Surviving

Posted by Tanos on Wed 24 Dec 08, 3:44 PM

Tags: books

For the last six weeks the BBC has been showing "Survivors", a reworking of a 1970s series, in which a group of people survive an influenza pandemic that kills almost all of humanity - leaving only hundreds or thousands alive in the UK where the action is set. The climax last night was a bit of a surprise - mostly that they were so lame about using violence.

From my books page, you might know that I've been reading S.M. Stirling's "Dies the Fire" series, set in a present-day USA where steam and oil power, electricity and firearms suddenly don't work. The survivors in that scenario have to rebuild social structures that can contend with the practicalities of agriculture and defending what they have against more predatory groups. And since Stirling's forte is military fiction set in alternate histories, there's a lot more willingness to go back with weapons and kill the guy who's threatening you, rather than just trying to hide away from him for six weeks as the BBC's heroes did.

But it was the BBC's "Day of the Triffids" series from 1981 (and then Wyndham's book from 1951) that was my first exposure to the genre, in which almost everyone is blinded in one night by the intense light of an apparent meteor shower. Somehow I've always associated this kind of apocalyptic scenario with BDSM, probably because it means a restructuring of society according to more primal realities, and the "Day of the Triffids" contains the germ of this idea, in a speech made by Dr Vorless to a group of survivors:

Dr Vorless wrote: Well, indeed do the French say autres temps, autres moeurs. We must all see, if we pause to think, that one kind of community's virtue may well be another kind of community's crime; that what is frowned upon here may be considered laudable elsewhere; that customs condemned in one century are condoned in another. And we must also see that in each community and each period there is a widespread belief in the moral rightness of its own customs. ... The conditions which framed and taught us our standards have gone with it. Our needs are now different, and our aims must be different. If you want an example. I would point out to you that we have all spent the day indulging with perfectly easy consciences in what two days ago would have been housebreaking and theft. With the old pattern broken, we have now to find out what mode of life is best suited to the new. We have not simply to start building again; we have to start thinking again-which is much more difficult, and far more distasteful. ... The laws we knew have been abolished by circumstances. It now falls to us to make laws suitable to the conditions, and to enforce them if necessary. ... Solomon had three hundred - or was it five hundred? - wives, and God did not apparently hold them against him. A Mohammedan preserves rigid respectability with three wives. These are matters of local custom. Just what our laws in these matters, and in others, will be is for us all to decide later for the greatest benefit of the community.

I do remember being struck by that argument at the time, about morals and customs being tied to particular societies rather than universals, and it's grown over the years into seeing the complex interplay of biology and culture over generations which creates human societies and our inbuilt human nature.

To underline the point, the narrator of the story loses a physical confrontation with a drunken, sighted man leading a group of blinded men and starting to "recruit" women, and then thinks about the consequences of winning:

Bill Masen wrote: Had the result been reversed, I could scarcely have escaped making myself responsible for the men he had been leading. After all, and whatever one might feel about his methods, he was the eyes of that party, and they'd be looking to him for food as well as for drink. And the women would go along too, on their own account as soon as they got hungry enough. And now I came to look around me, I felt doubtful whether any of the women hereabouts would seriously mind anyway. What with one thing and another, it looked as if I might have had a lucky escape from promotion to gang leadership.

All of these scenarios lend themselves to being backdrops for BDSM, and Stirling's books frequently contain characters who take slaves and in the case of one post-apocalyptic leader, he dresses them in fetishwear and collars just because he can. But I also wonder if it's more than just the freedom to deviate that these alternate histories provide. More than just a re-roll of the dice with the chance to pick a different set of rules.

Maybe it's something to do with that word "primal" that I used, and that I also use to describe the environment in Bridgewood? That stripping away the layers of civilisation, and especially of egalitarian, democratic Western civilisation, leaves more of our primal selves visible. And those primal selves look a lot more like BDSM than modern life.

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