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Taken together with its two sequels, Bioshock 2and Bioshock Infinite, the series expands from anapokalypsis of the doom of any would-be G<strong>alt</strong>’sGulch, to warning of the doom from any deviationfrom the modern, neo-liberal capitalist consensus.Bioshock 2 posits a collectivist opposition toAndrew Ryan’s objectivism taking over in the ruinsof Rapture, and judges those principles to befailures in practice. Bioshock Infinite extends thisjudgement both to modern neo-Confederate conservativereactionaries, and militant resistance bythe oppressed. Taken as a whole, the series becomessomething of an Apocalypse of ProfessorPangloss, the mentor of the titular main characterof Voltaire’s Candide. As the professor says at theend of the novel:“There is a concatenation of events in this best ofall possible worlds: for if you had not been kickedout of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde:if you had not been put into the Inquisition:if you had not walked over America: if youhad not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost allyour sheep from the fine country of El Dorado:you would not be here eating preserved citronsand pistachio-nuts.”This repeats all across <strong>spec</strong>ulative fiction. Star Trekposits the ultimate triumph of 1960s liberal Americanidealism. Fallout warns of the consequencesof our overweening sense of control over ourfate, and belief in progress, echoing Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein. Gears of War is a neo-conservativemorality tale for the War on Terror, exhortingits players that the only response to our implacableenemy is total war, total victory, or total destruction.Dead Space presents an atheist moralitytale of the horrors that could be unleashed by deludedtheists in the future. The “secular heaven”posited in the late Iain M. Banks Culture novels isa more modern, European take on the idealisticapocalypse of Star Trek.Employing apocalypse even extends to the storiesour political leaders generate about the kind of
government they and their opponents would implement.In the United States of America today,we are deluged by the duelling Apocalypses of theRepublican and Democratic parties. Apocalypse,and its apokalypsis, is fundamental to our modernunderstanding of the future and the past. It givesus the narrative of history. The whys and wherefores.Without that judgement of thepresent, the future isn’t the future,and the past isn’t history.Without that, it’s simply stuffthat happened, or might happen,or might have happened.Image: Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by ViktorVasnetsov. Painted in 1887. Public domain imagevia Wikimedia Commons.
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