“If there is something more frightening than a distoppical novel about the future, it is a distople novel about the future that was written in the past and that it has already begun to come true.”
The phrase of Gloria Steinem in the prologue of the Parable of the Eighth Seeder E. Butler (Captain Swing) is the most relevant in this post-Covid world in which we are still looking for a sense and an end that may not exist.
The prophetic capacity of Dean R. Koontz, which anticipated the pandemic in the eyes of darkness (1981), is just an example of the power of fiction to raise such credible futures that they end up being real.
In its role of Augures, writers and scriptwriters have the ability to enlighten, challenge or deconstruct our pandemic present.
This is demonstrated by series and books as an eleven station, Anna or Maddaddam, the closure of the homonymous trilogy of Margaret Atwood.
In all these oblique looks at our present written years before the Covid, the cause of different types of Distópical Futures is a pandemic!
«Survival is not enough» is the explicit slogan eleven, the HBO Max series based on Emily St. John Mandel’s novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was the finalist of the National Book Award in 2015. It’s so much
Thus, what book and series renounce the already classic account of repeated survivors up to the zombie nausea by The Walking Dead and the like.
The narrative is not free of drama, but a warm humanistic breath welcomes the viewer / reader from the first compasses of this history of hope and redemption.
Behind that feeling of tenderness, melancholy and, at times, comedy that crosses the series is Patrick Sommerville.
The person in charge of The Leftovers, Maniac and this exemplary adaptation in Fondo and Form, narrates with the help of directors such as Hiro Murai or Jeremy Podeswa the vicissitudes of a group of characters interconnected with each other before and after the pandemic cataclysm.
The end clock of the world has not yet given the last hour, and the scarce survivors have had to learn to look for themselves in a world without technology, grouped into small communities such as traveler symphony.
This itinerant group of actors and musicians is dedicated to spinning tirelessly through the area of the Great Lakes, in the heart of the United States, representing works by Shakespeare as if they were life in it.
And, in some way, this is: comedians are a last redoubt of vitalism.
Ultimately, Eleven Station is not there if not a reflection, at times enigmatic, at times moving, about what gives true sense to human lives, what we would choose to save if we lose everything.
For its part, the Anna miniseries, a Franco-Italian co-production available since December in Disney +, part of a disturbing approach: a virus called “La Roja”, by the spots on the skin of whoever contracts, has finished with all adults
.
The disease is latent in children until they reach adolescence, so chaos has seized what are no longer more than the decadent ruins of the recent past.
Niccolò Ammaniti, Director of the 2015 Book Series and Author on which it is based, converts the imposing Sicilian landscapes into which the story takes place in a country of the nightmares seen from the point of view of a child: a mixture of carnival
, Delirium dream and garbage.
At times, Ammaniti recreates in a realistic and macabre violence, more unpleasant even when dealing with truncated innocence.
But sometimes he is also allowed by the tradition of the fantastic in Italian cinema.
Anna sometimes seems in the Lord of the flies passed by Fellini and Sorrentino.
Few can talk about fulfilled prophecies and distopies with the authority of Margaret Atwood.
The author of the tale of the maid still does not have all the work of her available in Spanish, a lagoon that Salamandra editions intends to correct with the publication of Trilogy Maddaddam.
The homonymous, third and last part of this satire in an ecological key, continues the narrated in Oryx and Crake and the year of the Flood, set in an apocalyptic world that explores the social implications of biocience and extrapolated the horrors of our current trajectory
environmental
Atwood already knew in 2003, when the first installment was published, which we were direct towards the disaster, without a flywheel and straight, and hence is fun and scattered speculative in which there is also room for affection.
It is likely that, as has happened with Utopia, the new television adaptation of Stephen King apocalypse or the version of Y: the last man, Eleven station, Anna and Maddaddam are victims of pandemic fatigue.
Will be an error.
Since we started this trip with an appointment, put the brooch with another, atwood harvest: “People need stories because by very dark it is, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent emptiness.”
