Apocalypse When?

This blog is one of a number spinning off from my website. It looks at creativity – largely creative writing – and parallels my online apocalyptic novel, "Like Fleas on a Dog'sBack", so it's logical to pose the early question, "why write an online novel?"

It's not purely self-indulgence or ego trip. I aim to make a living from my writing - I hope "Like Fleas on a Dog's Back" will act as a shop window for my fiction. Any professional writer has to consider the demands and problems of marketing. Offering up my fiction online seems like an acceptable form of 'soft-sell' – if you look at "The Stories You Don't Write" section of my website, you'll appreciate my concerns about the morality of marketing.

Writing remains a private affair; it can be a very lonely one, you and your imagination confronting a virgin sheet of paper or an impatient, blank screen. You set a target of so many words a day, then try to motivate yourself to forget the ten thousand other things you suddenly remember need doing.

An online novel can be a practical exercise in release, particularly if you decide to write about apocalypse. Here you begin with more than a blank page, you begin with a blank slate. You're the writer, playing god in a world abandoned by gods, a world stripped of its peoples and their realities, a social, political and economic vacuum. Your imagination is now total anarchy, your writing free of any boundaries - decency, taste, editorial demands.

Written online, your novel doesn't have to sell, doesn't have to be a commercial success. Your novel doesn't have to appeal to the demands of a publisher or film producer for some market pleasing happy ending … mind you, I might just inject a bit of sex, and some violence, and maybe the odd laugh or two (and I'll probably receive death threats from pet lovers, but, hey, that's show business).

I hope people will read "Fleas", but it's liberating to just write and be able to go back and revise a chapter or a paragraph whenever a better idea comes to mind. This, folks, is a plastic novel, one which may undergo several revamps and rewrites before they come to take me away.

This is a flasher novel (I told you I wasn't going to be restricted by boundaries of taste); I'm exposing myself to inspiration and criticism. I hope you'll enjoy the story and visit regularly to see how it unfolds. For those of you who write or want to write, I hope it'll prove a stimulus, give you an example of a 'work in progress' and encourage you to start developing your own ideas, characters, worlds, themes.

It's worth repeating, writing can be a lonely business. You're forever at the mercy of your own self-confidence and the torment of your own self-criticism … unless you have the sort of armour-plated ego which won't let you get side-tracked by self-doubt. I'm interested in writing as therapy - I encourage people to write, write, write.

So "Fleas" has its therapeutic dimension. As I work on the website, as I work to try to earn a living, I can unwind with my flea circus and use it as a speculative vehicle to consider how change affects people. The theme of my website, after all, is human change.

In "Like Fleas on a Dog's Back" my characters become lab rats in a safe, humane experiment, and you, illustrious reader, can don a metaphorical white coat and prod them along! Ask questions, spot errors, suggest plot twists … offer to buy me a drink.

Maybe I can inspire a workshop for apocalyptic writing, maybe provide a resource for writers exploring dystopias and utopias? What I'm anxious to communicate is my sense that there is no single 'Apocalypse'. I don't write from a fundamentalist religious perspective where the end of the world is portrayed as scripted by some deity. The end of the world has no purpose.

If our world ended, the universe would still go on, but it would be a shame – none of us will ever know how the human story unwinds, but I do hope that my children, and grandchildren, and great grandchildren, etc., will have a chance to write a few chapters of their own and contribute to making the world a better place.

I don't assume there is any one true dystopia or one true utopia. We all have our visions of hell – karaoke tends to feature in mine; we all have our own nightmares as well as our own dreams. I'm forcing myself to question my values … and fears. I present my vision of Apocalypse as a Dystopia, because I don't imagine a Utopia is possible. Could we ever have a 'perfect' society?

Apocalyptic and dystopic explorations give writers the scope to pose the ultimate questions about the societies they inhabit. We need to consider these concepts. Although they're possibly most familiar to fans of horror or science fiction, 'Apocalypse', 'Dystopia', and 'Utopia' are terms which should be of interest to all writers.

