James Van Pelt

About “The Last of the O-Forms”

James Van Pelt’s story for Wastelands, “The Last of the O-Forms,” takes place in a world where there are no more normal births. “All of them are mutations. At first, the mutations are a novelty, so Trevin and his daughter Caprice are able to make their living touring with their mutant zoo,” Van Pelt said. “But as the mutations become more numerous, fewer people are willing to pay to see their exhibits. Trevin wants to save the zoo, but what can he do? It doesn’t help that Caprice wants him to give it all up.”

Trevin is the proprietor of Dr. Trevin’s Traveling Zoological Extravaganza. “He’s not particularly bright, but he’s had success and some fame with the zoo in the past,” Van Pelt said. “Now that it’s failing, he’s having a hard time giving it all up. His much brighter daughter, who he resents, wants him to cut his losses and sell the equipment. He’s not a heroic man, and his treatment of his daughter isn’t admirable, but I found I sympathized with his struggle to hold on. I don’t know who it was who said it (Garrison Keillor maybe?), but sometimes you have to look reality firmly in the eye, and deny it. That’s Trevin.”

When Van Pelt first started writing, all his stories felt very personal, he said. “It scared me to write them, a little. But once I worked those out of my system, I started paying more attention to story craft and the joy of putting together a tale. In the case of this story, I realized that I had an opportunity to write a deeply ironic ending, and that tickled me.”

However, what Van Pelt also discovered is that no matter how outlandish the events in his stories, and no matter how much he congratulates himself on becoming a writer who is not just composing thinly veiled autobiography, he’s still writing about personal stuff. “I respond strongly to irony, for instance,” Van Pelt said. “The end of the story encompassed some of my favorite personal themes, including the unwillingness to give up despite all evidence to the contrary, and how sometimes we have to embrace what disturbs us the most to achieve what we really want.”

The Appeal of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Post-apocalyptic fiction feels like a literary demonstration of the myth of the phoenix, Van Pelt said. “I like the idea that in the destruction of the old that something new can be born. This is really cool if you are one of the survivors, of course. The fact we ignore when we write the post-apocalyptic survivors’ stories is that so many did not make it to the other side. For me, thinking about the price to create the new world colors the story’s tone. There’s a lot of graves underneath the foundation of a post-apocalyptic story which I think more people are aware of since 9/11.”

Favorite Examples of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Van Pelt likes post-apocalyptic settings in general, so many such works are in his top all-time lists, he said. “My most influential would be George Stewart’s Earth Abides, but I bet everyone would list that. Another kick butt story would be … of course, Stephen King’s The Stand.”

The most depressing example of the genre, for Van Pelt, was Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7. “Everyone dies, like in Neville Shute’s On the Beach, but what really depressed me is that his main character realizes the music that they are listening to in the shelter isn’t infinite. It’s just a long tape that keeps playing over and over.”

Van Pelt really liked David Brin’s The Postman too, but if you hold him to choose just one post-apocalyptic title, he’ll go with Fritz Leiber’s “A Pail of Air,” he said. “I’ve never read anything that seemed as desperate, sad and doomed as that story, and then he manages to give the characters hope in the end. Great work.”