Part Six: Day of the Triffids: Apocalypse genes

Can we see a future, a couple of generations from now perhaps, where the supersized male stature, not only for heatlh insurance reasons but for sheer unfair advantage and violent aggression, bred out.
A kind of Eloi population but really, there wont be a Morlocks!

I mean, there is a class of people who empower Despots by accepting for one and for all, the rule of fear. Iraqi's perhaps?

But then I look at my own fear...the Nuclear war was scary growing up.

So, the post apocalyptic theme is scattered through out the reading. This is a good theme. So, its like German: Okay, you keep talking about this literacy thing. We give up, what is this literacy thing you keep talking about?"
And the Roman providing a very well edited book. Classically trained editing applied.

Classic Apocalyptic stuff, very Germanic in temperament! Interesting accidents of History could be a sub title, but what I am getting at is actually the first adult novel I ever read: The Day of the Triffids.

I read it twice, struggling the first time. But that was hardly the last Apocalyptic book I read, and I was not aware of Revelations until in High School.
Other books I read, after Triffids, were The Sentinel, (yes the Horror novel) and more significantly, A Wizard of Earthsea (freaky stuff for a 5th grader).

What is similarly an accident of History is these Stone Age people still hurling structures into the sky with beyond human imagination, and figuring out the Cosmos clock. Of all the precocious acheivements, such as Gravity, etc. is the Mayans, a stone age people even still in the earliest development of literature figuring out the galactic rotation.

They didn't have the image but they had the program.

Triffids is monstrous, not demonic, though, the blinding comet has the dimension of Apocalyptic space phenomenon. Even in the-all-grown-up-with-mythology/sci fi thinkers are strongly fueled by the imagination. Especially of the Global Apocalypse.
So its not hard to ferry out, into the political theater, a show for the rest of the world.

Regardless of the apocalypse of current World politics, we can guess that most of the problems come from the long practice of breeding soldiers.
Or, even, a hysterical class, whose material existence, regardless of its luxury, renders a reaction. To the unfairness of biology.
Unfairness in biology is not hard to see as pretty deeply wired. Could be genetic.

In regard to my own Geneology, I am from the Warrior class, from a name bred that way over generations, and noted in many scrolls of battle. I have exceptional size, speed and reflexes.

Knowing this came into a reflection about War in general, presented in the Media and in these books, as an Anti-War sentiment. But its also reflected in Women, perhaps having, statistically, a far greater likelihood of dying by Men, than Drowning or other accidents.

The necessity, and of course, the vanity many women would seek in the Warrior man, was custom for a world without bounderies.
Since the Globe became quantifiable (soon we will have the accurate inventory of all the minerals, all the Petroleum, all the Methane, all the biomass, the centuries left of total farming potential, etc.) hurling beef at the other oncoming invaders is useless.
This was even lost in what I think is the better male form: smaller than five ten and well knit. These guys have easier lives later, for their bones and shape are not so ravaged and altered by gravity, as the nearly ubiquitous knee braced "giants".
Colonialism really does well with Pastorialists. As well does a milk and meat diet while riding horses.

So, the colonial world needs to slowly be worked out of the gene pool, or, rather than genetically engineering them away, the violent, narcissistic, "beautiful", breeders can be enabled as space farers.

That is more likely...that a significant drain of that overbearing Mad Violence from Males as many of them take to exploring space.

I was deeply affected by the Cultural left, these novels that are not Apocalyptic (and forming another genre) but, ala, Wolfe, Kesey, Kerouac...a kind of drum of final peace.

Dick belongs to this generation, but he is more in the Apocalyptic author. Probably the most relevant was the 1964 JG Ballard Novel "The Drowned World." Yet, I read that long after playing Gamma World, and reading a variety of other apocalyptic stories and movies, including The Road Warrior, Dawn of the Dead, some of Revelations, Lucifer's Hammer...well, among the novels it is nearly everywhere...including Lewis and Tolkien.

No, the first I read was Day of the Triffids, something published in the early fifties and lo and behold, until Goodreads, no one having also read it around me in the mid-seventies.

Where I grew up, a child would eventually ask "Why are there sirens every Saturday?" Always at noon, but this is before a child had fixed a time of the day to a word. Even before it was explained they were Nuclear War sirens that were keep running every Saturday to keep people on their toes, no...but they were garbled, yet Apocalyptically fearful explanations in the impossible magically configured world of Kindergarten and early elementary school. Kids explaining the universe to other kids.

But there were movies and assassinations to hear about in the news. The president was bad. One wonders how a Despotism would react? Still, this Nation aint perfect, but it can coast for awhile on getting things right early on, when the clock had to be reset (at the real source of industrial equality...the invention of handguns. Better knit and having less space to transit to raise the gun gives 'the smaller guy' another advantage).

So, Triffids is quite contrived: there is a vague threat at the edge of consciousness, and the edge of consciousness as read by a fourth grader was even more of an edge of consciousness. Something about floating nuclear platforms...escaped Soviet plant experiments.
Nor was the contrivance noticeable. The point was the world was reset to Warrior level. This I got as a boy: gunfights, swordfights, that kind of play came early. So, Warrior level was relatable...one got into a fight and won, and that was the whole of responsibility.
Yet, Wyndham has no Warrior, just a guy lucky enough. And other lucky enough. The image of a world of blind people was accessable.

This, in comparison to the hardly as believalbe but just as scary next-novel-read; The Sentinel. It was also a bad seventies movie shot similar to Death Wish.
But second, really, was Day of the Triffids, in the uses of fear novelists use, than LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.

The drumbeat of the Apocalyptic genre continued, well, we can see to now. Hence my enjoyment of not quite satirical enough Z-nation.
Which I think is a good sign. If a culture can mock and satirize the very ingrained themes of the Apocalypse, a theme that best appeals to hysterics...and fatally so, the hordes of hysterical males, bred, most likely, over the centuries, for the purposes of an army capable of defense, at least.
This Defensive Male all too easily switched into the Offensive male, and down we go into the Rabbit Hole of centuries of feminine oppression.
By THOSE GUYS. Germans seemed to have enabled a greater feminine power in their culture, perhaps due to a long standing willful rejection of "patriarchal literature", you know, whatever those scratchings are in those "Romans", and alongside this abrasion, develop a stable value in which the feminine was allowed to keep land and participate in government.

Its far easier to create an elite when you are ruthlessly exclusive: and a Warrior elite are going to dominate best.

But the value of free expression might be a trait not inherently German (while a Apocalyptic vision a Achilles Heel), but an accident of late coming to a smorgaboard of varying views and alphabets. (German: Might as well adopt the one most in use near the homeland, rather than those strange one Hermann yets seems to be able to read).

The Apocalypse always seems more an inhabitant of magical thinking. But it bleeds easy into the pragmatic, speculation wise. Still, it never arrives. Most like a Zombie, a symbol of lifelessness that worries the pragmatic, suggests the atavism of a return to the pre industrial pragmatic, and allows easy targets for a Warrior mind to find a virtual release.

One looks up to Triffids, as an adult or a child. This is the most visceral effect in the images of the story...the whip having a association (how complex is a childs set of associations?) with punishment, always, and so there is a sense of the Judgment of God, which is the innovation of Revelations into the Ragnarok.