They also have a place within us all, writer or not, in what I describe as "the stories we don't write". Within our own internal dialogue and everyday thoughts we rehearse dreams, good or ill; we all wake each morning to view the day with hope or dread, and oh how quickly our dreams can change, how rapidly our nightmares can be confirmed.

So let's consider the meaning of a few words - and remember, love of words and a fascination with their meaning and significance is one of the symptoms of both writing and creative intelligence. There is no treatment – you can hope only for sympathy and tolerance, you can pray for respect.

"Like Fleas on a Dog's Back" is my vision of an end to the world. It might turn out to be an exploration of survival, of hope and optimism if not of 'salvation'.  But dreams are fragile and nightmares can happen in the blink of an eye - when you step off the kerb without noticing that oncoming car, when you discover a lump which wasn't there yesterday, when the referee rules the goal offside.

The word 'apocalypse' comes from the Greek for 'revelation'. For the Jewish and Christian faiths apocalypse meant the revelation of some forbidden knowledge. It's a concept which has been handed down the generations. Its popular meaning today is 'the end of the world', but even in horror and science fiction writing this can still convey notions of some religious, political or scientific day of judgement involving a final battle between good and evil.

Jewish apocalyptic writing goes back thousands of years. There's a similar Christian tradition, envisaging some divine intervention in the affairs of mortals. In the West, this is our cultural heritage, a centuries old history of religious apocalyptic vision and writing. It found expression in the preaching of so-called saints, prophets and visionaries: the notion of 'vision' is important, for many of these doom-sayers and conduits of divine guidance claim to have experienced revelations.

Such divine instruction is often discovered through dreams or during states of altered consciousness - and we've all had that dreamlike, half-awake or drunken illusion that we've touched on the meaning of life or have witnessed something portentous only to wake or sober up and find it's gone, we've forgotten it.

Apparent communication with the infinite or the transcendental during a state of altered consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. It's easy to feel that this has been 'real', that we have truly been contacted by angels or spirits or a deity.

Religious apocalyptic vision is a cultural phenomenon with which we're familiar. Typically, it portrays the world's end as evidence of the deity's displeasure at the failures of mankind through greed, through ignorance, through inability to keep the faith.

It's a vision which has been absorbed into popular culture - how many books and films can you list which have themes of a battle between good and evil, a contest between the sacred and the profane, of zombie or vampire or alien invasion, of devastation by plague, of robot or machine seizure of the world, of nuclear holocaust, or collisions with comets, etc.. etc., etc.? The Black Death, the First World War, the 1918 flu pandemic, the Holocaust - how many historical examples can you find which could legitimise such visions?

But a lot of popular writing isn't that final. Paralleling the apocalyptic vision there is a long history of writers exploring utopia or warning of dystopia. Novels about survival, retribution, rebirth, transcendence, and a score of other themes can embody elements of dystopia or utopia.

"Like Fleas on a Dog's Back" is part of this popular tradition. It's my exploration of how we might handle change if all our social structures were eradicated, except there would be no 'we', only individuals. It encapsulates my belief that this history of writing about apocalypse or utopia or dystopia is really a basic human desire to create, to imagine something better, or to fear something worse. I believe that this desire to express hopes and fears is at the root of our creative consciousness.

But let me return you to first principles. 'Dystopia' has come to mean the worst of worlds, in contrast to visions of 'utopia' or perfect society. Revisiting the Greek roots of these manufactured words, 'utopia' means 'no place' and was a pun on 'eutopia' (meaning 'happy place'): 'dystopia', meanwhile, means a 'bad place', while … are you ready for this? … 'cacotopia' would probably be a better description of the 'worst place' or worst case scenario. (I'm indebted to Wikipedia for the above - you learn something every day!)

Now, before you decide I'm rambling into academic foothills here, just stop and think how much of your imagination is influenced by your visions of eutopia, or utopia, or dystopia, or cacotopia. Think how many times a day you become distracted wishing things were different (better) or agonising about how bad they've become.

