• 1 Le Guin, Ursula K., “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” The Found and the Lost (New Y (...)

I shall make my report as if I told a story, this having been the tradition for some time now.¹

• 2 Although Gaiman has had both critical and popular success in America and Great Britain, his books h (...)

1“Collapse.”
When we started working on this issue of Caliban, a year before anyone had ever used the word “covid,” I only knew Dr. Cyril Camus as an expert on Neil Gaiman,² and our idea of putting together a series of articles on the fantastic arts was no more concrete than that. As we waited for our galettes in one of the restaurants of the Rue du Taur, he dropped one word.

• 3 “It is the cumulation of all these crises [ecological, economic and political] which can lead to th (...)
• 4 Asimov, Isaac, Foundation (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 233.

2“Collapse.”
Two men discussing literature while eating gourmet food within walking distance of several ancient monuments and museums, too young to have lived through the last war—what did we know of collapse? We knew we were lucky and we knew the comfort and the beauty around us were not to be taken for granted, that much we knew. Thus it was decided that this issue of Caliban would deal with one of the greatest challenges of our time, the proteiform crisis made up of growing social inequalities, massive environmental destruction, dwindling resources and climate changes threatening to swallow our civilisational achievements³—in short, what any self-respecting science fiction reader would call a “Seldon Crisis,” after Asimov’s masterpiece Foundation.⁴

• 5 The common overarching term is “comics,” with “graphic novels” and “comic books” being two differen (...)

3I propose here to highlight the different ways in which, beyond the aesthetic aspects, the writers who contributed to this issue dealt with the political components of our topic. However, I would also like to complete their fascinating work by shedding some light on two semiotic forms that, despite our best efforts, did not end up being included here: comics⁵ and games. Finally I’ll focus on the implications of the various artistic modes used to think about collapse.

• 6 Miéville, China, “Afterword: Cognition as Ideology,” Red Planets—Marxism and Science Fiction, eds. (...)
• 7 As much is true of the works studied here as of other classics such as C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the W (...)
• 8 Alter, Charlotte, Suyin Haynes, Justin Worland, “Greta Thunberg: Time’s Person of the Year 2019,” T (...)
• 9 Indeed, and though it is a useful tool to understand an environmental evolution spanning centuries, (...)
• 10 Steffen, Will, Paul Crutzen, Jacques Grinevald, John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and His (...)

4Far from shying away from present-day concerns and politics by an over-zealous attention to the text itself, the essayists we have selected all embrace “a necessary theoretical engagement with the fact that the text does not exist in an a-sociological vacuum.”⁶ Not surprisingly, almost half the articles contained in this issue deal more or less directly with environmental concerns, which Claire Perrin highlights as inherently political in its nature and even pedagogical in its function (“Apocalyptisme ou collapsologie ? L’effondrement dans la cli-fi”). Paradoxically enough, though the armchair world is dealing with global warming, the predominant metaphor for climate-related collapse is that of winter, the central motif of two of the articles included here in the chapter on climate fiction.⁷ One should be careful not to hastily categorise those as a mere trend of the turn of the century. Previous to the current health crisis, an omnipresent but mild form of global ecological awareness had indeed found its place in contemporary public discourse, climaxing with the crowning of Greta Thunberg as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019.⁸ Yet we are reminded that fantasy literature has long been used to tackle those issues, through both articles on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the attention they pay to the motif of the endangered tree. Far from being surprising, there is a compelling logic to the existence of what could naively be seen as early or proto-ecology, since an environmental crisis on this scale cannot unfold overnight. Though the concept of the Anthropocene is not universally accepted,⁹ it underlines two key elements: the role of human activity on environmental changes and the larger scale (both in terms of time and space) of these changes,¹⁰ and it is the latter which explains the keen ecological awareness of Tolkien’s books.

• 11 Romero, George, Dawn of the Dead (Pittsburgh: Laura Group, 1978).
• 12 Brooks, Max, World War Z. An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2013). (...)

5However, the political implications studied in the articles of Dynamics of Collapse go further and reveal a wide array of opinions. Thus, zombie fiction is the second most covered topic in this issue, with two articles (three, if one includes the White Walkers of A Song of Ice and Fire, which one should). Beyond the matter of responsibility for a worldwide pandemic and the failure to contain it, zombies are often identified as revealing anxieties related to our capitalist way of life, whether as a satire of mindless consumption as in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead,¹¹ or as the proletarian Multitude as in Brooks’s World War Z.¹² Whereas Thomas Michaud warns against extrapolating and draws a parallel between collapsology and conspiracy theories (“Le zombie dans World War Z, métaphore d’une pandémie globale”), Alice Ray emphasises the potential for social justice in collapse, as depicted satirically in Z Nation (“La satire du zombie : Z Nation ou l’effondrement comme critique de nos sociétés capitalistes”). Above and beyond anxieties towards a loss of comfort—not to mention culture and life support—such considerations reveal an awareness that collapse is never abstract but rather the collapse of a specific society: white, male and capitalist in Z Nation, or pre-Christian and matriarchal in The Mists of Avalon—the study of which leads Manon Berthier to wish for the collapse of the subsequent civilisation (“Effondrement ou ensevelissement : les modalités d’une logique conservatrice dans The Mists of Avalon”).

