"South on both sides of the line, we have a huge hot country we now call Olathe. Humans fucked it up very thoroughly by tossing nuclear weapons around, before Wraeththu spread east from another great continent, Megalithica."

- Fulfilments of Fate and Desire, Chapter One, p. 502, Orb omnibus edition of 1993

Most science fiction agrees: Before the good stuff comes, we'll have to suffer. Even when the book or film is about the "good stuff," the unnameable suffering that enabled this bright future to happen lies under the main narrative like a level of drainage under a road. Even the most technocratic and optimistic of popular mainstream utopias, namely "Star Trek," mentions those strata of despair and decline we will have to filter through before we reach the bright future that series depicts. In Wraeththu, this is especially apparent, as we witness the rise of a new species from the fall of humanity. While the rise of the Wraeththu is what we read the books for, the fall of humanity is always implicit, and sometimes eerily present.

Every book worth the chlorine-free paper it's printed on not only speaks to all other books ever written (as Umberto Eco remarked in The Name of the Rose), but also to the world as it is at the time of writing -- however much the author attempts to avoid that. It also speaks to the world as it is to the reader's eye at whatever point in time that reader might be, relative to the writing -- as every good book worth surviving the decades on its chlorine-free paper will be firmly grounded in the archetypes of human thinking, feeling and fears. Any book worth reading will become an integral part of the mental landscape of its readers, and from there go on to speak to other books, other ideas -- as readers are always speakers, and sometimes writers, who in their turn contribute the global meme pool.

I have long held the opinion that, in an essayistic variation on the much-quoted "six degrees of separation," I will be able to connect any random subject to any other random subject and cook up an essay that is both plausible and believable. I have never yet been taken up on the challenge and am still game. Meanwhile I connect the random things that are on my mind and build myself a macramé of mental shortcuts which I defend as absolutely legitimate. The world as we know it is only phenomena anyway, each popping up like a Windows warning message at whatever time/space node it may be located, meaning nothing whatsoever on its own -- it's human minds that add the meanings and connections to it, that add good and evil, fear and hope. To quote another favourite, E.M. Forster, "Only connect!" So that is what I do, wherever I go. When reviewing books and movies for Areion, for example, I play the game of always telling the potential reader or viewer why this work is relevant for us, and how it is connected to the world we live in and the most current of issues we deal with.

The truth is not out there, so I draw my own map and travel by it, which has taken me to some very fascinating places, far more interesting than where I'd get if I believed in something and stuck to it. For someone with that attitude towards life, the universe and everything, it is quite obvious and natural to go searching for real world connections to the things that fascinate in favourite books -- so I went to look for the precursors of harish Grissecon in the real world not because I believed it actually existed to be found, but because I expected a workable connection somewhere, because each book worth its chlorine-free paper speaks to the whole world as it is at any possible moment.

Why do I bore you with all this when you were hoping for juicy details about the end of the world, you ask? I just want to make abundantly clear where I come from when I connect our favourite science fiction trilogy with some of the most relevant issues in our real world today. I don't think the Wraeththu books especially prophetic or important or relevant -- I just happen to love them, and they drift in a spot on our culture's meme pool from where it's very easy and obvious to reach some other spots which have come into sharp focus in recent months and years. Each time I read the Wraeththu trilogy, it sends me down another new and fascinating line of thought, of things that I can connect to it.

This is what came from my most recent reading in late summer and early autumn last year:

I was cycling from work to the station one certain windy afternoon and feeling thoroughly downcast, frightened and lost. You know, the world as we knew it had just ended that day -- at least that's how it felt at the time.

Pretty soon, we all realized that the only thing that had ended that day was the relatively recent illusion that we were safe, and that the world we'd made ourselves was going to work after all; on that afternoon, however, I felt a leaden certainty -- as probably did millions around the world -- that this was the proverbial it. Cars drove around, and a few elderly ladies were puttering about on the cemetery -- just as any other day, and I looked at all that with doubt whether this kind of life would exist much longer.

We are the ones, I ruminated, that have to go. For something else to surface, we are the ones that have to move aside, and we won't go peacefully -- so the world throws this at us. And this is only the beginning of the destruction. For a Thiede to arise from the ruins of our world, our world has to go to ruins first. Thiede, my favourite character in my favourite book, embodies a tremendous hope, a powerful future -- but what has to go for this future to unfold is mostly me and the culture that feeds me.

We had known for some decades now that the way we'd built our world didn't work, and never would. In the late seventies at latest, we'd been scared by predictions of imminent apocalypse by environmental destruction and nuclear Armageddon working hand in hand. All during the eighties, there was a pervading certainty there was "No Future," that nature and society would go to hell in a hand basket together -- a certainty from which, among many other inspiring or influential ideas and perspectives, the Wraeththu novels emerged. Our environment, it seemed, was then already beyond salvation, human folly all-pervasive, politics hell-bent on destruction of the enemy no matter what, our society destined to crash and burn. We might go out with a bang (nuclear war) or a whimper (destruction of environment and society by inner forces and sheer entropy, the way it happens in Wraeththu) -- but go we would.

In the early nineties, when the Cold War ended, we found new hope and managed to grab hold of the dear old illusions of safety once more. We were wiser now, we decided; we didn't put our bets on simple solutions and one-sentence answers any more, we'd instead trust in the powers of a self-regulated, naturally growing market and an economic freedom that would, of a necessity, spawn a political one. The world was complex, but we were willing to be complex with it and find solutions instead of mere answers. Apart from the Balkans, Rwanda and few other isolated spots on the map where people were a bit unreasonable still, human beings worldwide were coming to their senses and building a future that would, at long last, work for everyone. The economy was flourishing, the Internet was emerging and promising a new and hitherto unknown hope for world-wide democracy, technology was promising a solution for the pressing problems of the world, and nukes were being dismantled. Safety, certainty and security for everyone seemed entirely do-able.

Reading the Wraeththu trilogy for the first time during that happy age, I thought the premise of an new society being built on the ruins of our own world a bit outdated and rather "eighties," to be honest. Of course, something new and better would come -- but we'd evolve into it slowly, we wouldn't have to die first to go to heaven.

In Autumn 2001, reading the trilogy for the fourth time, I was overtaken by the dreadful realization that the world was going to end after all. The turn-of-the-century optimism was officially over, after just 20 months. The twentieth century, I thought enviously, had at least had a dozen years of unbridled belief in the answers of science before the sinking of the Titanic and then World War I had shown us how much in error we had been. This time around, our hopeful misconception the solutions we were working out might actually take effect was dashed much sooner, but quite as mercilessly, and with quite the same body count among the very elite of our dominant world culture.

We had lost, and realised once more, as we had at the time when Wraeththu was written, that our way of living would not go on forever - we and our world are fragile, and as the world darkens (and those nukes seem less and less impossible) we arrive at the certainty that sooner or later we'll be out-evolved by someone else. If we're very lucky, they might be a good as the Wraeththu.