Wild Animals Of The Wildest West

This review contains mild spoilers for the book Outlaw Planet

M.R. Carey's latest novel
is the third (and best) in his
Pandeminium series. 

M.R. Carey’s Outlaw Planet features an anthropomorphic dog gunslinger striding across a post-apocalyptic Wild West-analogue landscape wielding a talking gun and fighting anthropomorphic bear outlaws and anthropomorphic raccoon military bad guys.

The result is a rollicking, entertaining, and occasionally ludicrous novel that does not take itself too seriously. And although some readers might enjoy Outlaw Planet as simple pulp entertainment, it has much more complexity and depth on offer than might be obvious at first glance.

Screenwriter and teacher John Truby notes that the traditional western didn’t die; rather, the fight for a new frontier moved into outer space, and includes genre favourites like Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy,. Truby wrote in The Anatomy of Genres, “If science fiction is social philosophy in fiction form, and crime and comedy are applied moral philosophy, the western gives us a philosophy of history,” and this is evident in Outlaw Planet, as the book offers both ideas about a philosophy of history and broader ideas about social philosophy.

The setting (the titular “outlaw planet”) is a nation similar to the antebellum United States. It’s populated with the sapient descendants of numerous mammal species; everything from dog people and cat people to weasel people and even moose people. As the story begins, readers are introduced to Elizebeth (aka “Dog-Bitch Bess”), a young woman of canine lineage who sets out from the prosperous southern coast out into the untamed wilds of the west in search of her destiny. As she reaches the frontierlands, her nation plunges into civil war.

Featureless white ceramic towers litter the landscape of this Western setting, vibrating with an ominous hum — and as it turns out, resetting the minds of everyone who lives there to restart their civil war over and over again.

It slowly emerges over the course of 500 pages that this planet’s analogue of the United States Civil War has been engineered by shadowy figures as part of a multi-generational experiment to figure out what species of sapient mammal makes the best soldiers for their much larger war. It’s a lot to fit into one book, and our biggest criticism of Outlaw Planet is that it might be overlong.

The subtext of this setting is timely. From our perspective, it seems like the United States is trapped in an endless cycle of conflict, replaying the tensions that eight score and five years ago led the nation to its first civil war. America’s mass-media ecosystem is complicit in misinforming the public, and pitting the masses against each other while faceless corporate overlords profit from the resulting tensions. Consequently, the setting of Outlaw Planet that features mass media organizations broadcasting falsehoods from featureless skyscrapers and pitting citizens against each other is somewhat apt as a metaphor. Or maybe we’re reading too much into things.

At its heart, the book succeeds primarily because of well-developed character work. Even when the protagonists Bess and her gun Wakeful Slim have lost their moral compass, they’re written with believable empathy and the reader understands their bad choices. Supporting characters — such as elderly warrior Mur Ghrent and young shaman Dima Saraband — may not be fully fleshed out, but they aren’t reduced to a series of cliches either.

As a non-American, author M.R. Carey does not 
seem to be swayed by the mythologized version
of Westward Expansion or "Manifest Destiny"
that many United States residents are taught.
(Image via Wikipedia)

One of the interesting details in this setting is that the only characters recognizable as standard-issue human beings belong to semi-nomadic bands living in western lands that are slowly being expropriated (stolen) by settlers. We are not of Indigenous ancestry, so we cannot speak definitively about whether this depiction passes muster. It is interesting to note that members of these Indigenous-analogue groups are the only characters in the book who truly know how the World really works. Indeed, Indigenous knowledge is depicted as being vital.

The book acts as a stealth sequel to Carey’s previous two novels, Infinity Gate and Echo of Worlds. Outlaw Planet is not marketed as the third part of the Pandominion trilogy, with the publisher’s website even describing it as a “standalone” novel. The previous novels had introduced the Pandominion, a multi-planetary empire stretched across billions of parallel Earths with sapient species having evolved on different Earths from almost every mammalian lineage. This empire — and its fracturing during the events of Bridge of Worlds — is referenced early in the book, and eventually becomes crucial to the outcome of Outlaw Planet.