• 13 It would be closer to the truth to say that we received very few propositions on the subject and th (...)
• 14 Kirkman, Robert, The Walking Dead (Portland: Image Comics, 2003-2019).
• 15 Darabont, Frank, The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010-present). See also the spin-off series: Kirkman, Rober (...)
• 16 Jones, Cory, Larry Renac, The Walking Dead Board Game (Lake Forest: Cryptozoic Entertainment, 2011)
• 17 The Walking Dead (Malibu: Telltale Games, 2012), video game.
• 18 It should be noted that comics are only seldom the work of a single person. In big companies, they (...)
• 19 Bruno Faidutti raises the question whether “the illustrator must be considered a co-designer of the (...)

7Obviously both have been around for quite a while, and this is not the place for a brief history of these, nor do I intend to lose myself in a fruitless rant about “highbrow” and “lowbrow” or “classical culture” versus “pop culture.” The simple fact, however, is that although both editors—Cyril Camus and myself—hoped to see these artistic forms included, we could not get a single article on the subject.¹³ Ironically, both semiotic modes have been heavily influenced by the motif of collapse, especially in the form of its post-apocalyptic subset. In this respect, the work of Robert Kirkman has had a huge impact on the field—on both fields, actually. His series of graphic novels, The Walking Dead,¹⁴ depicting the tribulations of a group of survivors in a zombie apocalypse was genre-defining and spawned a number of adaptations across semiotic modes: a TV series and its spin-off,¹⁵ as well as franchised games, whether tabletop¹⁶ or digital.¹⁷ Apart from an obvious trope, that could be roughly tagged zombie post-apocalypse survival, those have in common intrinsically intersemiotic modes, that is to say they rely on visual as much as verbal art. Moreover, and it could be said, as a consequence, they are a collective creation: comics typically include two people,¹⁸ likewise most board games involve at least a game designer and an illustrator,¹⁹ whereas video games and TV series rely on the collaboration with a whole crew. A proper study of all these being far beyond the scope of a postface, I would like to focus on what seems to me the least known of these art forms: tabletop games.

• 20 It does mean that I think boardgames, card games and pen-and-paper role-playing games should be inc (...)
• 21 “Out of ten games sold in France, six are made in Asia”. Uncredited, “Des jeux de société respectue (...)
• 22 According to Kickstarter’s statistics page, $1.11 billion have been collected for games on their pl (...)
• 23 Guillois, François-Xavier, “L’ultime jeu post-apocalyptique,” Ludovox, 10 Oct. 2019, accessed 25 Fe (...)

8By labelling the category “tabletop games,” I mean to underline what seems to me to be a fundamental division between, on the one hand, games played on a computer, which rely on a technological and industrial system for their creation as well as for being played, and games played in a social group, sharing the same space and time,²⁰ and whose creation depends on what amounts to craft—even though the actual production of the final object, as often as not, happens in a factory in Asia.²¹ Or to put it simply, a distinction between games that would survive a collapse of the techno-industrial civilisation, and those that would not. As a matter of fact, the gaming community is keenly aware of the strain on the environment caused by the production of boardgames in a globalised economy. This is partly due to the huge development of crowdfunding,²² which turns the consumer into a co-producer, but mostly to the work of editorialists who underline the contradictions between the ecological theme of some games and their means of production.²³

• 24 For Bruno Faidutti, history Ph.D. and author of many successful games, boardgames “always tell two (...)
• 25 I do not mean that games should be used as education rather than entertainment. In the same way as (...)
• 26 Aquino, Maryline “Shanouillette,” “Les grandes tendances de la décennie [2010-2019],” Ludovox, 23 J (...)
• 27 Gilmour, Jonathan, Isaac Vega, David Richards, Fernada Súarez, Peter Wocken, Dead of Winter—A Cross (...)
• 28 For instance, the card “Missing Child” offers to go and look for the eponymous helpless survivor (a (...)
• 29 “A sequence of decisions is made, although the process may terminate before all potential decisions (...)
• 30 In the first scenario, Asylum, Location 15-C presents the players with a choice, whether to take pa (...)
• 31 As the enemy is defeated, his parting speech opens new interpretative possibilities: “The only way (...)
• 32 The legitimacy of the Agency (and in a way, of the game frame itself) becomes the main stake of the (...)
• 33 Ursula K. Le Guin refers to utopia/dystopia of control as utopiyang and to the anarchy counterpart (...)

