Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (272 page)

* * * *

It’s going to be my last day, he thought. My eyes are going fuzzy, and I can’t breathe right, and the throbbing’s hurting my head. Whether he lived through the night wouldn’t matter, because delirium was coming over him, and then there would be the coma, and the symbolic fight to keep him pumping and panting. I’d rather die tonight and get it over with, he thought, but they probably won’t let me go.

He heard their voices coming up the stairs…

“Nora tried to get them to stop it, Father, but she couldn’t get in to see anybody but the butler. He told her he’d tell Mrs. Keith, but nothing happened. It’s just as loud as before.”

“Well, as long as Donny doesn’t mind—”

“He just says that. You know how he is.”

“What’re they celebrating, Martha?”

“Young Ronald’s leaving—for pre-space training. It’s a going-away affair.” They paused in the doorway. The small priest smiled in at Donegal and nodded. He set his black bag on the floor inside, winked solemnly at the patient.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” said Martha. She closed the door and her footsteps wandered off down the hall.

Donegal and the young priest eyed each other warily.

“You look like hell, Donegal,” the padre offered jovially. “Feeling nasty?”

“Skip the small talk. Let’s get this routine over with.”

The priest humphed thoughtfully, sauntered across to the bed, gazed down at the old man disinterestedly. “What’s the matter? Don’t want the ‘routine’? Rather play it tough?”

“What’s the difference?” he growled. “Hurry up and get out. I want to hear the beast blast off.”

“You won’t be able to,” said the priest, glancing at the window, now closed again. “That’s quite a racket next door.”

“They’d better stop for it. They’d better quiet down for it. They’ll have to turn it off for five minutes or so.”

“Maybe they won’t.”

It was a new idea, and it frightened him. He liked the music, and the party’s gaiety, the nearness of youth and good times—but it hadn’t occurred to him that it wouldn’t stop so he could hear the beast.

“Don’t get upset, Donegal. You know what a blast-off sounds like.”

“But it’s the last one. The last time. I want to hear.”

“How do you know it’s the last time?”

“Hell, don’t I know when I’m kicking off?”

“Maybe, maybe not. It’s hardly your decision.”

“It’s not, eh?” Old Donegal fumed. “Well, bigawd you’d think it wasn’t. You’d think it was Martha’s and yours and that damfool medic’s. You’d think I got no say-so. Who’s doing it anyway?”

“I would guess,” Father Paul grunted sourly, “that Providence might appreciate His fair share of the credit.”

Old Donegal made a surly noise and hunched his head back into the pillow to glower.

“You want me?” the priest asked. “Or is this just a case of wifely conscience?”

“What’s the difference? Give me the business and scram.”

“No soap. Do you want the sacrament, or are you just being kind to your wife? If it’s for Martha, I’ll go
now
.”

Old Donegal glared at him for a time, then wilted. The priest brought his bag to the bedside.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”

“Bless you, son.”

“I accuse myself…”

* * * *

Tension, anger, helplessness—they had piled up on him, and now he was feeling the after-effects. Vertigo, nausea, and the black confetti—a bad spell. The whiskey—if he could only reach the whiskey. Then he remembered he was receiving a Sacrament, and struggled to get on with it. Tell him, old man, tell him of your various rottennesses and vile transgressions, if you can remember some. A sin is whatever you’re sorry for, maybe. But Old Donegal, you’re sorry for the wrong things, and this young jesuitical gadget wouldn’t like listening to it. I’m sorry I didn’t get it instead of Oley, and I’m sorry I fought in the war, and I’m sorry I can’t get out of this bed and take a belt to my daughter’s backside for making a puny whelp out of Ken, and I’m sorry I gave Martha such a rough time all these years—and wound up dying in a cheap flat, instead of giving her things like the Keiths had. I wish I had been a sharpster, contractor, or thief…instead of a common laboring spacer, whose species lost its glamor after the war.

Listen, old man, you made your soul yourself, and it’s yours. This young dispenser of oils, substances, and mysteries wishes only to help you scrape off the rough edges and gouge out the bad spots. He will not steal it, nor distort it with his supernatural chisels, nor make fun of it. He can take nothing away, but only cauterize and neutralize, he says, so why not let him try? Tell him the rotten messes.

“Are you finished, my son?”

Old Donegal nodded wearily, and said what he was asked to say, and heard the soft mutter of Latin that washed him inside and behind his ghostly ears…
ego te absolvo in Nomine Patris
…and he accepted the rest of it lying quietly in the candlelight and the red glow of the sunset through the window, while the priest anointed him and gave him bread, and read the words of the soul in greeting its spouse: “I was asleep, but my heart waked; it is the voice of my beloved calling: come to me my love, my dove, my undefiled…” and from beyond the closed window came the sarcastic wail of a clarinet painting hot slides against a rhythmic background.