Over the past few decades, numerous writers best known for work in comic books have attempted to make a transition to writing prose novels. The results have been mixed at best; even influential comic book figures like Alan Moore, John Byrne, and Warren Ellis have often found limited success on book store shelves, and although Neil Gaiman has sold a lot of books and graphic novels, his career is the exception rather than the rule. Even the legendary Stan Lee’s attempt at prose (a series of novels called The Zodiac Legacy) is not well remembered. It is clearly a different set of skills that is required for success as a purely text-based author as opposed to one whose work involves words and pictures in sequential panels. M.R. Carey, the Liverpudlian author of Outlaw Planet seems to be a worthy exception, having begun writing successful novels only after a multi-decade career as a high-profile comic book author.

Outlaw Planet is a delightfully weird fusion of western and big multiversal sci-fi adventure, and it’s one that we sort of hope earns Carey his first Hugo nod in best series.

Guest Post: Celebrating Poetry at the 2026 Hugo Awards

We are pleased to welcome a guest column by 2025 Worldcon Poet Laureate — and friend of the blog — Brandon O'Brien. He is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist, and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been short-listed for the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions and the 2020 Ignyte Award for Best in Speculative Poetry, and is published in Uncanny Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Strange Horizons, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is the former poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. His debut poetry collection, Can You Sign My Tentacle?, available from Interstellar Flight Press, is the winner of the 2022 Elgin Award.

In my presentation of the Best Poem category at the 2025 Hugo Awards at Seattle Worldcon, I hoped to remind people of the long road that poetry has carved for the speculative genres, not only as one of the initial sources of our most revered epics as examples of genre fiction, but therefore as one of the oldest and most enduring forms of storytelling craft in human history. I had hoped in doing so — and in delivering a cheeky challenge to the Worldcons to come — to reiterate how important it is as a fandom to continue valuing poetry as a part of the legacy of our genre.

Writer, poet, artist and game designer
Brandon O'Brien, who was the 
Poet Laureate at last year's Worldcon.
(Image via the author's Bluesky)

So imagine my absolute glee when I have learned — just the same as many of you — that LACon in 2026 will also have a Best Poem category at the Hugos! Following Marie Brennan’s historic win in the same category for ‘A War of Words’, I am beyond excited that we keep this trend going of supporting and rewarding poetry as a part of this great genre into the future.

As we wait for the LAcon Business Meeting to potentially ratify a permanent space for this category in the awards going forward, this decision not only gives us even more data about the viability of the category, but makes 2026 an especially bumper year for speculative verse, as SFWA will be hosting a similar category for the very first time in that year's Nebula Awards thanks to the stalwart work of their Poetry Committee. My sincere hope is not only that the community of readers becomes even more invested in reading and discovering speculative poetry, but that this year is the one that shapes a more committed presence for speculative verse in the imagination of science fiction and fantasy both in fandom and in the mainstream.

I'm even more excited as a result to hear that LAcon has also announced Terese Mason Pierre as one of their Special Guests! Terese is a phenomenal poet and editor, and an outstanding champion of the form. The convention is beyond fortunate to have someone as curious, as creative, and as thoughtful as her present and waving the flag of speculative verse next year in Anaheim.

Having heard Terese both read from her own work and speak on the craft of verse in panels, I can say without a doubt that she is exactly the voice for the art form that the convention will benefit from: a confident and critical voice in her own right, incredibly excited about the work of her contemporaries, and infinitely knowledgeable about what poetry has done and can still accomplish in this genre.

