sometimes, on gray, rainy days, i take a walk in the suburbs.

story: Thijs Van Nimwegen Art: Tomas Kucerovsky

I prefer the ones that are somewhat slummy, that have a feel of poverty and social disarray.

And then I start to imagine.

I imagine this is not a slum, I imagine the whole world is like this.

A world after the apocalypse, be it nuclear, social or economic - it doesn’t matter. The world as a scrap yard, with the few people left barely surviving.

I think this fantasy has something to do with being European.

When you look at the science fictionliterature and movies of the 19th and 20th century, there’s a clear division between

European and non-European works.

Stories from the USA, Australia and other postcolonial societies mostlydepict an optimistic, explorational

future, where humans have beaten nature and their own inadequacies, happily

conquering the universe.

If they show us a post-apocalyptical world, it’s one where the protagonist is a rebuilder: the first new airplane,

restoring the postal service,rediscovering old knowledge.

While in European literature and film, sci-fi stories tend to look back

at what once was.

They show us the final throesof civilization; the destruction of

the last library, people failing to grow crops, a man standing on the edge

of the continent, overlooking an empty sea, as everyone else has died of

an unnamed plague.

It’s Huxley versus Orwell, Roddenberry versus Shelley. Oswald Spengler may have summed up this European fixationon death instead of rebirth the best.

As for me, I definitely geta masochistic thrill outof this little fantasy.

I will leave the explanationof this Spengler-complex

to the mass psychologists.

A lonely world.

An empty world.

The end.