orthogeeks

I have always found intriguing post-apocalyptic worlds, because they are a very unique kind of fantasy. Specifically, during the past century they were in some way the chief fantasy; the chief myth. In the same way the ancient Chinese believed in the Golden Age, people were certain that post-apocalytia was possible and perhaps inevitable. If the nuclear weapon is one of the gods in the pantheon of the modern, then post-apocalyptia is his myth. It seems that in working hard to de-mythologize the past, we’ve succeeded only in mythologizing the future. If ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ is not a vision of this very thing, then there is hardly cause to speak of it.

Enter Fallout. It is certain that Fallout is serious story; it’s not a comedy. But yet, at the same time, there is much that is intentionally absurd about it. And maybe this is purposeful; if you take a lot of the conventions of modern cinema, pulp fiction, television and video games seriously, what results is quite delightfully absurd.

Fallout bills itself as fantasy; which is what Post-apocalytic literature is. (There are probably some real exceptions, though.) But yet it does not have the same kind of forced feel of most modern fantasy, which tries to unironically ape Tolkein, Lewis and MacDonald. What is good among it is still good, no doubt, but it lacks the same qualities that Lord of the Rings has. At least in my day when we played D & D we did because it gave us a chance to feel like we were in a Tolkien story. (And perhaps this is why spin-offs are less successful; D&D IS Tolkien; most other settings are recycled Tolkien.)

I think Fallout succeeds where some others fail because it firstly does not try to be *too* realistic; it ignores scientific facts such as the real rate at which fallout radiation disperses (for instance.) It also does not take itself so seriously; most of the games in the series are full of dark humor, and ‘break the fourth wall’ (itself a convention.) When doing a bit of genre research, I was looking at Aristotle’s Poetics and found an interesting point. Aristotle, speaking of certain artists, says that some will do the comic (people who are ridiculous and clownish; and are ‘worse’ than us) some will do the heroic (people who are virtuous and ‘better’ than us) and some will do people that are very much like us. In Fallout, there is a conscious effort to include all of these types of people, evil and good clowns, heroes and villains, and people that seem like you might know them. Liars who nonetheless tell the truth, good-hearted and misguided people who do evil, and so on.

And not to forget the monsters; ghouls, super-mutants, robots, aliens and all manners of mutated giant creatures. It is a fantasy of course, because these things that we saw in old pictures and movies that were hokey, and read in old books are real in this world, and as horrifying as they ought to have been. Fallout 3, with the 3-d perspective really seals the deal for a lot of these creatures (especially the giant scorpions and ghouls) the way the earlier games did not quite do. Of course, to have a world with all of these things in it, makes that world quite fantastic, even if we could scientifically and historically explain why they’re all around.

And in this sense, Fallout is a modern faerie tale; When in the third game you run into the ‘fire ants’ (literally, giant ants that breathe fire) and get the back-story behind how they came to be you get a George MacDonald sense of the way science is treated in the series. You remember Chesterton saying, ‘It is logical that a Father has a Son, but it is incidental that apples grow on trees rather than gooses.’ In Fallout, gooses grow on trees. They may be a result of faerie magic, the whims of the powers that be, or in this case, an unlikely and uncontrollable event provoked by the research of a scientist who only half knows what he’s doing. Nonetheless, the geese remain. You laugh at the idea of fire ants and the frightened little boy who heralds their coming; but you aren’t laughing later on, when your world is fire and you are running from five ants the size of ponies.

But nonetheless, there is a real story going on, this is not just a paper plot wrapped around a special-effects display. Like in Firefly, the dramatic, epic and lyric find themselves expressed in the progression of the plot in this intentionally absurd – and yet strangely real – world. Maybe we all live in worlds as absurd as Fallout, but we like to pretend otherwise because we’re educated.

One of the most important metaphors in the game is the Wasteland itself; and maybe the subtlety to the metaphor, to the allegory if you will, is what is missed by some reviewers. Fallout does not really represent the future; as any good fiction concept it represents a vision of the world as it is, even if all of the things find themselves wearing masks in this particular play. I strongly believe that the Wasteland is a representation of the actual state of the World, and that the ‘Fallout’ (the fall if you will) is merely the means of its revelation in literal terms. Sometimes we’re struck that despite how bizarre the things are that happen in the stories, we knew or have known people (maybe ourselves) who may have done those things if the stricture of civilization had not prevented us.

And in representing the ‘world’, Fallout often serves as a metaphor for man himself. What if civilization were restored, however? It seems that it is never possible on a large scale in the world anymore; and most who claim to be creating order (other than the Brotherhood of Steel, who mostly defend innocents, collect technology and kill monstrosities) are actually tyrants and monsters themselves.

There is another level where we might think of Fallout’s world as the ‘fall’ from traditional society; the Vaults (where people kept themselves from the destruction) represent a kind of ‘ersatz’ continuation of civilization. For the modern person, there is no ‘continuation’ of tradition in the cities (which are now wastelands) the only thing that remains is the path of extreme renunciation; of going out into the desert. Uncoincidentally, all of the games (except for Fallout Tactics) begin with this act, though there is a twist each time.

In case there was a thought that this was not intentionally a kind of Christian symbolism, in the second and third games the item most sought after, the item which is this story’s ‘Holy Grail’ is called the ‘G.E.C.K.’ – Garden of Eden Creation Kit. If this isn’t about Paradise and the Fall, then what’s it about?