It wasn’t so bad, Old Donegal thought when the priest was done. He felt like a schoolboy in a starched shirt on Sunday morning, and it wasn’t a bad feeling, though it left him weak.

The priest opened the window for him again, and repacked his bag. “Ten minutes till blast-off,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do about the racket next door.”

When he was gone, Martha came back in, and he looked at her face and was glad. She was smiling when she kissed him, and she looked less tired.

“Is it all right for me to die now?” he grunted.

“Donny, don’t start that again.”

“Where’s the boots? You promised to bring them?”

“They’re in the hall. Donny, you don’t want them.”

“I want them, and I want a drink of whiskey, and I want to hear them fire the beast.” He said it slow and hard, and he left no room for argument.

When she had got the huge boots over his shrunken feet, the magnasoles clanged against the iron bedframe and clung there, and she rolled him up so that he could look at them, and Old Donegal chuckled inside. He felt warm and clean and pleasantly dizzy.

“The whiskey, Martha, and for God’s sake, make them stop the noise till after the firing. Please!”

She went to the window and looked out for a long time. Then she came back and poured him an insignificant drink.

“Well?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I saw Father Paul on the terrace, talking to somebody.”

“Is it time?”

She glanced at the clock, looked at him doubtfully, and nodded. “Nearly time.”

The orchestra finished a number, but the babble of laughing voices continued. Old Donegal sagged. “They won’t do it. They’re the Keiths, Martha. Why should I ruin their party?”

She turned to stare at him, slowly shook her head. He heard someone shouting, but then a trumpet started softly, introducing a new number. Martha sucked in a hurt breath, pressed her hands together, and hurried from the room.

“It’s too late,” he said after her.

Her footsteps stopped on the stairs. The trumpet was alone. Donegal listened; and there was no babble of voices, and the rest of the orchestra was silent. Only the trumpet sang—and it puzzled him, hearing the same slow bugle-notes of the call played at the lowering of the colors.

The trumpet stopped suddenly. Then he knew it had been for him.

A brief hush—then thunder came from the blast-station two miles to the west. First the low reverberation, rattling the windows, then the rising growl as the sleek beast knifed skyward on a column of blue-white hell. It grew and grew until it drowned the distant traffic sounds and dominated the silence outside.

Quit crying, you old fool, you maudlin ass
…

“My boots,” he whispered, “my boots…please…”

“You’ve got them on, Donny.”

He sank quietly then. He closed his eyes and let his heart go up with the beast, and he sank into the gravity padding of the blastroom, and Caid was with him, and Oley. And when Ronald Keith, III, instructed the orchestra to play Blastroom Man, after the beast’s rumble had waned, Old Donegal was on his last moon-run, and he was grinning. He’d had a good day.

Martha went to the window to stare out at the thin black trail that curled starward above the blast-station through the twilight sky. Guests on the terrace were watching it too.

The doorbell rang. That would be Ken, too late. She closed the window against the chill breeze, and went back to the bed. The boots, the heavy, clumsy boots—they clung to the bedframe, with his feet half out of them. She took them off gently and set them out of company’s sight. Then she went to answer the door.

* * * *

Copyright © 1954 by Ziff-Davis, Inc.

The idea of apocalypse, in its different variations, is perhaps one of the most common themes in twentieth-century science fiction and beyond. In itself the concept of the end of our civilization is an ancient anxiety of humankind—as, for example, reflected in the biblical narrative; just as the fear of death is the most common fear of the human being, the fear of the end of its species, and with it, the end of civilization, is the most common collective angst of the human race. Today, however, it also reveals our much more specific concerns with the role of science, technology, and global political power play in contemporary society.

Our perception of science, technology and their implications for the human race has undergone a distinct evolution through modern history. Since at least the epochs of Renaissance and Enlightenment and the tradition of the Western humanist philosophical discourse, the ideas of reason and progress have been central to our conceptualization of the place of the human being in the universe and our relation to and intervention in the surrounding environment. The structures of science, technology and mass education have been key to the belief in the possibility of the progressive betterment of our world. The rapid acceleration of the technological progress in the nineteenth century (development of the steam engine and later internal combustion engine, growth of railroad network in Europe, growing use of electricity, mass production of steel, invention of telegraph and telephone, along with many other inventions and discoveries) is reflected in much of the science fiction of the time, which serves as a testimony to the triumph of human reason and its ability to transform the world through the scientific and technological advancements. One of the prime examples of such largely optimistic science fiction was Jules Verne’s multi-volume series Extraordinary Voyages that enthusiastically commented on the progressive exploration of the planet and future potential of the world of technology. Even Verne, however, was aware of the dangers of irresponsible science.

