Instructions:
1. Read the following article and clarify new words
2. Write out the meanings of the bold and underlined words
3. Write a summary of each subsection of the article
4. Follow the link at the bottom of the article, download and listen to an audio interview with the author
Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam
COLLEEN KEANE
March 12, 2012
Things We Didn’t See Comingis a rare example of an Australian dystopian novel. Yet the setting is generalised, not overtly Australian, or even familiar. Places are not specific and place names never mentioned and this consolidates the allegorical depiction and the very broad implications of this complicated and intriguing novel.
As a subset of science fiction, dystopian novels — the opposite of utopian fiction — often emerge at times of social and cultural pressure, when uncertainty dominates onmany levels. George Orwell wrote1984in 1948, as the Cold War was setting in. Margaret Atwood publishedThe Handmaid’s Talein 1985, when second-wave feminism was asking hard questions and nuclear war seemed possible. Steven Amsterdam’s celebrated novel anticipates, or at least imagines, major environmental breakdown, and traces the impact on life as we know it and on the parameters of individual behaviour. Dystopias serve as cautionary tales, warnings about what might happen if we don’t review things now and act.
In the ‘‘real world’’ and in most current scientific research it is projected that without major action todecrease carbon emissions dramatically, there are a limited number of years before global warming — already irreversible — has disastrous consequences.As such, this novel may be a dystopian tale of the near future, of a seriously depleted world, both in terms of resources and the human spirit. Apocalyptic thinking and survivalism form the bases of many people’s thinking already.
The realistic imagining of possible future scenarios inThings We Didn’t See Comingis quite different from the usual fantasy elements in science fiction, and in this sense Amsterdam has influenced the genre and created a new category, or at least given it a new inflection. Cormac McCarthy’sThe Roadis another example, but by comparison the imagined impact of the struggle to survive in Amsterdam’s novel demonstrates a greater range of practical and psychological implications and action, both individual and communal, than does the more symbolic and biblically influenced style ofThe Road.
MAJOR THEMES
Resourcefulness
In the profoundly challenging situation of extreme breakdown most things are up for grabs, figuratively and literally: ‘‘I’m sure that whatever you got up to at that time would qualify you as, at the very least, ‘resourceful’. Am I wrong?’’ (146).
So the official tells the narrator in The Profit Motive, as the New Nation order starts to be implemented and new roles emerge and take shape. Resourcefulness is the essential theme of Amsterdam’s novel, and realistic projection and practical detail are at the core of his enterprise. In the context of survivalism, it is the foundation of the central themes.
There is a loose and shifting general narrative and a narrator who tells diverse stories and presents compelling experiences in the first person, and nine stories that comprise the structure of the unconventional novel.The detailed first-person narration creates intense immediacy and visceral closeness to the often confronting action and experience. We aren’t always clear who’s who, and only by memory, evocation and inference do we glimpse the connections between the different strands of the over-arching narrative. Time sequences overlap and readers are propelled back and forth across this elliptical play with time. Only gradually do we trace everything back to the young boy in the first story — and the Millennium bug as an early warning of what may come. He is the crux and the narrator, emerging more explicitly at different intervals and time periods in the survival tale.
Characters’ paths intersect briefly, as other angles and dimensions unfold. Examples are numerous, such as the ailing narrator driving young Jeph in Predisposed and passing by the mother and daughter, Liz and Jenna, of Dry Land, before he dumps his ward anddramatically chooses himself and his own health.
Agency/Opportunism
Resourcefulness, like many qualities that the narrator’s voice and activities demonstrate, has a dual, or split, potential. It is not straightforward but ambivalent. The grandparents make active choices at the end of their days, use their last chance to do something on their own terms. But it is a sad sort of agency born of desperation.
Agency and resourcefulness have a flipside of opportunism, evident everywhere after the Barricade goes up to protect the city and keep out infection. Yet the countryside and ‘‘higher ground’’ — in both senses of the term — is where survival has a greater chance with food cultivation, bartering and hunting and gathering — a return to more primitive and reliable, traditional modes. Vast numbers flee to the forest and focus on getting undercut by black humour at times, with Shane stuck in a tree in Cakewalk, in frozen horror, as the ever-resourceful Margo scouts.
Cynicism is also in full view in the stories. The tone is mostly dry and cool as ordinary moral expectations break down and the bottom line becomes the norm. The Theft That Got Me Here prefigures later The Profit Motive. Opportunism accompanies a polymorphous sense of broken boundaries in The Forest for the Trees. Exploitation is an ever-present temptation in the survival struggle for self and, inconsistently, community. In The Forest for the Trees, abuse of power and the defiance of rules and boundaries leads to actual and symbolic conflagration.
Ambivalence uncovers both the positives and negatives of experience, as well as motivation and action. Behaviour choices and honour become a rare but ghostly backdrop and critique. Choice is always present, but usually motivated by blind self-interest. Contagion and infection are both real and symbolic, denoting the contamination of environmental and behavioural decline. Disease and dysfunction dominate the narrative — and actual — drive in Predisposed.
Trust
Trust is absent, hard-won or deluded, because everyone wants to survive and acts strategically to benefit themselves — in the post-apocalyptic reality a variation on ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ would be survival of the smartest. Commitment is uncommon in the struggle; commitment is primarily to the self. The narrator in Uses For Vinegar is lulled by his old flame, Margo, into betraying Shane.
Common humanity, caring and support are difficult to locate amid the chaos. Authorities and government officials take charge, reinstall order and implement rules, but solutions are regimented and soulless, and undercut by mercenary motives. When security can no longer be taken for granted on any level, the need to feel more secure promotes all kinds of self-interested behaviour. Theft is the most obvious, as everyone scrambles to get whatever goods and supplies they can scrounge, steal or scavenge, especially in the blighted city.
In the second last story, The Profit Motive, the cynicism of the narrator seeking a role is on view, as he plays the required games and passes the technical test, somewhat like a lie detector in the form of a full-body scan.But his loss is exposed as well — he can reclaim his possessions, his valuable watch, but no longer knows how to empathise and must force himself to be civil and sympathetic because it no longer comes naturally.
Interdependence
Despite the complex shifts within his text, there is a distinct forward movement in the series of stories connected by the global scenario of breakdown and survival.
But the narrative revisits a core group of characters, as key signs become clearer, and the experience of the boy in the opening story is slowly revealed across a span of 30 years. The overlapping situations come full circle from the father-son interaction at the time of initial panic in What We Know Now to their reunion in the morbid but hopeful setting of the father’s sad little paradise in Best Medicine.
Interdependence has mixed dimensions. Contact leads to contagion and infection, and to polymorphous sexual connection and the breaking of boundaries and taboos. But some loyalties to self in community must and do endure.
What we know now is that the Millennium bug and the accompanying fears and over-preparation did not lead to the collapse ofsupport systems for life as we know it. But the cautionary features of Amsterdam’s novel are explicit amid the terror and trauma. The knife-edge is now. It isn’t too late to avoid the breakdown of the planet and society, and regeneration may be possible if action is swift and informed by communal values and a sense of common humanity, integrity and the interdependent nature of survival.
Things We Didn’t See Cominguses a structure of shifting and interweaving stories, time frames and angles as a futuristic allegory of survival and adaptation. It dramatises human drive and continuity, in both its best and worst expressions.
Following the following link and download the audio to hear an interview with the author:
Radio National Book Show author interview (download)
abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/steven-amsterdam-on-things-we-didnt-see-coming/3145866