Most apocalyptic fiction rests solely on the basis that the end has come, civilisation has been shown the door and humanity is existing, if it can even be called that, in its smouldering, soon-to-disappear ruins.
Granted these types of stories aren’t meant to have much hope or be even remotely inspiring, destruction porn of the most irrevocable, irredeemable kind when humanity’s hubris has caught up to it, and then some, but you sometimes wonder what might have happened if we hadn’t stop raging against the dying of the light (with apologies to Dylan Thomas).
Glow by Tim Jordan is your answer, a techno-punk fever dream that takes place some fifty years into the future when the Earth has barely recovered from what’s been dubbed the “Nova Insanity” when a well-intentioned act turned deadly with people weaponising an invention that could have changed everyone’s lives for the better.
One again we have shot ourselves royally in the foot as a species, and yet somehow emerged, certainly not unscathed but somehow sort of intact, Earth reduced to a series of corporate and criminal fiefdoms in which many people barely eke out an existence, many of them out of their minds on a digital drug called Glow which allows them to escape their barren lives while slowly tearing apart their innate sense of identity.
That’s because the substrate upon which the drug relies, a construct of technology that fuels Glow’s deadly efficacy, remembers all of its past hosts memories, needs and desires, effectively creating dissociative identity disorder in which various personalities are fighting for dominance, the host never quite who, or what they are.
“Rex woke and looked straight into the eyes of a dead man.
He screamed through clenched teeth, swallowing the sound, muffling it with his tongue so it exploded safe and silent inside the barrel of his chest. The mantra he’d lived by for years clattered through his skull: Act dead, act crazy, run like hell … fight!
He ran. (P. 5)
Bet you’re glad we dodged that end-of-species bullet now, right?
Not so fast though because while an authoritarian ruling alliance seeks to take over the planet and a dying corporate behemoth, which is responsible in part for the current drugged state of much of Earth’s populace, stands in trenchant opposition to it, one man is trying, in small faltering ways to get his life back together.
That man is Rex, a street dweller hooked on Glow who, one night, finds himself lying on a street in a terrible part of town – honestly, while there are good parts, they’re not really that much of a step up from where he is – a dead man he might know holding onto to him with the post-death strength of rigour mortis after which a robotic nun spirits him off to the most draconian of rehab centres where somehow, miraculously, he gets clean.
Well, clean enough, since thanks to the voices dwelling in his head, a devil’s chorus of past users who scramble a person’s sense of self almost beyond recognition, he’s never quite sure who he is; all he knows is he likes dogs, he may have found a wholly unreliable friend, maybe more, the scattered, evasive Mira, and a nightmare of an assassin, sent from space, might just be after him.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, titanic battles for humanity’s future are waging, all very self-centred and narcissistic as these power plays always seem to be, with the very real possibility that Rex, pushed and pulled between all kinds of competing parties on the broken streets of Coriolis City, might just be the person who can somehow change the world.
See, there is a saviour after all, just not the one you might expect, and to be honest, not the one Rex expected either.
In Glow, Tim Jordan has created a brilliantly compelling protagonist in Rex, an everyman of the post-apocalyptic world who is simply trying to put one foot in front of the other and find small fleeing moments of happiness in caring for rescue dogs, in the twisted teachings of the Future Lord cult and resisting the pernicious effects of Glow, pretty much the only person able to do so.
Filled with space operatic twists and turns, and a powerful sense of driving humanity, the kind that seeks to survive at any cost but which, while debased by its own need and craven self-interest, is inspiring thanks to its desperate, wanton need to stay flickering in existence, Glow is a sublimely well-realised novel, one in which we see into the darkness of our collective soul and find perhaps a flicker of hope and goodness.
“A horrific revenant lurched in front of her, blank, dead eyes right in her face. She barely saw it, but didn’t care. It seemed to be looking for someone, maybe it spoke. Eventually it went away.
She felt the world turning, flinging her away as gravity dragged her back to the ground. A balance. A line. An infinitesimally thin region where she existed between fictional Haven and a very factual Hell.” (P. 148)
As an exploration of humanity’s capacity to evade its own, likely well-deserved extinction, Glow is damn near peerless, sagely acknowledging the paucity and brokenness of our species while offering us a slim but palpably beguiling hope that perhaps we are completely done for just yet.
You could be forgiven multiple times for thinking that we are, though.
If it’s not criminal militia fighting over crumbs of often Glow-enhanced power, and ruthless military forces seeking to subjugate and annihilate, and tattered remnants of corporate might hanging delusionally onto scraps of an illustrious, if morally questionable past, it’s artificial lifeforms acting as puppet masters of other created beings and people using people at every available opportunity.
Doesn’t exactly scream hope and buoyant possibility does it, but somewhere in the middle of this expertly and evocatively written tale of the decline and decline of humanity, set with characters to vibrantly alive it’s easy to forget they are constantly wavering on the edge of death, there is Rex, a protagonist who, despite his confusion, sense of loss and horror at his inability exactly who or what he is, and who’s is mocked when he thinks he does, is everything we want humanity to hang onto.
He cares, he’s sincere, he loves and tends to man’s best friend and he’s willing to look after others in a world that’s near-comprehensively forgotten what that’s like; he’s far from perfect but he’s what humanity should be, and while he’s barely left alone by forces seeking to exploit and abuse him, he somehow remains, even if it’s by his fingernails and nothing more, more human and worthy of our attention that anyone around him.
And he might also be the one to change the rotten state of the world around him, although Glow, possessed of a rip-roaring mix of pell-mell action and existential poignancy, doesn’t guarantee a happy-ever-after, just the possibility of it, which in the superbly well-evoked post-apocalyptic world of Jordan’s effortlessly talented making, is likely the best you’re going to get.
For now, at least.