Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (273 page)

Another science fiction writer who rose to prominence in the 1960s and remained productive through the 1970s was Philip K. Dick, known for his overwhelmingly dystopian vision of the future. In one of his novels,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(1968), the post-apocalyptic setting becomes especially significant. In the aftermath of World War Terminus and a massive nuclear fallout, the surviving population of the Earth is struggling with progressively deteriorating life conditions. Although the novel evolves mostly around a conflict between humans and androids, Dick’s treatment of the post-nuclear disaster world engages in an exploration of other issues, such as the devastating ecological consequences of the nuclear war. Most animal species are extinct, and those still surviving are listed in catalogues and offered for sale. In what appears to be an echo of a typical consumer society, owning certain things is still prestigious, but, ironically, through a radical change of values, status is no longer attributed to real estate or luxury cars, which are worth nothing, but to the ownership of authentic live animals. Prestige, however, is not the only stimulus as the need for empathy for the disappearing life on Earth and the humanity’s angst in the face of its looming loneliness assumes a major driving force. Anxiety caused by the rise of simulacra is another prominent theme as synthetic food, synthetic animals and androids threaten to replace the disappearing biological life on the planet. The classic screen adaptation of the novel, Blade Runner (1982, dir. Ridley Scott), became known for its haunting and highly aestheticized post-apocalyptic setting of urban decay.

During the 1960s–80s, the post-apocalyptic sub-genre flourished, both in short prose and in the novelistic form. Select other examples include Harlan Ellison’s Nebula Award–winning classic short story “A Boy and His Dog” (1969), where the writer explores a world in the aftermath of a global nuclear war with most of the surviving population living in underground structures and very few remaining above ground. The story develops around a teenage boy and his dog who continue to live on the contaminated surface and scavenge for food, while later developments lead him to an underground city. The story was made into one of the better cinematic examples of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre (
A Boy and His Dog
, 1974, dir. L. Q. Jones). J. G. Ballard’s novel
The Drowned World
(1962) examines the devastating consequences of global climate change. Frank Herbert’s
The White Plague
(1982) looks at a possibility of a deadly global epidemic, and
Emergence
by David R. Palmer (1984)—at the global aftereffects of a manmade virus.
Outside of the anglophone tradition, Stanislaw Lem’s tongue-in-cheek
The Futurological Congress
(1971) explores an overpopulated, dying world with depleted resources where the illusion of a wealthy consumer society is maintained by mass administration of psychotropic drugs. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) is an influential impact-genre novel where a global cataclysm is caused by a collision with a comet. The idea of a deep impact (post-)apocalypse will be revisited in much of later fiction and film. In 1986, Walter M. Miller, Jr. and Martin H. Greenberg published an anthology of post-apocalyptic short prose Beyond Armageddon: Twenty-One Sermons to the Dead.

Over the last couple of decades the genre of post-apocalyptic science fiction has only increased in popularity, with its themes leaning toward ecological disasters, biogenetic experimentation, and post–peak oil scenarios. Among the more recent contributions to the subgenre is Margaret Atwood’s novel
Oryx and Crake
(2003), which explores the consequences of irresponsible genetic engineering. In a not-so-distant world where the Earth’s population has been wiped out in a global epidemic caused by a genetically modified bioform there is only one human survivor who co-exists with a group of “Crakers,” odd humanlike beings, and a variety of strange animal species, all of which turn out to be a result of genetic experimentation. The protagonist’s memory flashbacks of his past life reveal a disturbing dystopian world of biotechnological corporations, extreme social segregation and consumerism, and an experiment to create a “better” human race. The story does not have a conclusive ending as to the future of the human civilization. Oryx and Crake was followed by the publication of The Year of the Flood (2009), which develops further the same post-apocalyptic plot but with a set of different characters. Another recent novel is Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Road (2006), where the author creates an extremely grim picture of a near-future post-apocalyptic world. Although the nature of the cataclysm that destroys the civilization on Earth is not clear, the almost complete collapse of the biosphere is obvious as a father and a son embark on a journey of survival across an unidentified part of America. Apart from environmental consequences, the degradation of the surviving population and its turn to a nomadic cannibalistic lifestyle is another important theme. The main characters’ journey is a meditation on humanity at its end. The recent post-peak oil fiction includes Last Light (2007) and Afterlight (2010) by Alex Scarrow and World Made by Hand (2008) by James Kunstler. The novels, although largely different in style, explore our world at the end of oil supply. Kunstler engages with long-term consequences of such a scenario, creating a world where civilization has come to a stop, all familiar social structures have collapsed, population is thinning, and people are forced to revert to pre-industrial, artisanal modes of production in a largely agrarian setting. Kunstler’s thought experiment is a commentary and a critique of today’s rampant unsustainable consumerism, exhaustion of natural resources, and the human race’s growing separation from the means of production and loss of skills necessary to sustain itself outside the structures of a post-industrial society.

