Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey
In collaboration with editors John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, A Dribble of Ink is proud to introduce a series of interviews with the authors of The End Has Come, the final volume in the The Apocalypse Triptych. Following on The End is Nigh, and The End Is Here, The End Has Come contains 23 stories about life after the apocalypse.
Interview with Nancy Kress about “Blessings”
(Interview by Jared Cooper)
“Blessings” shows two sides of an alien invasion—an apocalypse for some, a new life for others. What elements of the story did you focus on while writing this third triptych piece?
“Blessings” follows the previous two stories in this series, carrying my “apocalypse” forward another few generations. When I started the first story, I wanted to write about a different apocalypse from the usual, so I chose this: an incident that makes everyone nicer. Less aggressive, biologically incapable of violence. That raised questions: How could such a thing come about? Who would desire it? I knew from before I began that aliens wished to remake us, and that genetic alteration of the entire world was the way they could do it.
This third story was thus free to explore how such an experiment ends. The aliens have succeeded—but only temporarily. Regression to the mean is a real, inescapable biological phenomenon (which is why children of Nobel winners don’t also win Nobels). Human beings have had millions of years in which they were biologically hierarchal and—yes—violent under the right circumstances, which vary from person to person. Violence is, unfortunately, a survival trait. It reappears, despite the Dant. And as with all human change, some gain and some lose. To me, that’s reality, and any good fiction must reflect that reality. Read More »
