Hope and survival

Ive been reading an SF book this week that I've been eagerly waiting to read from the last year.  I loved the first book in the series, but this second one is entirely different.  It has several viewpoints, and there's a building sense of doom throughout the book.

The narrative strands only come together two-thirds of the way through the book.  By then the five  crew members are the last humans alive, and all of them are threatened with death.  A couple of them turn mad.  They were never stable personalities to start with, but now they spiral off on their own separate paths of logical madness.

An alien virus infects the humans and turns some into puppets and mouthpieces for the virus.  They're  sort of zombies, but far more realistic and frightening than a horror or fantasy zombie.  Perhaps if I hadn't been reading this in the week when coronavirus had been declared a pandemic it might not have got to me so much.  Because, in times when survival is threatened, we humans need hope.

Then I was reminded of a section in Gareth L Powell's book About Writing, titled 'how to keep being creative in a crisis'.  "Art doesn't stop for history" he says.  "In some way, art is history."  "Art is one of the candles of civilisation."  That's one of my favourite sayings ever. 

"Every... line of prose you make is a blow struck against entropy and ignorance, and a contribution to the net beauty of the world."  The phrase 'contribution to the net beauty of the world' restored me to some kind of equilibrium, to the place where I know my writing, which centres hope, survival, and purpose, is important, has a message for the world.

I could not write an end-of-civilisation story like the one I've just read.  My drive to survive, my need to have a purpose of some kind, means I can't get into the mindset of a person who has lost all hope.  And partly that's because I'm lucky enough never to have suffered from depression.

As the coronavirus spreads across the world I think it's stories of hope and remembrance and survival which we need more than ever.  Literature can do this thing of telling us that we've been in the darkness before, and that "this too will pass".  Writing can remind us that, one day, we'll be free of the darkness again.  And it's those narratives of hope, survival, and purpose which are exactly what I write, and what I think the world so sorely needs right now.