What fills me with the most joy, of course, is watching the response to this news elsewhere. Seeing fandom continue to show excitement for Worldcon as an institution valuing speculative poetry is infinitely heartening. I'm grateful that Los Angeles Worldcon has offered this opportunity for yet another year, I'm excited to see what wonderful spaces for reading and discussion will come to bear as a result, and I hope that it continues to be a positive sign of the public appreciation of verse in science fiction and fantasy, today and well beyond.

Per penna ad astra,
Brandon O'Brien

The Next Degeneration

Three months ago, right-wing billionaire David Ellison’s Skydance Media bought Paramount, the venerable and storied studio that is the home of SpongeBob SquarePants, Mission Impossible, and of course Star Trek.

As Variety has recently reported, Ellison’s short tenure at Paramount has already brought significant changes to the company. Management directives have included everything from hosting Mixed Martial Arts events on the White House lawn in celebration of President Trump’s 80th birthday, to firing executives who made the unforgivable mistake of being women, to blacklisting stars who have condemned the Israeli invasion of Gaza. 

New Paramount CEO David
Ellison is afflicted with resting
frat-boy face.
(Image via Paramount)

It is clear that Paramount now has a specific political perspective. It is also clear that the studio’s owner plans to expand their reach by acquiring additional intellectual property.

Given the long production schedules of television and cinema, the effects of this right-wing turn will likely not be immediately obvious. But it is likely that the next generation of Star Trek showrunners will be incentivized to curb the franchise’s progressivism, either directly or by the knowledge that advancing left-wing ideas is a career-limiting move in the company. Five years from now, it is almost inconceivable that whatever Star Trek is still being made by Paramount will depict labour unions or transgender characters without villanizing them.

Blogger Darren Mooney has ably pointed out that the series is not always as progressive as its reputational legacy, but recent incarnations such as Discovery and Strange New Worlds have certainly leaned into diversity, equity, and inclusion as essential elements of the franchise. This is in sharp contrast to the values of the franchise’s new owners, who have vowed to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at the studio.

We suspect that Star Trek is boldly going nowhere good.

The spectrum of political viewpoints expressed within canonical stories of a franchise that is considered to be acceptable exists within certain expectations governed by creators and owners. In the 1960s, Gene Roddenberry was prohibited from depicting a labour union in The Original Series, but in the 1990s labour organizing became part of mainstream Star Trek politics. In the 1980s, David Gerrold quit The Next Generation because LGBTQ stories were prohibited on the series, but by the 2020s, such stories were an essential part of Star Trek. This is the Overton Window of the franchise; the spectrum of political storytelling that is considered canonical.

Star Trek Picard was not our favourite series,
but they do have to be given credit for being
pretty clear on their position on I.C.E.
(Image via StarTrek.net)

This window shifts slowly. It is unlikely that there will suddenly be a Star Trek: Neutral Zone Patrol show where Dean Cain and an alien hedgehog first officer are heroic Starfleet officers trying to prevent Romulan immigrants from stealing Federation jobs. But It’s more likely that the show will maintain a patina of progressivism, while airing an increased number of episodes that implicitly endorse warrantless wiretapping, right-wing military adventures, or racial profiling.

There is a faction within every fandom that embraces the franchise as part of their identity. Someone isn’t just a fan of the television show Dr. Who, they identify as a Whovian. Someone isn’t just a fan of the television show Star Trek, they identify as a Trekkie. Someone isn’t just a fan of the television show Mercy Point, they identify as a Pointhead. There is often in-group slang and a rejection of criticism of the franchise coming from those outside of the group. Once you have pledged allegiance to a specific intellectual property, the ability to assess its output becomes more difficult.

This type of fan loyalty is already big business, with media properties monetizing commitment to community through slapdash sequels and merchandise. The most die-hard fans will continue to follow the franchise uncritically even when intellectual property is owned by someone whose overt political agenda informs the end product. For a franchise like Star Trek, which has built an occasionally insular partisan core of fandom, the most fanatical group is fairly well established. It is conceivable that Trekkies who once celebrated inclusivity, exploration, and social critique may find themselves complicit in endorsing a vision they did not initially share, simply by remaining loyal.

