Guilty boredom...

Every Friday I try to make a little time to read an online comic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield called Freak Angels. They're taking a break from producing the comic this week but Ellis has written a few pages outlining his inspiration for Freak Angels and a very brief history of "disaster fiction."

Ellis also goes into why he feels disaster fiction is so prominent in British literature;

"We imagine great natural (or unnatural) disasters because we'll never actually experience them. Literary survivors' guilt."

If you're a reader of ER3 or if you know me personally, you will know that there's only one method of catastrophic disaster I really worry about;

Horrible, ever-loving, nuclear Armageddon. A flood isn't so bad when you consider the instant vaporization of entire city blocks, and that's just the fun part of the impending fiasco.

I'm not too worried about many other types of disaster. I'm pretty confident in my abilities to survive any minor cataclysms like flooding, ice storms, black-outs and even the elusive (but somehow constant) threat of terrorism.

But a nuclear firestorm? In that situation, my plans go from basic survival mode to completely psychotic. My plan for any large scale nuclear holocaust would be to grab the cooler of beer and a lawn chair and try and reach the highest rooftop I can so I can get a nice, clear view of ground zero before my eyeballs melt and my skin flies off my cheery, beer drinking skeleton.

Hold the SPF 5 million! I'm going to experience this blast in high definition! Because I'd have to be Mad Max style, bat-shit crazy to want to try to survive that clusterfuck.

That being said, I love disaster fiction, but I don't think it's because of "survivors' guilt." Disaster fiction is prominent in the west partly because our lifestyles don't give us many opportunities to test ourselves. Disaster fiction and fantasies give us an outlet to see the best and worst of ourselves in a scenario that not only destroys who you were, but gives you an opportunity to see who you could be.

I refuse to admit that I'm the only person who's dreamed of a world where I was that bat-shit crazy marauder, or a desert wasteland community builder, or a wilderness-roaming hard-ass. Sure beats installing bumpers for 30 years.

Maybe Ellis is right and Britain thinks of these things because of guilt. Maybe Britain lacks nuclear catastrophic fiction because WWII is still a bit too fresh and I've been terrified with the notion since childhood.

Personally, I think we all just lead really boring lives.