The post-apocalyptic sub-genre has also enjoyed a growing popularity in other media: film, television, visual arts, comics, computer games, digital fan fiction. Film, as an older medium utilizing big-screen special effects and visual appeal, has an especially rich and diverse tradition ranging from experimental art film and
auteur
film to mainstream blockbuster industry. The first category includes examples such as Chris Marker’s experimental French film
La jetée
(
The Jetty
, 1962), made almost entirely of still shots in black and white and later remade by Terry Gilliam into
12 Monkeys
(1995); Andrei Tarkovsky’s
The Stalker
(1979) with hauntingly memorable scenes of a post-alien-visitation apocalyptic setting; Yasuaki Nakajima’s black-and-white post–World War III
After the Apocalypse
(2004), a film with no dialogue. The mainstream tradition, apart from the titles already mentioned, includes classics and more recent films such as
Deluge
(1933),
On the Beach
(1959),
In the Year 2889
(1967),
Planet of the Apes
(1968),
Mad Max 2
and
3
(1981, 1985),
The Quiet Earth
(1985),
Waterworld
(1995),
The Day After Tomorrow
(2004),
Doomsday
(2008),
20 Years After
(2008),
2012
(2009),
The Road
(2009). The television tradition has classics of its own: the 1970s BBC three-part series
Survivors
featured a post-apocalyptic depopulated world after a disaster caused by a genetically engineered virus. Proving the longevity of the nuclear holocaust theme, in 1983 ABC aired The Day After, which focused on the graphic aftermath of a nuclear conflict between the NATO forces and the Soviet bloc. Only a year later, BBC aired Threads (1984), a series on the same topic. The more recent television series that develop various aspects of the theme of post-apocalypse include Showtime’s Jeremiah (2002–04), CBS’s Jericho (2006–08), Discovery Channel’s The Colony (2009–10), and AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010– ). The human race will always ponder its beginnings and its end. Notwithstanding our obsessive contemplation of the end, there will be hope as long as the “after-the-end” imagination is kept alive.

References

Adams, John Joseph. “Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction.”
The Internet Review of Science Fiction
(January 2004) http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10013 February 27, 2011.

Curtis, Claire
. Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: “we’ll not go home again.”
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010.

Heffernan, Teresa.
Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel
. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008.

Paik, Peter Y.
From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe
. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

Rosen, Elisabeth.
Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination
. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008.

Varley, John. “The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)” http://www.varley.net/Pages/Manhattan.htm March 2, 2011.

* * * *

Dr. Irene Sywenky
is Assistant Professor in the Program of Comparative Literature and Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has published, taught undergraduate courses, and supervised graduate research in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales. Other areas of her research expertise include postmodernism and postcolonialism.

(1903–1978)

There are many conflicting life stories of Joseph Ward Moore floating around: Was he expelled from high school for political activism or did he quit to focus on writing? Did he actually raise goats? What is undeniable is that he had a deep focus on ecology and sustainable living long before the modern environmental movement existed, and wrote powerful stories about the potential environmental pitfalls of bioengineering. He also wrote one of the key works of alternate history, and “Bring the Jubilee,” in its various forms, remains widely read today.

After leaving school in New York City, Moore drifted around to various places, including Chicago and Milwaukee, working various jobs both related (book store clerk) and unrelated (sheet-metal worker) to writing. He moved to California during the Depression in 1929, where he lived (mostly) for the rest of his life. Moore married Lorna Lenzi in 1942, and they had seven children.

Moore’s first novel,
Breathe the Air Again
(1942), concerned labor struggles in California during the Great Depression.
Greener Than You Think
(1947), Moore’s first SF novel, was about the eco-disaster caused when a bio-engineered grass overruns the world. “Bring the Jubilee” was published in
F&SF
1952 (and in book form the following year), and firmly cemented his reputation in the SF field. Although never prolific, Moore continued to write SF stories fairly regularly through the 1950s, then completed only two more novels in the last two decades of his life. His paired stories “Lot” (1953) and “Lot’s Daughter” (1954), which used Biblical parallels to look at nuclear holocaust, were the basis of the movie Panic in the Year Zero!

First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, November 1952

What he will he does, and does so much

That proof is call’d impossibility.