Contemporary (post-)apocalyptic themes reflect an important shift that happened somewhere between the development of Industrial Revolution and the end of the nineteenth century: namely, our growing questioning of the Western idea of progress. This shift manifested itself in at least a two-fold manner: firstly, in the disillusionment in the power of science to solve social problems and to improve social welfare; and secondly, in the realization of the destructive potential of the modern technology, especially with the formation of global powers and the rise of a threat of major international conflicts. The trauma of World War I with its use of the weapons of mass destruction was a sobering experience that affected millions of people; it was also a convincing proof that science can be put to many uses against humanity. The genre became particularly prominent after World War II and the development of the Cold War with a looming threat of another major military conflict (and a nuclear holocaust). In the following decades, this theme was somewhat overshadowed by the anxiety of ecological disasters, bioengineering hazards and genetic experimentation. Possibly, no other twentieth-century literary genre is as fully engaged with the fragility of human life in the context of the destructive force of the scientific progress.

Although post-apocalyptic science fiction implies an occurrence of some sort of a catastrophic event of global proportions that leads to the extinction or near extinction of the human race, it rarely explains the details of the actual cataclysm. Instead, it focuses on the possibility of survival and revival of the human civilization, and its continuation in whatever form possible. In a rather obvious manner, the sub-genre of post-apocalyptic science fiction combines the elements of survivalist fiction and dystopia. However, if dystopian science fiction examines many ways in which our future can develop in undesirable directions, post-apocalyptic fiction explores much more radical scenarios, such as a complete devastation of the planet through a global military conflict, biowarfare, scientific experiment gone awry, ecological disaster or a combination of several factors. In some odd ways, the very idea of a post-apocalyptic civilization can be treated as optimistic as it implies our belief in the possibility of a clean start. The quote from John Varley’s “The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)” summarizes the strange appeal of “after-the-end” stories:

We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn’t, why would there be so many of them? There’s something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell’s pork and beans, defending one’s family from marauders. Sure, it’s horrible, sure we weep for all those dead people. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive, to start all over.

Secretly, we know we’ll survive. All those other folks will die. That’s what after-the-bomb stories are all about. (Varley, qtd in Adams)

The roots of the post-apocalyptic themes can be found already in nineteenth-century fiction. Mary Shelley is mostly known for one of the first modern science fiction novels,
Frankenstein
. Although
Frankenstein
, without doubt, is one of the darker nineteenth century science fiction novels, and possibly the first one raising the question of scientific ethics, Shelley’s
The Last Man
(1826) can be qualified as one of the first early post-apocalyptic novels in English. It is possible that Mary Shelley was inspired by the 1805 French novel
Le Dernier Homme
(
The Last Man
) by
Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, which was translated into English in 1806. De Grainville’s story presented a dark futuristic vision of a sterile Earth and the end of the human race. Shelley’s novel,
set at the end of the twenty-first century in Europe, tells a story of a plague epidemic that first emerges as a localized phenomenon (during a war in Greece) and gradually spreads throughout the world. Great Britain (and the world) is engulfed in devastation, chaos, plunder, and lawlessness. The main characters struggle for survival and are forced to move across Europe in search of a relatively clean and safe place to live, but there is only one of them remaining at the end, facing the dawn of the twenty-second century. It is interesting to note that the novel was poorly received as both readers and critics were not prepared at the time to entertain Armageddon scenarios. The novel was not reprinted until the 1960s, when the genre came back on a massive scale. Although De Grainville’s and Shelley’s novels may not be classic examples of post-apocalyptic fiction, in both works main characters are faced with the aftermath of the demise of their civilization. De Grainville’s protagonist wanders the empty face of the planet in search of surviving human beings; when faced with the option to father a new race of beings doomed to eternal darkness in a world without the sun, he prefers to die. Shelley’s characters witness the process of the gradual extinction of the human race as the plague slowly spreads across the continents.