Two years ago this blog predicted that within a decade, one of the major streaming services would lean into culture war divisions in an attempt to build a walled garden that appeals to the increasingly extreme right wing political identity. That prediction is coming true faster than we had anticipated. Paramount Plus is on its way to becoming the Fox News of entertainment content.

Declaring allegiance to a specific corporate-owned franchise effectively puts one’s loyalty up for sale; whichever media conglomerate owns the property has its hooks in the fandom. The transformation of Paramount under Ellison illustrates how corporate ownership might reshape both the content of a franchise and potentially its fandom.

When allegiance to a brand eclipses critical engagement, even the most idealistic communities risk being co-opted by forces that run counter to the values they once championed.

Inconceivable! (Hugo Cinema 1988)

This blog post is the thirty-first in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.  

Confusion about program item locations, registration difficulties, and a convention committee that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis. These are some of the reasons that the 1988 World Science Fiction Convention is remembered as a largely shambolic affair. Held in New Orleans on the weekend of September 1, it was described by Locus Magazine as “easily the most disorganized large-scale Worldcon ever held.”

The Metropolitan Auditorium in New Orleans
where the 1988 Hugo Awards took place has
lain vacant and in shambles since 2005.
(Image via NOLA.com)

The lineup to get into the Hugo Awards ceremony was also a mess, but once fans got inside the festivities were actually pretty entertaining. Toastmaster Mike Resnick had the audience roaring with laughter, and Gardner Dozois’ acceptance speech for his first Hugo Award was lauded as heartfelt and moving.

Not a single Best Dramatic Presentation finalist appears to have been in attendance for the ceremony, leaving Resnick to announce the award fairly quickly, hand the trophy to publicist Terry Erdman (who hadn’t even worked on the movie), and then move on.

Hugo voters had been enthusiastic in their support for The Princess Bride, with more votes being cast for the Best Dramatic winner than anything in any other category. With 493 votes, it eclipsed its nearest competitor Robocop, which garnered only 276 first-place votes.

The 1988 shortlist is a mixed bag. On top of Princess Bride and Robocop, there was Star Trek The Next Generation’s pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint,” Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator, and George Miller’s Witches of Eastwick. Two of these probably didn’t deserve to make the cut, but it’s difficult to think of other movies from that year deserving inclusion instead.

Perhaps the British anti-war low budget movie Friendship’s Death might have warranted inclusion on the ballot, or the classic Anime Neo Tokyo. Inner-Space, Batteries Not Included, and Spaceballs all have their adherents, but any of these would likely have been a marginal call. Harry and the Hendersons also came out that year.

It would be fair to say genre cinema was in a post-Star Wars lull. As unbelievable as it may seem in retrospect, there was not a single science fiction or fantasy film among the Top-5 highest grossing movies of the Hugo-eligible year. This had not happened in more than a decade, and has not happened since.

In fact, the highest-grossing science fiction or fantasy movie of 1987 was the mostly-mundane Witches of Eastwick, which earned $63 million and eighth in the box office rankings for the year (behind the mediocre Richard Dreyfuss cop comedy Stakeout).

David Foster Wallace dismissed Witches of Eastwick
author John Updike as “a penis with a thesaurus.”
(Image via New Statesman)

The Witches of Eastwick probably should not have been considered for a Hugo Award. It’s barely fantasy, and is a meandering and irritating movie. Based on a novel by Couples author John Updike, and brought to the screen by Mad Max director George Miller, it portrays three single women (Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Cher) who are seduced by a stranger who might be the Devil (Jack Nicholson). Each of the three women are portrayed as missing something in their lives, and the audience is supposed to accept that Nicholson’s devil has the power to change that. Insultingly, to the characters, each of them essentially gives up their career and artistic aspirations as soon as they’re with him. John Updike may have his admirers, but to us the portrayals of women and LGBTQ people in his works have aged extremely poorly, and Witches of Eastwick is no exception. There is also a tonal mismatch between the source material, the directorial vision, and the energy brought to the screen by the stars. As a reviewer in Variety Magazine noted, “Miller seems to become impatient with the material and tries to hike it up a notch toward the end with some inappropriate special effects.”

