J. E. Landau

I recently read High-Rise by J.G. Ballard, which is a completely deranged novel. It’s like staring into a black hole: dark, frightening, and hypnotic. The book also reminded me of a few other stories, which I believe can be loosely organized into a new genre: collapse stories.

High-Rise is about, as the title would suggest, the inhabitants of a high-rise apartment building. The tower has every amenity one could have imagined in 1975, including restaurants, a school, a grocery store, fitness facilities, and pools. The inhabitants are all members of the middle and upper class, ranging from the tower’s eccentric designer and backer, Anthony Royal, down through doctors and pilots to flight attendants and technicians. The book focuses on Royal, a doctor named Laing, and a filmmaker named Wilder.

Even from the get-go, the situation is clearly not ideal. The residents of the tower are engaged in constant partying. They throw trash down onto the cars of the people parked near the tower (the richest) and onto the balconies of the people at the bottom of the tower (the poorest). They cheat on their spouses constantly, and only leave the tower to work.

Then, things deteriorate. People stop going to work. Their personal disputes turn increasingly violent, intense, and organized, with floors organizing together to raid others. The school shuts down, people resort to eating animals, and eventually each other, and then eventually there are few, if any, survivors left in the tower. They are its apex predators, utterly consumed by the tower’s madness.

At many points, the residents are given the opportunity to end the fighting, or at least escape from it. The elevators to leave the tower still work. Royal and his wife think about leaving, but he wishes to remain to see what will happen. The police come to investigate as the power in the tower fails and trash covers the nearby parking lots, but residents go out to convince them that everything is fine. Even once people are being murdered, dogs are being eaten, and power and water have been out for months, a handful of people still venture out every day, and come back to their barricaded, trash-filled apartments, not bothering to bring back food or supplies, only leaving to keep up appearances.

The book lavishes descriptions on the vile conditions the residents live in. But it also spends plenty of time describing the shared psychosis of the residents, making it feel real. The residents in High-Rise are trapped because they’ve grown exactly into the shape of the apartment building, and they’ve changed the apartment building to fit themselves exactly. There’s no room for them to escape. It is a disaster entirely from their own psychology, and the architecture of the high-rise.

When I was reading the book, I was struck by the similarities with another piece of mid-20th-Century science fiction, Aniara by Harry Martinson, which is an epic poem about a spacecraft that is sent into deep space. The original poem has also been adapted into a 2018 science fiction film by the same name, which is quite good.

Aniara is an equal opposite to High-Rise in almost every way. Aniara has the ship physically isolated. Because the ship is on an unplanned interstellar journey, there is no way to leave or get help. The ship was not designed to support people indefinitely, and doesn’t feel nearly as self-contained as the tower in High-Rise, ironically, even though the tower is explicitly dependent on outside assistance in a way that the ship is not. And even if they were not on an interstellar voyage, Earth is destroyed as they set out.

The Aniara also has limited entertainment. In both the movie and the book, the life aboard the ship is highly centered around a technological artifact called the “Mima”, which is sort of like a pleasant VR experience, and which has its own intelligence. The Mima eventually breaks down due to the accumulated negative experiences of the passengers, and this leads to the same sort of debauchery as seen in High-Rise, with the crew eventually giving into despair and dying out.

In Aniara, the ship struggles valiantly against an inevitable, externally-imposed doom. They know that they will die from the moment they set out, because of the enormous distances of interstellar travel. Even if they were going towards a nearby star, they would never reach it in their lifetimes. And they aren’t. They are heading into the abyss of space, perhaps to travel even beyond the galaxy.

In High-Rise, the residents struggle valiantly to doom themselves. They can quit at any time. They have well-paying jobs outside, and they are in the middle of London. There is nothing holding them down except for their own psychic connections to the high rise.

I believe that these two stories are both collapse stories, despite their differences. Both go into extensive detail about the ways that the lives of people break down. They describe things from the perspectives of both individuals and the larger systems that sustain them. They are stories about despair, where a reader knows from the outset that doom is certain, and yet, the audience may hope, at each stage of collapse, that the situation will improve or stabilize. And then, it doesn’t.

These stories are not alone in the genre, but it’s not a large one. Most collapse stories are web fiction, such as Phantom Williams’s 500 Apocalypses or a number of stories in the SCP Foundation collaborative horror writing project. Another odd example is found in Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future, a speculative evolution book by Dougal Dixon which has some extremely harrowing descriptions of the collapse of various technological civilizations.