9Apart from socio-economic considerations on the context of production, and the themes of games, the game mechanics themselves are worthy of interest. Whereas the theme is the story told by the game, the mechanics are going to influence the story experienced by the players,²⁴ which, if indeed people can be changed by art and/or games, should be the more effective way to do so.²⁵ In this respect, it could be argued that the very essence of the game is a movement towards growth, a building process and thus totally unfit for the representation of collapse. Two factors should allow us to nuance this argument. First and foremost, storytelling, a traditional and key component of role-playing games, has become in recent years a major trend in board games as well,²⁶ bringing the theme from the background to the front. In Dead of Winter—A Crossroads Game,²⁷ it is storytelling that turns game decisions about resource management into moral dilemmas about the (im-)possibility of ethics in a context of survival and immediate danger. It is important to stress that, in this case, there are no obvious game penalties for victory-driven choices and that it would be possible (but much less interesting) for the players to make those decisions purely in abstract terms.²⁸ Some games emphasise storytelling even further, such as T.I.M.E. Stories, which borrows some aspects from role-playing games, namely players’ reactions to a scenario, designed here as a complex but sometimes rigid decision tree²⁹ handled through a deck of cards. The first instalment in the series, Asylum, gives the opportunity to fail willingly³⁰ (as opposed to failure through lack of time or a bad dice roll), a device which is developed further in A Prophecy of Dragons since in the latter, refusing to fail the mission results in the complete collapse of the fantastic-medieval society depicted. Thus collapse is a direct consequence of a choice presented in moral terms. Indeed, the game itself, as a mix of adventure, exploration and puzzle, is over, but its outcome depends on the players’ choice to accomplish a mission given by an arbitrary authority which is trusted implicitly (viz. the agency serving both as frame and background for the game) or to save a foreign world by refusing to complete the mission.³¹ Therefore, the emphasis is put on individual responsibility as opposed to blindly following authority,³² which echoes traditional themes of collapse leading to dystopia of control (and totalitarian dystopia in general).³³

• 34 In a “legacy” game, the rules and the components (board, cards…) evolve from one session to another (...)

10Moreover, in combination with appropriate storytelling and theme, resource management can be used to represent collapse in games. Thus, Pandemic Legacy—Season 2³⁴ takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, in which only the Atlantic and the Mediterranean shores are known to the players at the beginning of the campaign. As such, the setting is a great illustration of a collapsed world, however, part of the game consists in reconnecting lost cities to the main network, which could lead to the opposite experience (building and growing), if it weren’t for game mechanics. As a matter of fact, the allotted resources go scarcer throughout the campaign and there are just not enough to sustain the whole world. Consequently, and in perfect keeping with the theme, the players are made to experience a collapsing world, as they are faced with the choice of which cities to forsake.

• 35 Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New (...)
• 36 Miéville, “Afterword: Cognition as Ideology,” 236.
• 37 Joanna Russ, “Towards an Aesthetics of Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 2.2 (1975): 112.
• 38 Stableford, Brian M, David Langford, “Galactic Empires,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, eds. (...)
• 39 Let us note, however, that ecology as a concern is ostentatiously absent from Foundation, the novel (...)
• 40 Frémaux, Anne, La Nécessité d’une écologie radicale — La pensée à l’épreuve des problèmes environne (...)
• 41 Suvin, Metamorphoses, 69.
• 42 “It is to this growth of power that the so-called freedom due to Technique amounts.” Ellul, Jacques (...)

12If, as Suvin theorised, science fiction is characterised by the fruitful interaction of estrangement and cognition³⁵—or, rather, as Miéville points out, of estrangement and a “cognitive effect”³⁶—then it ensues that science fiction is the perfect mode to envision rationally (or at least, meta-rationally) the collapse of our society. Thus, as has been shown in the articles of this issue, when the text draws on science fiction it delivers a warning which derives “rigorously and systematically, from science.”³⁷ For instance, though on the surface, Asimov’s novum in Foundation, “psychohistory,” is science fictional, the political, social and economic forces described are mainly historical. Indeed, his drawing on “the analytical historical perspective of such works as [Gibbon’s] The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,”³⁸ underlines the cognitive and rational possibility of any civilisation’s collapse.³⁹ In this respect, the very essence of SF states not only the historic possibility of collapse but its ultimate fact through the laws of entropy, challenging in the process the capitalist myth of unlimited growth and its irrational denial of “the physical limits to an infinite increase of production.”⁴⁰ On the other hand, the meta-rational approach of fantasy implies a different relation with collapse, one tainted at times with fear and often with nostalgia, as has been stressed in the articles on Tolkien and Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example. While these feelings are denounced by Suvin as a “proto-fascist aversion against modern civilisation, materialist rationalism, and such,”⁴¹ we must consider them as a reaction against the very causes of a possible collapse of our civilisation, namely the technician system developed since the industrial revolution in service of capitalist materialism.⁴² Thus, fantasy has the potential for creating subversive world frames that envision collapse to warn us not so much about a time-specific danger as about its hybristic causes.

• 43 Oddly enough, the debate about the potential use of the health crisis to build a better, greener, f (...)

13Between the preparation of this project and its publication, the world has weathered a pandemic whose many-faceted consequences are far from over. It has triggered a worldwide fear of collapse, with manifestations both absurd and tragic, as well as the expression of hope for a better “world after tomorrow.”⁴³ It is our wish that reading this issue—and the fiction cited—will help you make better sense of both fear and hope, of both the present and the future.