The Predator is probably not the best his planet has
to offer. The scorpion-faced alien is just a half-rate
nepo kid trying to pretend that he’s formidable
and worthy of his father’s affection.
(Image via Newsweek)

Released on the exact same day that summer, Predator is a well-constructed and highly quotable pulp adventure action movie featuring one of the best-designed alien creatures of that era’s cinema. The almost all-male cast is muscle-bound and somewhat cliched, with action beats interspersed with bro-handshakes between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers. But while Predator is on its surface a testosterone-fuelled jungle romp about heroic American soldiers put into conflict with a deadly alien who hunts them, it is often pointed out that the movie can be read as a condemnation of American trophy hunters who take high-tech weaponry with them on African safaris where they hunt whatever animals they can put their sights on. It’s a savvier movie than it’s often given credit for, and was a worthy Hugo finalist. As an interesting aside, as far as we can tell, Predator director John McTiernan is the first Hugo-winner to serve time in prison.

Probably the most anticipated science fiction event of the year had been on the small screen, as Star Trek launched The Next Generation — and earned a Hugo nomination in the process. Although the series would eventually become a classic, and possibly the most popular iteration of the franchise, it got off to a very rough start. The pilot episode “Encounter At Farpoint” is a fairly clunky two hours of television, with two plots that seem to work at cross purposes. On one side, the Enterprise D and its new captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stuart) gets accosted by a malevolent god-like being, while on the surface of a nearby planet half of the crew are trying to solve the mystery of how a city got built fairly rapidly. It’s rough around the edges, and occasionally very clunky in terms of dialogue. Whether or not this deserved to be on the Hugo shortlist probably depends on your affection for The Next Generation, but we would suggest “Hide and Q,” which aired on November 23 of that year, would have been a better pick.

However, two works on the shortlist — and indeed in that entire year — stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Given the militarization of police over the past three decades, the increasing corporate dominance of

It may be of fannish interest to note that in 1987,
Forrest J. Ackerman played the President of Earth
in the movie Amazon Women On The Moon.
(Image via Letterboxd)

America’s legal system, and the lack of accountability among those in power, Robocop’s grim satire seems more timely now than when it first hit cinemas. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, it’s an over-the-top social commentary peppered with immersive and organic worldbuilding and intense non-diagetic inserts. Depicting a near-future Detroit where the police force is being privatized, the movie follows a detective named Alex Murphy (Peter Weller). Murphy is killed and then brought back to life as a cyborg who must avenge his own murder. But the story is so much more than that, tackling the dehumanization of labour and the alienation of late-capitalism. The movie is occasionally witty, sometimes disturbing, and structurally perfect. Details introduced in the first act (e.g., the way Alex Murphy holsters his gun) are relevant to in the denouement (e.g. the reveal of who Robocop is), Some members of our cinema club argued that this is the most incisive and relevant science fiction movie made in the entire decade, as the movie offers brutal social commentary presented in an innovative manner.

Studios had struggled to market The Princess Bride, and as “Inconceivable!” as it might be now, the movie was widely regarded as a box-office disappointment. Opening on barely 800 screens, it hadn’t even cracked $30 million, and wouldn’t be popularly regarded as a significant movie for several more years. So the fact that fandom chose it as their favourite indicates that the Worldcon community was ahead of the curve. Told as a metafictional narrative read by a grandfather to his sick grandson, the movie follows a farm boy named Westley (Cary Elwes) on a quest to rescue his true love Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright). For at least one member of our cinema club, Princess Bride remains her “favourite movie of all time,” but some others found the delivery a touch too saccharine and the whimsy to be forced.

