I was reading Fall of Delta Green last week and it struck me how much iconic American horror is about trying to preserve the appearance of normalcy. Our bleakest and most nihilistic art is about dying for the American Dream while knowing full well that it's hollow. Lovecraft believes that people ought to be sheltered from the mind-breaking knowledge of the outer darkness. English grimdark is different: it's about blowing up a horrible world to epic proportions, exaggerating all the misery and brutality of our own world, and then taking it seriously enough that it becomes something other than satire. There's no beautiful dream to protect, no glimmering surface. There's no credible ideology of Mega-City One or the Imperium of Man that makes them look like something worth loving; they're just marginally better than the alternatives.
Americans are considering disillusionment. The English seem to be past that.
Succinct and powerful; there's something about a (fundamentally? subconsciously?) optimistic American perspective coming across and using the powerful imagery of English grimdark - thus that all that death and sacrifice gets given a twist of hope.
ReplyDeleteI'd also say that Mega-City One is a non-central example here: it is or has been used both for 'Authoritarianism bad' stories and also 'American parody' stories (along with 'True Grit' stories), with the latter having commercial success, flourish art scenes, rampant consumerism, weird lively subcultures and the like. That's not obviously good, but it doesn't suggest the utter decay of the Imperium of Man. Contrast the world of Termight from 2000 AD's Nemesis the Warlock, or the nu-Earth of Rogue Trooper.*
I have before speculated about a pre-satiric (?) source of the Grimdark.**
And, on the Saturnine nature of 40k - I don't think I cited as Saturnine any American works? Hmm. A Canticle for Liebowitz may not count, and Clark Ashton Smith is revelling too much in Orientalist visions. Wolfe is his own creature.***
*https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2020/02/rogue-trooper-nightmare-machines.html
**https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-hobbesian-theory-of-tabletop-war.html
***https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2024/06/lewis-and-saturn-in-41st-millennium.html