—
Troilus and Cressida

It is always the puzzle of the nature of time that brings our thoughts to a standstill. And if time is so fundamental that an understanding of its true nature is for ever beyond our reach, then so also in all probability is a decision in the age-long controversy between determination and free will.

—
The Mysterious Universe
, by James Jeans

I.

LIFE IN THE TWENTY-SIX STATES

Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921. Neither the dates nor the tenses are error—let me explain:

I was born, as I say, in 1921, but it was not until the early 1930s, when I was about ten, that I began to understand what a peculiarly frustrated and disinherited world was about me. Perhaps my approach to realization was through the crayon portrait of Granpa Hodgins which hung, very solemnly, over the mantel.

Granpa Hodgins, after whom I was named, perhaps a little grandiloquently, Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, had been a veteran of the War of Southron Independence. Like so many young men he had put on a shapeless blue uniform in response to the call of the ill-advised and headstrong—or martyred—Mr. Lincoln. Depending on which of my lives’ viewpoints you take.

Granpa lost an arm on the Great Retreat to Philadelphia after the fall of Washington to General Lee’s victorious Army of Northern Virginia, so his war ended some six months before the capitulation at Reading and the acknowledgment of the independence of the Confederate States on July 4, 1864. One-armed and embittered, Granpa came home to Wappinger Falls and, like his fellow veterans, tried to remake his life in a different and increasingly hopeless world.

On its face the Peace of Richmond was a just and even generous disposition of a defeated foe by the victor. (Both sides—for different reasons—remembered the mutiny of the Unreconstructed Federals in the Armies of the Cumberland and the Tennessee who, despite defeat at Chattanooga, could not forget Vicksburg or Port Hudson and fought bloodily against the order to surrender.) The South could easily have carved the country up to suit its most fiery patriots, even to the point of detaching the West and making a protectorate of it. Instead, the chivalrous Southrons contented themselves with drawing the new boundary along traditional lines. The Mason-Dixon gave them Delaware and Maryland, but they generously returned the panhandle of western Virginia jutting above it. Missouri was naturally included in the Confederacy, but of the disputed territory Colorado and Deseret were conceded to the old Union; only Kansas and California as well as—for obvious defensive reasons—Nevada’s tip went to the South.

But the Peace of Richmond had also laid the cost of the war on the beaten North, and this was what crippled Granpa Hodgins more than the loss of his arm. The postwar inflation entered the galloping stage during the Vallandigham Administration, became dizzying in the time of President Seymour, and precipitated the food riots of 1873 and ’74. It was only after the election of President Butler by the Whigs in 1876 and the reorganization and drastic deflation following that money and property became stable, but by this time all normal values were destroyed. Meanwhile the indemnities had to be paid regularly in gold. Granpa and hundreds of thousands like him just never seemed to get back on their feet.

How well I remember, as a small boy in the 1920s and ’30s, my mother and father talking bitterly of how the war had ruined everything. They were not speaking of the then fairly recent Emperors’ War of 1914–16, but of the War of Southron Independence which still, nearly seventy years later, blighted what was left of the United States.

Nor were they unique or peculiar in this. Men who slouched in the smithy while Father shod their horses, or gathered every month around the post office waiting for the notice of the winning lottery numbers to be put up, as often cursed the Confederates or discussed what might have been if Meade had been a better general or Lee a worse one, as they did the new-type bicycles with clockwork auxiliaries to make pedaling uphill easier, or the latest scandal about the French emperor Napoleon VI.

I tried to imagine what it must have been like in Granpa Hodgins’s day, to visualize the lost past—that strange bright era when, if it could be believed, folk like ourselves and our neighbors had owned their farms outright and didn’t pay rent to the bank or give half the crop to a landlord. I searched the wiggling crayon lines that composed Granpa Hodgins’s face for some sign that set him apart from his descendants.

“But what did he
do
to lose the farm?” I used to ask my mother.

“Do? Didn’t do anything. Couldn’t help himself. Go along now and do your chores; I’ve a terrible batch of work to get out.”

How could Granpa’s not doing anything result so disastrously? I could not understand this any more than I could the bygone time when a man could nearly always get a job for wages which would support himself and a family, before the system of indenture became so common that practically the only alternative to pauperism was to sell oneself to a company.

Indenting I understood all right, for there was a mill in Wappinger Falls which wove a shoddy cloth very different from the goods my mother produced on her hand loom. Mother, even in her late forties, could have indented there for a good price, and she admitted that the work would be easier than weaving homespun to compete with their product. But, as she used to say with an obstinate shake of her head, “Free I was born and free I’ll die.”