Although some of us still wish a more purely science fictional movie like Robocop could have won the Hugo that year, it’s difficult to quibble with the overwhelming vote of the 1988 Worldcon attendees. The Princess Bride was the film that represented the tastes of fandom voters that year. Considering the fact that it remains a cult favourite in the broader public, it’s probably the right pick for the award.

Art as a Video Game

The Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work presents the Hugo voter with a conundrum: should the works be judged based on the quality of the gameplay, or on the merits of the storytelling as science fiction or fantasy. As an example, Donkey Kong Bonanza might be one of the best video games of 2025, but its story is uninspiring. Consequently, for some, it is difficult to put forward as a Hugo contender.

The president of France celebrated the success of
Clair Obscur as a triumph of French art.
(Screen capture)

When making our selections, we view the Hugo Awards as being an institution that was designed to recognize story first and foremost. Although gameplay is a factor in our votes for this category, it is secondary to the quality of narrative and the artistry of how that narrative is expressed.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, however, offers no such tradeoffs, taking the framework of a standard role-playing game (RPG) and evolving it in ways that reinvigorates one's faith in the format. It is first-rate fantasy storytelling combined with well-balanced and compulsively playable action.

The story is set in a world where every year, people who have reached a certain age suddenly die, and every year that age gets younger. Now that the population is dying at the age of 33, an expedition is organized to try and find out why and to confront the villainous Paintress who is thought to be responsible.

One of the aspects of Clair Obscur that should be highlighted is the design. Rather than hewing to very standard, anime-inspired art, the game designers took inspiration from sources such as Belle Époque, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Symbolism, Dark Romanticism, and Surrealism. The resulting, eclectic art style makes gameplay encounters feel both unnerving and alien; emphasizing how little the player knows about their enemy.

Unlike some other RPGs, Clair Obscur offers a fairly lean cast of characters, including earnest and loyal Maelle and fanciful giant Esquie. However, this cast is well developed enough to offer satisfying gameplay and story telling. The characters’ interactions feel organic and the relationships develop naturally. Each party member gets fleshed out through vignettes in the game’s camp, developing their relationships with the game’s main character and each other.

It's clear that Clair Obscur directors Guillaume
Broche and Maxance Playez understand and love
the history of this type of RPG game.
(Image via liesofp_official Instagram)

This cast eschews much of the adolescent power fantasies that have been staples of video game narratives for far too long. This is, instead, a story about adults who are facing their mortality and decide that it is better to carry on in a quest for the sake of future generations. There are discussions about the dangers of optimism, the morality of euthanasia, and the value of perseverance in the face of declining health.

At first glance, Clair Obscur’s gameplay might seem slightly antiquated. Turn-based combat is so out-of-fashion that most flagship titles from AAA studios (such as Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy series) have done away with the whole concept. Clair Obscur’s designers have breathed new life into this mechanic, however, through a combination of balanced options and attention to detail. It’s a turn-based system with real-time dodges and parries that make the action energetic and exciting. This may not be a complete reinvention of the system, but it is a thoughtful implementation of it.

This actually points to one of the aspects of Clair Obscur that is worth celebrating; it is a mid-budget title, something that has become rare in the era of AAA vs indie. French games developer Sandfall Interactive doesn’t have the resources of a gaming titan like Electronic Arts or Sony Interactive — but neither is it a tiny indie studio putting out titles solely via Steam or itch.io. They have the resources to devote to a project like this, and the nimbleness of a smaller studio to take some risks with it. It’s a subsector of games development that has unfortunately become less common in the industry.

The people at Sandfall Interactive seem to really care about the storytelling traditions of RPGs. They created a work that is in conversation with classics of the genre, adding thoughtfully to the canon. We look forward to seeing what Sandfall Interactive does next.

