Cacotopia: An Ominous Prognosis on Future World

Apocalyptic literature is an exclusive field of fictional works that portrays the cataclysmic events which are most likely to get hold of human civilizations when the end of the world gets closer. Novels written with apocalyptic features depict a pessimistic view of the present time around us and an ominous prognosis on future.

California is one of the spellbinding works of fiction of  2014 by Edan Lepucki, an American author. This novel fictionalizes a bleak future devastated and rampaged by horrendous natural disasters and the outbreak of a deadly flu resembling a plague that claims the lives of thousands of people living in California, one of the major American cities. Frida and Calvin, two leading characters of the novel run away from Los Angeles to avoid the spread of the flu. The book starts with Frida wondering how to tell Calvin that she is carrying a baby inside her womb while the locality in which they lived was collapsing under the mortal effects of apocalyptic calamities. As living in Los Angeles became too risky for them, Frida and Calvin moved away from there. They passed two years in a forest while the urban areas all over California including Los Angeles were losing all their luminosity and glamour due to the spread of some scary environmental phenomena. As they left the forest after a couple of years, they reached a locality where they came across several human beings. But all the humans they found in that place seemed extremely self-absorbed, always guarded by private security agencies and hardly showing willingness to interact with others. It was a locality where receiving cooperation from anyone was quite unlikely. So, Frida and Calvin felt direly insecure and abandoned. The storyline of the novel resembles the features of dystopian fiction. Cacotopia refers to a place or circumstances where the glory of human civilization is under dreadful threats and all the advancement of the world turns out to be suddenly useless or even perilous.

Frida and Calvin feel afraid of disclosing the fact that they are going to have a baby because the inhospitable world around them doesn't welcome new life as survival has abruptly become a tough challenge for everyone. Still they don't lose hope. They look around for a congenial place where the baby can be raised in a privileged way after its birth. The book California is actually a prognosis about the impending cataclysms that have all the likelihood to catch us off-guard anytime in the future if humans don't retreat from their indiscriminate onslaught on the world's environmental resources. There are a good number of allusions to global warming and ecological disorder in the novel which convey the message that the disasters that seem fictitious in today's books or movies may turn into reality some years later. So, from this point of view, the novel California rings a warning bell. The book seems to be an allegoric novel as well. The self-cornered people always protected by privately owned security forces showing utter reluctance to associate with others as portrayed by the author don't appear to be unreal at all. In the present mechanized world, particularly in big cities, people hardly have time to say hello to their next door neighbours. They hardly care about paying heed to the well-being of the people living around them. This aloofness and self-absorption may become more intensified in the future, the novel suggests.

In The Time Machine, a cacotopian science fiction, H. G. Wells depicts a philanthropic scientist who invented an extraordinary contraption that he called a 'time machine' which he believed would turn time travel into reality. He traveled back and forth by millions of years with dreams in his mind to reach such a period of the future world where humans will have climbed the peak of enlightenment and prosperity. But he was terribly shocked to find the helpless state of humans in the remote future under the suppressive reign of a horrid species of creatures called the Morlocks. The abject plight of humans scared and hurt the scientist so much that he was about to lose all his pride for human civilization. However, the hostility of the Morlocks couldn't daunt the scientist. He started to contemplate how to restore the superiority of human beings over all other creatures. Finally, he decided to stay back with the jeopardized people of that land to help them rescue the lost glory of human race.

Likewise, at the end of the novel California we find Frida and Calvin picking up courage to overcome the ongoing plague. They dream of a reconstructed world for their child's birth and growth. Edan Lepucki, towards the closure of the breathtaking novel, exhibits mankind's ability to fight back in the middle of untoward circumstances. She ends her story with a dash of optimism, believing in the power of humans to recover from traumatic situations. Her characters regain hope and start rebuilding their towns and cities and thus look forward to another genesis.


Rifat Rafique Badhon is a
freelancer and a columnist.