My personal eutopia might involve Sophie Marceau, a sun-drenched shore, copious amounts of real ale, the odd curry or two, and me trying to explain the finer points of cricket to my daughters while we all watch the West Indies play Australia. For most people (particularly Sophie Marceau) that would probably amount to hell. And I'd probably tire of it in about ten days, if not three. My personal vision of cacotopia would involve having to go back to a 9-5 job tomorrow … does that ring a bell with anyone?

We have our dreams, we have our nightmares, and, while these might be fantasies, they intrude into our real, material, everyday world. Whenever we feel happy or sad, bored or enthusiastic, we're making comparisons between life as it is, life as it was, and life as it could be, or maybe should be. Do you speculate on worst case and best case scenarios when you wake to face the day?

I don't gamble, I've never backed a horse in my life, but I've woken convinced I'd won a huge fortune on the horses and now had total control over my life. Millions play the lottery on this same basis. Alternatively, I've dreamt I was listening to the radio news and heard that the police had found 'the body' … and I wake up sweating, reasoning with myself that where I buried it no one could ever find it. And then I really wake up. Sweating.

So, "Like Fleas on a Dog's Back" is part of a tradition of imagination going back to our earliest days of evolving consciousness. Our ability to experience an 'altered consciousness' is hard wired into the physical and chemical structure of our brains. How we imagine, our palette of concepts and metaphors, is culturally learned, acquired over millions of years, reinterpreted and re-voiced culture by culture, generation by generation, person by person.

Our visions of heaven or hell, our specific visions of how or why the world could end have changed over the centuries, but they remain a recurring theme.

One of the earliest known explorations of utopia is Plato's "Republic". It dates from the era of the Peloponnesian War and the very real danger that Greek civilisation would be extinguished by foreign invasion, so Plato's enquiry embodies an element of 'what are we fighting for', 'what do we hope to achieve in victory', 'what might we lose in defeat'. I couldn't imagine George Bush or Tony Blair writing a 21st century equivalent of "The Republic".

So the apocalypse isn't just a religious tradition, it's a political and cultural one as well. War, a cataclysmic external threat, the risk of annihilation, stimulates our creative senses, encourages us to picture an idealised society or world as a counterweight to the nightmare before us.

Thomas More, whose book "Utopia" gave us the popular use of the word, also wrote in an age of turmoil. There was fear of cultural, religious, political and dynastic extinction (Elizabeth dying without an heir to assume the throne). I'd argue that most (if not all) the great utopian visions and most graphic explorations of dystopia or apocalypse have occurred within societies which see themselves as under major threat.

Lewis Mumford, "The Story of Utopias", looked at the history of utopian thinking and concluded that it demonstrated optimism. He sees it as a rational, natural desire to make things better. It's back to that universal question, 'When you wake up in the morning, how do you see the world?' Do you spend a moment looking forward, hoping for the best from the day, do you look forward to achieving something, doing something even if it's only a day spent in bed doing nothing. Or, is life so bad you lie there dreading getting up because you'll have to start coping all over again?

Change is driven by vision, by threat, by discontent, and by the very nature of and belief in change. To some, change is desirable, to others, anathema.  Change, in itself, can be threatening, or at least disorienting. (And I write as a Scot in a Scotland wrestling with the prospect of independence!)

We inhabit a material world but we also live in the subjective world of our own inner thoughts. We can't escape the physical world (at best we can build shelters), but we can find solace in our inner world. We can flee into the universe of the imagination. We can reconstruct the world internally - utopian visions are gateways to creativity and invention. But don't assume utopian visions are necessarily dynamic or 'progressive' - they can be reactionary or concerned with protecting the status quo.

For two thousand years after Plato our exploration of utopias and dystopias was monopolised by religious metaphors and paradigms. Thomas More stepped beyond these boundaries to explore humanistic and material possibilities, but it's only when we reach the 19th century that we witness a transformation of utopian and dystopian visions of the world. Revelation is no longer by divine intervention or inspiration but via science and discovery. Science will solve all our ills, science will open up a new Pandora's test tube of horrors.

Arguably the first great science fiction novel is 'Frankenstein', which reflects the dystopic and apocalyptic nature of scientific inquiry and invention. Can science conquer death (or creation)? From the 19th century onwards apocalyptic visions emphasise a secular rather than a sacred milieu.

