My scheduled guest had to cancel last minute, so I decided to go on the stream myself — to talk about a collection of drawings by survivors of America’s nuclear bombing of Japan. It’s called Unforgettable Fire and it collects drawings exhibited for the 30th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These drawings are heartbreaking and unexpectedly powerful, revealing the horrors of the war through the eyes of ordinary people. As you’ll see, children and mothers — dead, alive, burned, and maimed — are a recurring subject. In our age of hyper-realism, these hand drawn images carry a lot of power…at least for me.
I found this book while doing research for my novel Radiance, which is set in a post-nuclear war world. But the topic of nuclear technology intersects in a big way with my work on the internet and vampire valley, too. The two technologies — nukes and information systems — were part of the same co-evolving meta-technology. America’s use of nukes in Japan, and the nuclear arms race that this attack helped launch, massively sped up and shaped the development of modern communication systems and surveillance technology, giving it the form that it has today. You could say that our hyper-real information society was built on the back of the nuclear bomb. And it feels that way, doesn’t it? Paranoid, constantly on edge…
If you liked Pistachio Wars, come out to Brooklyn this Sunday to watch our surreal post-ecocide short film about California’s zombie lake.
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