If everything here sucks, maybe we could leave. I think that sums it up. That’s the Exodus trope. Oh, and, also, we will get a fresh start.
Science fiction has a lot of this. I was thinking about it recently because I just finished beta-reading someone’s manuscript, and it has what I call the Exodus trope. So, first, what is it? As a trope, I may have made it up, because a quick internet search didn’t get me anything on the first page and I was too lazy to look at the second page. But the original story of Exodus itself is in the Bible, and it tells the tale of Moses acting under God’s orders and leading his people out of Egypt –which wasn’t kind to them– and heading toward the promised land of Israel. It was a great migration. It was an exodus, as they say.
In the manuscript I just finished reading, Earth has become a totalitarian dictatorship where all the individual liberties of Western Civilization have been eradicated. A small, secretive band of dedicated people figure a way to send several dozen college-age kids to Mars to start a new civilization conceived in liberty. I loved it. Battlestar Galactica is also an example of the Exodus trope. Its Twelve Colonies devastated by the Cylons, the Battlestar sets out on a quest to find a new world for a chance to start over. That was awesome, too.
Part of the appeal of the trope, I’m sure, is the thought of having a chance to start over. I haven’t read that many, but I suspect the Survival genre contains a kernel of this. Sure, most of the U.S. just got flattened by an EMP attack, but those of us who were ready will re-build. And we might make it better. It’s not the devastation that makes the tale appealing. It’s the attempts to survive and prevail. Compare Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is all about the devastation after a holocaust, with S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse, which also gives us plenty of devastation but shows a struggle to prevail and the world re-built anew. The Road is mostly a downer. The Emberverse uplifts.
There’s more to it than merely starting afresh, of course. There’s also fear. I grew up under the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, in which –the theory goes– the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wouldn’t attack each other because the resulting nuclear exchange would result in nuclear extinction, and most everyone agrees that’s bad. I wasn’t even around for the portion of MAD where schoolchildren hid under their desks to shelter from radiation, and I was too young for the Cuban missile crisis. Still, it affected me. I remember a group of us having a very angry talk about it in the girl’s locker room in 9th grade. (That’s my subtle way of making the point it wasn’t just me.)
I’m sure that reading Robert Heinlein as a teen while worrying in the back of my head that any day might be my last (and not just my last day but everyone’s), made me think it might be good to have another place to go. We could live underground on the Moon. Maybe we could terraform Mars. And, one day, after more technology happened, we could reach the stars and find worlds like Earth. Elon Musk talks about having a back-up plan for the human race as part of the impetus behind his goal of attempting to reach Mars. Now that we know what happened to the dinosaurs, we know that outer space itself poses a threat, even as it offers hope for a new place to live.
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