Films like "Metropolis" or "Modern Times" addressed concerns that industry was dehumanising people, making them little more than slaves or robots.  World Wars made hell a living experience - watch "All Quiet on the Western Front" and consider the dehumanising effects of war, the difference in the way it's experienced by those fighting it and those who still peddle the old lie, "Dulce et decorum est ".

Between the wars, and after, we had concerns about the grip of totalitarian governments - "Brave New World", "1984". By the 1950's we have the horrors of nuclear warfare, perhaps most chillingly expressed by Neville Shute's bleak "On the Beach". Such concerns have continued to the present day with various post-apocalyptic visions ("Mad Max", "Survivors").

We've had scenarios where the science (human or alien) has run amok creating invasion by body snatchers, Triffids, machines ("Blade Runner", "Terminator"), various sea monsters and genetically altered giant ants, spiders, even shrews and 'blobs'. And, of course, there's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" which I love, but then you'll forgive an old man his fantasies.

We've enough nuclear weapons on the planet to eradicate life several times over but we're now facing the prospect that the world won't end with a bang. Environmental disaster is silent but every bit as deadly - hands up if you can hear the climate's winged chariot hurrying near.

We've become the audience at the coliseum, watching the various species being extinguished, oblivious to the fact that we're moving up the list: "they came for the dodo and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a dodo; they came for the tiger and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a tiger; whose voice will be heard when extinction comes for us?"

Of course, we're too selfish for that. By changing our lifestyles we could begin a fight back against environmental disaster. But that would involve us taking action, it would require us all to pare back the excesses of consumption and sacrifice a few luxuries. No, instead, our current apocalyptic fears become species-centric - we worry that the human race might be extinguished by bird flu or pandemic. Rather than face our own guilt we can blame the birds (and try reading Daphne Du Maurier's short story, "The Birds").

So, an online novel about the end of the world? Our cultural tradition of utopian and dystopian metaphors and narratives gives expression to dynamic imagination - an adventure in what we would wish from life, a concern about what we might get from it. Apocalypse is this utopian-dystopian continuum taken to extremis.

How we interpret apocalypse is a political act. Do we concern ourselves with the planet and our individual responsibilities for the threats it is experiencing? Do we take environmental action, concerted political action, or do we demand that our governments protect us from bird flu?

So, my online novel is a political act. We need to worry about the planet, first and foremost. Climate change and the exhaustion of natural resources is going to impact in unforeseen ways. We need to worry about our roles as human actors. In the West we've learned to expect, or at least to demand, long life, material comforts, and cure-all health care.

We expect to buy what we want or what the marketers convince us we want - how many million bottles of water do we buy, how many do we throw away when, unlike most people in the world, we have safe drinking water on tap?

We expect scientists and doctors to save us if we are injured or ill. We require our governments to protect us from disease - the same governments which insist they are protecting us from weapons of mass destruction or who are going to renew Trident nuclear submarines. How many nuclear submarines does it take to save the polar bear? Or prevent the next famine? Or give every child access to education?

It's time we started requiring ourselves to take action and act to protect our world, our planet, our environment - and I'm fully conscious of the hypocrisy of my words, writing to a medium which burns electricity, in a room heated by gas, having just enjoyed a meal of supermarket bought food while wearing clothes manufactured in some Asian sweatshop, temporarily postponing the need to hurl another bin full of rubbish out for collection.

So, will the last chapter of "Like Fleas on a Dog's Back" offer any optimism?  Will it contain a message of hope? Will I be weaving my own clothes by then and making my own shoes out of recycled car tyres? That might be down to you. I'm open to suggestions, to ideas, to criticism and to advice. I'm looking for practical advice. What happens to a nuclear power station if nobody turns up to work in it? What happens to sewage systems and reservoirs, to water and gas supplies, to oil wells and a hundred other taken-for-granted services if nobody, or not enough people, are left alive to keep them functioning? They don't just switch off and wait for instructions. What happens? What are the consequences? You tell me, I'll incorporate it in my story.