The Wall

Slick, efficient world-building. Communicates his ideas powerfully through immersion in this strange dystopia. Reminded me of Christopher Priest in style.

It’s an idea that caught on after the Change: that we shouldn’t want to bring children into the world. We broke the world and have no right to keep populating it.

It’s guilt: mass guilt, generational guilt. The olds feel they irretrievably fucked up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did. They know it, we know it. Everybody knows it.

A bit like human life in general, you could say, the terrible regularity with which nothing happens, the genuine terror when something does. Hurry up and wait. That’s the motto which governs most lives. It’s the motto which governs the Wall, for sure. The only thing worse than when nothing happens is when something does.

I suddenly got it. Hifa’s mother was one of those people who like life to be all about them. With the Change, that is a harder belief to sustain; it takes much more effort to think that life is about you when the whole of human life has turned upside down, when everything has been irrevocably changed for everyone. You can do it, of course you can, because people can do anything with their minds and their sense of themselves, but it takes work and only certain kinds of unusually self-centred people can do it. They want to be the focus of all the drama and pity and all the stories.

But maybe, now that I was one of them, they weren’t Others any more? If I was an Other and they were Others perhaps none of us were Others but instead we were a new Us. It was confusing.