The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries witness more examples of literary work engaging with the theme of the dying Earth. H. G. Wells in his 1895 novel
The Time Machine
explores the idea of a gradual degeneration of the human civilization, seemingly left without a purpose. As the protagonist continues to travel into a more distant future, thirty million years ahead, he witnesses a bleak picture of a dying planet, with very few simple life forms left and, as he ventures further in time, the end of the Sun’s cycle and, by implication, the end of the living Earth. Although in itself an apocalyptic (rather than post-apocalyptic) novel, it raises questions about the possibility of human survival on a physically declining planet and the role of human reason, social structure and intelligent social purpose in the continuation of the human race. Many critics also see elements of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre in Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), which explores the theme of a massive alien invasion. A lesser known novel, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), is closer to the treatment of the post-apocalyptic subject matter. In Hodgson’s fictional world, the Earth is plunged into darkness due to the dying sun, and the surviving few millions of the human race are living in a huge pyramid structure (the Last Redoubt, a megapolis of sorts) that protects them from the antagonistic outside forces, the nature of which remains ambivalent. The novel deals with the theme of survival of a small oasis of the remaining human civilization facing a hostile environment. At the end, the novel may be interpreted as having an optimistic ending as the narrator comes out victorious after having undertaken a mission outside the Last Redoubt; it may be assumed that there is a hope for the remaining humanity to survive. The same year saw the publication of Jack London’s novella The Scarlet Plague (1912), which takes place in the futuristic San Francisco some decades after a plague wipes out most of the planet’s population.

The sub-genre of post-apocalyptic science fiction becomes fully developed in the second half of the twentieth century. A number of genre-defining novels appear in the 1940s and ’50s. Thus, George R. Stewart’s
Earth Abides
(1949) continues to develop the idea of struggle for survival after a global epidemic. Richard Matheson’s
I Am Legend
(1954) deals with a mass-scale spread of a manmade virus as a result of which infected people develop symptoms of vampirism. The novel has distinct elements of the horror genre and becomes influential for the later zombie (post-)apocalypse tradition. There are several screen adaptations of the book:
The Last Man on Earth
(1964),
The Omega Man
(1971), and, more recently,
I Am Legend
(2007). In
The Death Of Grass
(1956), John Christopher (pen name of Samuel Youd) explores a post-apocalyptic world following a global famine caused by a grass-attacking virus; the novel was later revisited in the film
No Blade Of Grass
(1970).

It is, however, the aftermath of WWII, the atomic bombing of Japan and the growing anxiety of the possible repetition of a global military conflict and of a threat of a nuclear holocaust that provide material for a lot of the post-apocalyptic fiction of the time. In 1960, Walter M. Miller Jr., by that time the author of a substantive body of science fiction short prose, published A Canticle for Leibowitz, which became a canonical work of the post-apocalyptic science fiction. The novel is a poignant, but also a witty and parodic commentary on the idea of an almost complete annihilation of life on Earth as a result of a nuclear disaster and a subsequent gradual rebuilding of a civilization. As part of his military service during the Second World War, Walter Miller participated in the bombing and destruction of the ancient Roman Catholic monastery in Monte Cassino, Italy, which was founded by St. Benedict in the sixth century. The ensuing trauma and the feeling of responsibility for the irreparable loss of an important part of our cultural and spiritual heritage led him to write a short story and, eventually, a novel influenced by his personal experience.

The plot of
A Canticle for Leibowitz
is set in a depopulated southwestern desert on the territory of the former United States six centuries after the civilization on Earth is destroyed as a result of a global nuclear conflict in the twentieth century. The story revolves around the life of a Catholic monastic order founded by a converted Jewish military engineer, Isaac Leibowitz, who survived the nuclear war (called “Flame Deluge” in the novel) and founded the order. Leibowitz belonged to the movement of “bookleggers” who were dedicated to saving whatever little was left of the books and protecting them from destruction by the supporters of “simplification,” a movement that was a reaction against advanced technological knowledge that was perceived to have resulted in the nuclear holocaust. Leibowitz’s order serves the role of primarily recovering and preserving the knowledge lost in the war. Later Leibowitz is martyred by the “simpleton” mob and is eventually beautified by the church, thus also becoming part of the perpetuation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The novel’s plot develops around the life of the order through three chronological parts, each one of them roughly corresponding to what is recognizable as the (new) Middle Ages, Renaissance, and a variation of a technologically advanced capitalist society. Apart from the relationship between the church, state, and the institution of knowledge, Miller also engages with the problems of epistemology (concerned with the nature and validity of knowledge): instability and unreliability of knowledge, oral or recorded; human memory; and the interpretive—and thus highly subjective and variable — nature of our cognition. The writer emphasizes our inability to know the past and to interpret material data; for example, one of the lighter moments in the novel involves the monastic order’s revered treatment of one of the historic “memorabilia” which strongly resembles a mundane twentieth-century shopping list scribbled on a piece of paper. Part of Miller’s commentary on the evolution of our civilization consists in postulating its cyclical nature with an inevitable self-destruction when technological advancement reaches a certain point of self-saturation. The novel ends in another nuclear war thus perpetuating the cycle of self-annihilation. Although we may assume that a rebirth will follow, it is a largely pessimistic interpretation of history repeating itself.