “crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability,” narrates the teenager, Caro – Greengrass’s novel The High House is set in rural Suffolk. While the world ignored imminent environmental catastrophe until it was too late, Caro’s stepmother, a prominent scientist, prepared a house for the family to move into with the meticulous planning of a doomsday prepper. Removed from floods and mudslides, Caro and her family’s situation parallels that of the wealthy in the Global North right now. “We are all at the mercy of the weather, but not all to the same extent,” thinks Caro early in the novel. Geography and wealth will be what saves – or kills – most of us as the climate crisis continues to rage on. Evoking Noah’s Ark, the book explores parental responsibility during environmental catastrophe, asking the queasy question: what are the ethics of bringing children into a world on fire?

It’s a theme that is also tackled by the Danish writer Ursula Scavenius in her collection of short stories, The Dolls (translated into English by Jennifer Russell and published by Lolli). Opening with the sound of violins and the fall of ash, the collection’s titular story is set in a world that could be either 20th-century or 22nd-century Europe. “The violin bows gnaw at the strings the same way we gnaw at chicken bones,” narrates the young protagonist, as the music relentlessly plays. The narrator, a young girl in a wheelchair, feeds her sister through a cellar grille, as they play with dolls with glued-on hair.

Scavenius’ writing is stark and cold, and The Dolls is a story drenched with post-apocalyptic dread. A monstrosity called 'the Machine,' where the girls’ parents work in the hope that they’ll be left alone, continues to roll closer to the family’s home. Every time the narrator looks away and back at the Machine, it’s inched closer, until it’s almost on top of them. Like the climate crisis in The High House, Scavenius’ story is about the normalisation of looming, terrible disaster. Rather than flee, The Dolls’ family accepts the rolling regime, acclimatising to its terror until it’s too late.

The Dolls captures the sense of fatalism that has come to hang over life in this decade: What’s the point of recycling when 20 fossil fuel companies are responsible for a third of all carbon emissions? What difference will one vote make in an election? Why fight the Big Data capitalists who are selling our behaviours, desires and very thoughts back to us? Wouldn’t it be easier to just give up and embrace whatever fucked up future is coming our way? 

Stuck in endless and normalised catastrophe, near-future dystopias can offer us clarifying focus. In Ros Anderson’s novel The Hierarchies, sex, power and desire have become commodified in the form of futuristic sex dolls. Fresh out of a box, one of these dolls, Sylv.ie, has been engineered to be the perfect 'wife' for her owner, a man simply referred to as the Husband. Sylv.ie’s life revolves around sex, but she also can engage in witty but polite conversation and play chess – always, of course, allowing the Husband to win. 

Like Westworld and The Stepford Wives, The Hierarchies explores the intersection of technology and patriarchy, narrativising concerns around gendered biases in software. Anderson strips apart performative gender in the novel – the dolls are given make-up and can cry real tears in order to play the role of idealised 'woman' for their owners – while also locating sexuality and capitalism as coming from the same impulse: social power. 

Sylv.ie’s downfall (or 'becoming') begins when she writes a diary and gains consciousness beyond her programmed settings. She learns of social movements fighting to give 'Augmented Persons' rights as well as her very reason for existing: a desire to outsource sex, like all realms of labour in The Hierarchies’ world. In her seminal 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto, technofeminist Donna Haraway writes that: the cyborg "is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”

As Haraway calls for in her manifesto, Sylv.ie pulls apart the supposedly rigid boundaries between human and non-human, wife and machine, consciousness and software. While The Hierarchies’ technology-driven world is hardly the feminist utopia envisioned in Haraway’s manifesto, the novel proves the essay’s point: we create the cyborg, but we also create the world the cyborg is born into. If we fail to act, that future world will simply be a version of the unequal, unjust social hierarchies that exist right now. 

Technology is also the crisis at the heart of Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s eighth novel. The narrator, Girl AF Klara, an Artificial Friend, lives in a showroom watching the world go by through the window. She spends her days speaking to fellow AFs and watching the sun (which powers their technology) make its way across the sky on its daily journey. Klara is her world’s latest version of Alexa or Siri: sophisticated technology in the shape of a humanoid, engineered with software to recognise emotion and provide companionship to children. Throughout the novel, Klara processes feelings to increasingly nuanced degrees, until she isn’t simply recognising them but, instead, feeling them herself. 

Ishiguro constructs his world-building through Klara’s limited perspective, leaving much to the reader’s imagination. Klara and the Sun could be set in 2021 or 2081: characters are designated as “high-ranking” by their clothing, while children spend their time staring at 'oblongs'. After Klara is bought for a young, ill girl called Josie, she is simultaneously a servant and friend, a toy and a governess, a product and a parent. “Are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?” says one character to Klara. 

Like Anderson, Ishiguro is interested in portraying a slowly deepening consciousness. Klara and the Sun shares many similar themes with his earlier beloved novel Never Let Me Go, in which orphan clones are brought up in an English boarding school and then harvested for their organs. But the world has grown crueller in the 16 years since Never Let Me Go was published. In Klara’s world, technological advancements have rendered people 'postemployed', while scientists argue about what makes a human human: ”A part of us refuses to let go,” muses one character. “The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer.”

Klara and the Sun is about a crisis of consciousness. As Klara’s understanding of her world – and her role within it – expands, she becomes increasingly human, relying on misguided faith, dignified martyrdom and the burden of parental responsibility to guide her consciousness into the light. Ishiguro upturns the hierarchy of human and non-human to ask: what happens when A.I. becomes more human than people? What happens when robots take on the burden of human anguish? What brave new world could technology lead us to? 

Fiction is incredibly powerful, especially when most of us are already living between multiple online and offline worlds and debates over what exactly constitutes 'real' and 'fake' continue to rage. Disaster has always loomed over us, but that state of 'twilight knowing' that so many of us have sat comfortably in for too long is coming to an end. Rather than simply offering escapism, these fictional post-apocalyptic worlds about technological, environmental and social crises grant us something far better: the space to explore hypothetical futures, from the dystopian to the utopian. Look at where we could go, these stories say. Look at who we could be. 

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The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters is out now from 404 Ink