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Novelist John Larison does not have an incrementalist view of change. His latest novel The Ancients suggests that the very fabric and foundation of a society can become so poisoned that it cannot solve its own problems in any lasting way without tearing that society down entirely and starting from scratch.
The book opens a few thousand years after some unnamed environmental catastrophe has led to apocalypse—long enough for humanity to begin to regain its footing, but also long enough for it to have reached the precipice of its next human-made cataclysm. While siblings Leerit, Maren, and Kushim remember a time of plenty when they were very young, now drought and famine are on the rise again. This circumstance propels them on a journey to find the distant members of their tribe, but still more calamity separates them and sets them on individual paths to self-discovery.
The Ancients is Larison’s fourth novel, and his second venture into the realm of survival fiction. He came to acclaim with his previous novel Whiskey When We’re Dry, a western tale that found widespread praise for its original voice and the skill with which he worked contemporary social issues into a conventional genre. Now with his latest offering, Larison’s characters fight to endure in a post/pre-apocalyptic domain that bears a striking resemblance to our own.
Who is served by a society’s hierarchies and structures?
While some of the characters who populate the novel live in sustainable if climate-strained tribes, the blooming industrial society at the center of the Ancients is rife with troubles. Improper ecological management driven by proto-capitalistic motives has diminished food and supply lines. Its cities are places where “old men grew fat, children starved.” Economic woes are stark while those of means must protect themselves with ever-more guards. Overseeing it all is a greedy emperor who wears a crown of plastic “mined” from the ruins of some long-forgotten civilization. “If they had everything,” asks Cyrus, one of the central characters in the book, “why did they choose suicide?”
The Ancients confronts pressing issues about humanity’s disregard for nature, the fabrication of social heritage, and homophobia, but interrogates one question above all: Who is served by a society’s hierarchies and structures? And if these frameworks cause more harm than good, why do we continue to maintain them?
The book is a forceful assertion that the crisis is here, our society is not up to the task of surmounting it, and so we may have to start over, dissolving existing social structures and rebuilding in accordance with nature. A culture built over millennia might not be worth saving, he suggests.
At its core, The Ancients is concerned with the enormity of time and how we have risen from disaster just as many times as we have descended into it. Civilizations rise and fall. Extinctions happen. We are left with a riddle. How can we move past apocalypse without laying the foundations for future catastrophe, without allowing the cycle to repeat? 
Lead image: Viktor Lanimart / Shutterstock
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