The Nukes Of Hazard

(This is one of two blog posts discussing nuclear war depicted in cinema and television. The other one is about fallout shelter stories in the 2020s and was posted simultaneously.)

With the Cold War in full swing, and fears of nuclear catastrophe looming large, there was a moment in popular culture in which mainstream cinema and television grappled with what impacts an atomic war might really have on humankind.

From the perspective of cinema, the 1980s were the golden age of nuclear war. 

There was a time in the 1980s when nuclear war
felt very present on television screens and theatres.
(Image via New Yorker)

There had of course been movies about atomic warfare prior to the 1980s — Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe to name two — though these had mostly to do with the political decision-makers and military types responsible for launching the weapons. There had been movies set in the decades after such a conflict (A Boy And His Dog or Mad Max as examples), but they mostly didn’t engage with or depict the actual bombs dropping.

Over the course of only a few years, mainstream audiences around the world were inundated with horrifying on-screen attempts to realistically portray a fully nuclear global conflict. Lynne Lyttman directed Testament for PBS in 1983. Within the same month, ABC’s The Day After hit screens. Less than a year later, the BBC offered the bleakest take on the subject with Mick Jackson’s Threads. In 1984, Canada’s CTV made Countdown to Looking Glass, a mock news broadcast showing how a nuclear war would appear to TV viewers. In 1986, Jimmy Murakami offered a small-scale view of nuclear war in his animated film When The Wind Blows. In the Soviet Union in 1986, Konstantin Lopushansky depicted survivors of a nuclear war in the basement of a museum in his film Dead Man’s Letters.

What made this flourishing of nuclear cinema unique was that these are depictions not of how the atomic war might have happened, but about what impact such a catastrophe would have on everyday people — people like those watching the movies.

Prior to the 1980s, the likely and potential consequences of nuclear war had been suppressed by governments. The British Government blocked the distribution of Peter Watkins’ 1966 movie The War Game, in which he tried to accurately depict what atomic warfare would mean for everyday citizens (the movie would not in fact be aired by the BBC until the 1980s). Information, when it was shared at all, focused on the blast and its effects on the immediate vicinity, not on the consequences to the globe and to populations removed from the impact sites. 

With When The Wind Blows, Jimmy Murakami
attempted to show the toll that nuclear war
would have on a pair of senior citizens.
(Image via BBC) 

There were numerous scientific and journalistic reports over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s that completely reshaped how the public imagined nuclear war. The SCOPE report (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment), specifically SCOPE 28, detailed the catastrophic and potentially extinction-level ecological and agricultural environmental consequences of nuclear war. Hugo-winning author Carl Sagan in 1983, brought the concept of nuclear winter (in which global climate is fundamentally altered by dust in the atmosphere) to the public's attention. 

By the end of the decade a combination of factors — the cooling of the Cold War, and increased public awareness of the global effects of such a conflict — nuclear war seemed both less likely, and less survivable. (If nobody survives a conflict, there would be no more stories to tell in its wake.)

In a tangible way, these films are amongst the most important science fiction movies ever made. Then-president Ronald Reagan later said he had watched The Day After, and been inspired to reach out to his Soviet counterpart to begin talks about nuclear disarmament. Threads is credited with turbo-charging the British anti-nuclear campaign. Russian State Broadcaster Первая программа broadcast The Day After in 1987, making the unusual concession to the American director that they would not change a word in their translation. In the subsequent decade, the policy results could be seen: the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991 limited the number of nuclear weapons hoarded by the two superpowers. It was followed by additional limitations in 1994, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996.

The explosion of nuclear war cinema in 1980s film might seem like and odd obsession for younger audiences, but examining them provides a window into the concerns and preoccupations of that time, as well as a warning about the inability of governments to stick to peaceable agreements.

We would suggest that a related explosion of screen storytelling will help audiences decades from now understand who we are in the 2020s.

Bunker Mentality

(This is the second of two blog posts discussing nuclear war depicted in cinema and television. The other one is about a flourishing of Atomic War fiction in the 1980s and was posted simultaneously.)

From Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth (1964) to Jeanne DuPrau’s City of Ember (2003), post-apocalyptic narratives set in bunkers often reflect how humans create, respond to, and survive authoritarian control and the destabilization of shared truths.

Say what you will about the shadowy builders of
Silo 18, they had a flair for brutalist architecture.
(Image via Apple+)

So what does it say about our present moment that there are three major television series all playing with the same trope?

• On the Apple+ TV series Silo, Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) slowly begins to realize that citizens of “Silo 18,” the underground bunker in which she lives, are being deceived and that a shadowy cabal is manipulating the populace. 
• Over on Amazon Prime’s Fallout, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) sets out on a quest to uncover a conspiracy surrounding “Vault 33,” the underground bunker in which she was raised. 
• On Hulu’s Paradise, Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) investigates the mystery surrounding the construction of a post-apocalyptic bunker in which the last vestiges of the American government are now sheltering.

These fictional nuclear bunkers provide a relatively controlled environment for narratives about authoritarian systems of control being replaced by a more egalitarian system. These are stories in which protagonists live in a home that they did not choose, can not control, and from which they (at least in principle) cannot escape. Systems of coercion and control are baked into the very walls by which the citizens are surrounded, because those walls were designed and built at the behest of an unseen elite. Architectural features such as the levels of Silo 18 can be designed to keep one class of citizen separated from another class. Surveillance — either overt or covert — can both enable authoritarian policing and be used as a panopticon that motivates individuals to police themselves. 

Fallout depicts a society that relies on propaganda
and the manipulation of shared notions of history.
(Image via Amazon)

Fundamentally, these are all narratives about a distrust in institutions and in authority — and the hope that they can be overtaken and replaced with something that provides more integrity and more space for hope. The villain in Fallout isn’t the atomic weapons, it’s the shadowy elites who make decisions without regard to the consequences for the masses. This resonates with audiences living in an era of global declines in trust towards institutions, and each other. They can also be about the idea that mere survival isn’t enough, that we need to do better by one another even in the face of catastrophe.

In the modern context, these stories can serve as allegories for climate change. It’s been long observed that climate change affects those on the lower end of the economic spectrum more than it affects the more privileged classes and countries. Consequently, those making decisions at the top do not have as much skin in the game when it comes to dealing with carbon emissions, for example. Essentially, whether the world burns in nuclear fire or is cooked in a runaway greenhouse effect, those at the top of the economic pyramid will be able to hide away in their bunkers and preserve their privileged position. This is the narrative conclusion of Frederick Jamieson’s famous maxim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; the post-apocalyptic bunker story portrays the persistence of capitalism-derived hierarchies when all else is dust.

What makes these stories affecting is not just their dystopian premises, but how plausibly they mirror the realities experienced by today’s viewers. As climate anxiety grows and wealth inequality deepens, the idea that a select few might retreat into secured, climate-controlled sanctuaries while the rest of humanity suffers outside doesn’t feel like science fiction. Rather, it feels like a logical extension of gated communities and private police forces.

In Paradise, the connection between bunker and
gated community is made fairly explicit.
(Image via Hulu. 

You don’t have to look hard to find real-world parallels: from billionaire bunkers in New Zealand to Silicon Valley doomsday preppers investing in underground shelters, the fantasy of survival for the elite is already in motion. The bunker trope is a narrative reflection of this quiet but chilling shift in priorities for the privileged classes. Elon Musk’s pipe dream fantasies of building underground slave colonies on an uninhabitable planet seem strangely benign and kind when compared to the prepper billionaires preparing for the depopulation of our current planet.

Fundamentally however, the current crop of bunker-mentality television shows reflect a world where escape is privatized and survival is monetized. Perhaps audiences turn to these shows for a glimmer of hope, since they all seem to argue that those in power can not perpetually escape the consequences of their decisions.