In traditional literature, however, I think that the epitome of this genre is probably Stephen Baxter’s Flood duology (the Landfall trilogy of stories set in the same universe are not collapse stories).

The first book in the duology, titled Flood, is about exactly what it sounds like: a flood. The story is told through an ensemble cast of people, bound together by their shared traumatic experience of being held hostage for years by terrorists in a disintegrating Spain. Things get worse from there.

The book ends up spanning the globe. The protagonists go through different situations, as the floodwaters rise. One ends up being involved in a billionaire’s plans for surviving the rising waters. One travels across America. Another joins scientists, studying the rising waters around the world. The book has rises and falls in living conditions. One character ends up living with the billionaire, and experiences first increasing luxury, as they move from decaying London to a post-apocalyptic self-sustaining cruise ship, and then utter deprivation, living on a refugee raft in the middle of the ocean. Another experiences a more direct decline, going from a respected engineer to one of the millions of refugees roaming the heart of America, chased off or employed by whatever passes for local authority in a crumbling world.

In the end, everyone is dead or left as a refugee in a completely flooded world. It’s a conclusion you can see coming from the beginning, and I don’t see it as a spoiler, because the book’s main appeal is not in the exciting plot or what happens to the characters. It is the spectacle of destruction, and the growing despair a reader feels.

I will not describe all of Ark, the sequel, but it is partly a collapse story and partly a more traditional science fiction story. It’s about a group of people sent into space, to try and survive the Earth’s demise, both before and after the launch of their mission. The first part of the story is a straight collapse story, as the audience is shown even more dire conditions than those in Ark. People are herded into the Rocky mountains, fighting over tiny scraps of land and tinier scraps of shade. One particularly disturbing moment shows the inner workings of a euthanasia gas chamber, operated by child soldiers working for the remains of the US government. As absurdly immoral as that sounds, the situation is bad enough that it feels completely understandable, both from the perspective of the government and the people who choose to walk inside.

As anyone who knows anything about Baxter will expect, these books are not for the faint of heart. They are extraordinarily depressing, but they have the same hypnotic quality as High-Rise or the film adaptation of Aniara. Something about them draws the reader in. There is a need to see just how bad things can get, to understand how things fall apart.

And I think that’s the fundamental quality of collapse stories. One could probably write a collapse story just about the end of a struggling business, or the fall of a government, or the death of a single sufficiently complicated and interesting superorganism. I don’t think that the death of a single person is enough to make a collapse story. Systems have to fail.

I also think that collapse stories need to focus on the, well, collapse. Some stories include collapses, but don’t focus on them. By focusing on the collapse, this distinguishes collapse stories from simple apocalyptic fiction like Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven or Fiat Voluntas Tua from A Canticle for Liebowitz. That collapse also has to be relatively gradual, so a quick apocalypse that sees heavy focus like the asteroid impact in Don’t Look Up doesn’t count.

I think that a fundamental weakness of the collapse story as a genre is that it’s difficult to focus on conventional character or plot moments that make most stories appealing. It can be done, but it’s hard to show how a system collapses from a technical perspective while still crafting a compelling narrative. I think that collapse stories benefit from ensemble casts, because this lets you provide a multifaceted view of the unfolding situation, something done by High-Rise, Flood, and Ark.

It’s important to understand the situation of ordinary people in this world, and for the situation to affect everymen. A lot of collapses are only “collapses” from the perspective of a certain ruling group, and those stories can be compelling, but I think that the collapse in a collapse story must be all-consuming and inescapable for at least a vertical slice of the population. It’s easy to write bad collapse stories, I suspect.

In general, I doubt that even well-written collapse fiction will ever have mass-market appeal. It’s depressing as shit and it tends to be pretty analytical in nature. But I am fond of it, and I will likely try my hand at it in the future.

I don’t read a lot of collapse fiction. I love it, but it’s definitely bad for me. I suspect that there are probably dark corners of the genre that indulge heavily in racism, fascism, and accelerationism. I feel the same sort of hypnotic energy when I read some of the CCRU stuff, and I imagine that the ideas of civilizational decline and extinction probably appeal to extremist elements.

That shouldn’t dissuade anyone from writing collapse fiction, but it is important for writers to consider the impact of their writing.