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In a recent episode of “Silo,” the sci-fi series from Apple TV+, a character who does not have long to live puts on a virtual-reality headset. She’s spent her entire life in a subterranean shelter, which descends more than a mile into the earth like an upside-down skyscraper. What she sees in the headset is totally alien: the cloud forests of Costa Rica, recorded in the bygone year of 2018. We never see the red-eyed tree frog and iridescent birds that appear on her screen; instead, we watch her reach out and close her fingers on empty space. “So beautiful,” she says. Then she refers to us, the people of the twenty-first century: “How did they lose this world?”
A post-apocalyptic story is something like a murder mystery in which the victim is life as we know it—“not a whodunnit but a howdidithappen,” as Jill Lepore wrote in this magazine, in 2017. Often, artifacts from our own time serve as clues about what has gone awry. In the first season of “Silo,” released in 2023, a string of ill-fated characters encounter “relics” that threaten to reveal dark truths about the origins of their underground refuge, and about what came before. They can’t figure out what a prehistoric Pez dispenser is for, but they can use the Silo’s ancient computers to read the files on a twentieth-century hard drive. A book called “Amazing Adventures in Georgia,” which might as well be set in Atlantis, includes photographs of long-lost animals, forests, and a beach at twilight.
In “Silo,” ten thousand people live on a hundred and forty-four subterranean levels, which are connected by an enormous spiral staircase. Working-class mechanics are consigned to the “down deep,” where they maintain a massive generator that powers, among other things, grow lights for crops. A managerial class, led by a mayor, a judge, a sheriff, and a head of I.T., lives in the “up top.” The only view of the outside comes from an aboveground camera, which shows a desolate hillside, some leafless trees, and the dead bodies of people who have left the Silo. The society’s worst punishment is “going out to clean”—being sent through an air lock to wipe dust off the camera lens, then die of whatever has tainted the air.
“Silo” follows a classic dystopian structure: forbidden knowledge launches a hero’s quest for more forbidden knowledge, which may lead to triumph or tragedy. The hero of George Orwell’s “1984” is a bureaucrat whose discovery of a blank diary leads him to turn on his government; the hero of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” is a professional book burner who starts to steal books. In “Silo,” as in these earlier works, powerful people act ruthlessly to keep secrets secret. But a hard-headed engineer named Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) is unexpectedly promoted to sheriff and starts to investigate. “How did they lose this world?” is the question that drives the entire show, and, indeed, an entire genre.
One of the perverse pleasures of a dystopia is that we identify with its truth-seeking inhabitants as they try to find out who ruined their world—and, at the same time, we sense that we probably did. The desolation outside the Silo evokes the everyday terrors of our time: only a few years ago, governments ordered their citizens to shelter in place for fear of a novel virus, and, as I write this, many residents of Los Angeles have fled their homes in the face of wildfires or are staying indoors to avoid the smoke. Post-apocalyptic stories can, paradoxically, be comforting: at least the present day isn’t that bad. On the other hand, we may be drawn to dystopias because we fear we live in one.
During President Trump’s first year in office, such stories were popular enough that Lepore’s piece proclaimed “a golden age for dystopian fiction.” (The term “dystopian,” which once referred to a utopia gone wrong, was also becoming more versatile; in 2023, Merriam-Webster noted that it had been applied to wildfire smoke, A.I. risks, and Republican predictions about the future of San Francisco.) As we approach the ultimate bad sequel, a second Trump Administration, post-apocalyptic dramas marked by pandemics (“The Last of Us,” “Station Eleven”), environmental catastrophe (“Snowpiercer,” “The End”), and the erosion of reproductive rights (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Furiosa”) have continued to proliferate. Many of them draw on decades-old source material that has taken on new relevance. When such works are successful, they are often described as “prescient” or “prophetic,” as though their creators saw the future and described it in art; when they are heavy-handed or make you want to look away, you might call them “too real.” But a better indication of a dystopia’s success may be that its world is at once alien and unsettlingly plausible.
The world of “Silo” is both, most of the time, though it occasionally defies physics (at one point, Juliette falls hundreds of feet and lives) and linguistics (Ferguson’s pesky Swedish accent is one of the few flaws in her performance). The books on which the show is based, published by the sci-fi writer Hugh Howey, starting in 2011, are also built on a dubious theory that history is not only cyclical but centrally planned, through written rules. As the second season wears on, this notion warps the plot in ways that strain credulity, and the series’ innumerable cliffhangers gum up the narrative with artificial tension. Still, the Silo is an inventive, absorbing setting, rendered in a retro-futurist mid-century style that compensates for the bleakness. The meticulous details of life underground, unspooled such that each answer raises another question, are a triumph of world-building—not only for us, the viewers, but also for the characters, who are solving a mystery, too.
One of the uses of speculative fiction—and of fiction in general—is that it allows us to look at our own world as a stranger might. In September, 1961, when the Soviet Union was preparing to test the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, CBS aired “The Shelter,” an episode of “The Twilight Zone” that begins at a doctor’s birthday party, in a pleasant suburb of New York. In a toast, one of his neighbors gently mocks him for the racket he’s made while constructing an underground fallout shelter. A few minutes later, a radio broadcast announces a yellow alert: a radar system has detected a possible missile attack. The guests rush home in terror without another word.
The doctor is retreating behind a metal door when a neighbor returns. The man begs for, then demands, a spot in the shelter, but there’s space only for the doctor and his family. “I kept telling you . . . get ready,” he says. “To build a shelter was to admit to the kind of age we lived in, and none of you had the guts to face that!” Other neighbors arrive and bicker for a few minutes about who should be allowed in. Finally, they bash open the door with a heavy pipe. Then an update crackles across the radio. The radar blips were satellites; the alert was a false alarm.
“The Shelter” did not depict a dystopia, at least not in the way we usually use that term. But these days the line is blurrier. After the wildfires erupted in L.A. last week, many turned to Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which is set in the twenty-twenties and describes “whole blocks of boarded up buildings burning in Los Angeles.” Butler owned a house in Altadena, and her story opens in a desolate version of the city she knew, ravaged by inequality and climate change. Much of Altadena has now burned down; even the cemetery where Butler is buried caught fire. Still, her writings are not solely dystopian. They also suggest, very quietly, that a better world might be possible. Her grave is marked by a footstone that quotes the book: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
