This book, and this post, contains discussion of natural disasters, pandemics, and heavy doses of existential dread.
Did I ever tell you the story of how I saw Cats (2019) in the middle of a wildfire? To be clear, the fire itself was a safe distance away and we weren’t on alert, not at that exact moment. But smoke was blowing in from the fires burning a few hours away, so my friends and I emerged from two hours of uncanny animal-hybrid CGI and bad music to see the sky overhead blanketed in grey, the sun glaring through in a shade of bloody red. It was 2pm or so, but it could have been the middle of a haunted night. But what could we do? We adjusted our smoke masks and went to get gelato, because the gelato place near the cinema was still open, and we wanted to give them some business as well as find somewhere air-conditioned to sit and dissect the movie we’d just seen.
As you might imagine, it quickly became a joke that Tom Hooper’s Cats caused the apocalypse. Covid hit a few months after this, so it’s safe to say that matters Did Not Improve even after that particularly rough bushfire season calmed down. It’s a surreal memory to return to, a funny and odd image of people doing their best to go about their ordinary life despite how it looks and feels like the world is ending around them. For all its issues, I do have to give Cats credit for distracting us for a few hours during a smoky, stressful time in our lives; lives that would only get more stressful.
Brendan Ritchie’s Eta Draconis is not a post-apocalyptic story. It’s more like a… mid-apocalyptic story, where the world appears to be in the process of ending, but ordinary life on earth has not yet been decimated and society hasn’t come unravelled. Disaster has become commonplace on the news and the future is terrifyingly uncertain, but also you still need to go to school and buy groceries—and you still want to read books and watch TV to pass the time.
The Afictionado 