Dark, Dark Is Human Degeneration

I finished reading George R. R. Martin's "Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels" with a feeling of dreadful revelation. The story began in an ambigious fashion with the main character, Greel, hunting with his pet rat H'ssig in the dark tunnels. Meanwhile, you have two explorers from the moon who descended into a post-apocalyptic Earth to look for "fresh genetic stock." Needless to say, as the reader gets deeper into the story, he or she will find humanity "degenerated" both ways: one from radiation and adaptation to a hostile world and another from being too comfortable in an environment where the greatest risk was inbreeding.

Greel was afraid of the "fire," or the bright lights that the explorers for toting. The reason was that Greel was adjusted to dark situations after keeping away from the surface for so many centuries. Greel would be the "ignorant" half of humanity, the cave man who has been in the cave for so long. I thought of my World Literature class that I took while I was in Highland Community College when my instructor had us read Plato's "Allegory of a Cave." Plato stated that humanity would live in a state of ignorance, which would be personified as a cave. Greel woudl be among the people who would only be aware of his ancestors' past only through oral traditions of the elders who did not know much about their ancestry either. Greel can be a forgotten creature among a forgotten people.

Greel's description as a hunched, humanoid being with milky white skin and large eyes reminded me of the blind, humanoid monsters featured in The Descent, a movie where a group of six women descend for a spelunking trip gone horribly wrong. The picture I inserted probably looks nothing like Greel, who is described having very large eyes and is able to see. But this creature has pale white skin, so it is a good enough match. He is guided by a rat companion named H'ssig who serves as a type of "hunting dog."

I guess another comparison to the "big eyed human rodent" would be Gollum from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga. I find it coincidential that Martin is a fantasy writer, just like Tolkien was a fantasy writer. And that Gollum and Martin's "rat man" share strong resemblances. Then again, maybe I am overanalyzing. Then again, Gollum detested light and had a connection with the One Ring. Greel hated light and had a connection with his rat companion. The biggest difference was that Greel would not be a jewlery addict that gets a couple of naive hobbits into trouble. He would just throw a spear at some prick from the moon who shot his pet rodent dead.

The connection between the both of them can be likened that they are "brothers." Both are very rat-like and live underground away from a hot, ugly surface. They "sense" each other because they are one and the same lurking though the tunnels. Dogs would have been "man's best friend" but centuries later, we have "humankind" on Earth befriending what they sought to destroy for many centuries. Martin could be making a point that humandkind had become what it sought to destroy. Centuries later, the near blue-blooded elite who lived on the moon for so long would view the survivors as something as less than they were. They would not befriend the rats, they would smoke out every last one.

Not to ramble too far on a different subject but I would not be surprised that if (Heaven forbid, only if) an nuclear war were to go on, cockroaches would be able to survive. But rats are cunning and resourceful in their own way. Both humans and rats are mammals, so to me, it would not make sense if humans evolved into cockroaches. Besides, eating cockroaches would most likely kill you if you tried to adapt to dining on them. Rats, unlike cockroaches, have their set of behaviors and set of intelligence higher than a cockroach would possess. They would not be the simple minded animals that cockroaches would be.

"Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels" provides an apocalyptic scenario of if we survived the apocalypse. We would face another apocalypse entirely; we would lose our humanity and lose what had made us strong. Sure, we can preserve whatever we can of our culture like the lunar explorers did but then we would lose the strength to survive on earth. Like the lunar people, our muscles would grow weak of floating around in a zero gravity environment for so long. As for the "tunnel people," we could grow strong and adapt to our environment but we would lose our humanity and knowledge of who we were. We would face extinction on a gene-based level.

- Kristopher