In Granpa Hodgins’s day, if one could believe the folktales or family legends, men and women married young and had large families; there might have been five generations between him and me instead of two. And many uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers, and sisters. Now late marriages and only children were the rule.

If it hadn’t been for the war…This was the basic theme stated with variations suited to the particular circumstance. If it hadn’t been for the war the most energetic young men and women would not turn to emigration; visiting foreigners would not come as to a slum; and the great powers would think twice before sending troops to restore order every time one of their citizens was molested. If it hadn’t been for the war the detestable buyer from Boston— detestable to my mother, but rather fascinating to me with his brightly colored vest and smell of soap and hair tonic— would not have come regularly to offer her a miserable price for her weaving.

“Foreigner!” she would always exclaim after he left; “Sending good cloth out of the country.”

Once my father ventured, “He’s only doing what he’s paid for.”

“Trust a Backmaker to stand up for foreigners. Like father, like son; suppose you’d let the whole thieving crew in if you had your way.”

So was first hinted the scandal of Grandfather Backmaker. No enlarged portrait of him hung anywhere, much less over the mantel. I got the impression my father’s father had been not only a foreigner by birth, but a shady character in his own right, a man who kept on believing in the things for which Granpa Hodgins fought after they were proved wrong. I don’t know how I learned that Grandfather Backmaker had made speeches advocating equal rights for Negroes or protesting the mass lynchings so popular in the North, in contrast to the humane treatment accorded these noncitizens in the Confederacy. Nor do I remember where I heard he had been run out of several places before finally settling in Wappinger Falls or that all his life people had muttered darkly at his back, “Dirty Abolitionist! ”—a very deep imprecation indeed. I only know that as a consequence of this taint my father, a meek, hardworking, worried little man, was completely dominated by my mother who never let him forget that a Hodgins or a McCormick was worth dozens of Backmakers.

I must have been a sore trial to her for I showed no sign of proper Hodgins gumption, such as she displayed herself and which surely kept us all—though precariously—free. For one thing I was remarkably unhandy and awkward, of little use in the hundred necessary chores around our dilapidated house. I could not pick up a hammer at her command to do something about fixing the loose weatherboards on the east side without mashing my thumb or splitting the aged, unpainted wood. I could not hoe the kitchen garden without damaging precious vegetables and leaving weeds intact. I could shovel snow in the winter at a tremendous rate for I was strong and had endurance, but work requiring manual dexterity baffled me. I fumbled in harnessing Bessie, our mare, or hitching her to the cart for my father’s trips to Poughkeepsie, and as for helping him on the farm or in his smithy, I’m afraid my efforts drove that mild man nearest to a temper he ever came. He would lay the reins on the plowhorse’s back or his hammer down on the anvil and say mournfully:

“Better see if you can help your mother, Hodge. You’re only in my way here.”

On only one score did I come near pleasing Mother: I learned to read and write early, and exhibited some proficiency. But even here there was a flaw; she looked upon literacy as something which distinguished Hodginses and McCormicks from the ruck who had to make their mark, as an accomplishment which might somehow and unspecifically lead away from poverty. I found reading an end in itself, which probably reminded her of my father’s laxity or Grandfather Backmaker’s subversion.

“Make something of yourself, Hodge,” she admonished me often. “You can’t change the world”—an obvious allusion to Grandfather Backmaker—“but you can do something with it as it is if you try hard enough. There’s always some way out.”

Yet she did not approve of the post-office lottery, on which so many pinned their hopes of escape from poverty or indenture. In this she and my father were agreed; both believed in hard work rather than chance.

Still, chance could help even the steadiest toiler. I remember the time a minibile—one of the small, trackless locomotives—broke down not a quarter of a mile from Father’s smithy. This was a golden, unparalleled, unbelievable opportunity. Minibiles, like any other luxury, were rare in the United States, though they were common enough in prosperous countries such as the German Union or the Confederacy. We had to rely for our transportation on the never-failing horse or on the railroads, worn out and broken down as they were. For decades the great issue in Congress was the never-completed Pacific transcontinental line, though British America had one and the Confederate States seven. (Sailing balloons, economical and fairly common, were still looked upon with some suspicion.) Only a rare millionaire, with connections in Frankfurt, Washington-Baltimore, or Leesburg, could afford to indulge in a costly and complicated minibile requiring a trained driver to bounce it over the rutted and chuckholed roads. Only an extraordinarily adventurous spirit would leave the tar-surfaced streets of New York or its sister city of Brooklyn, where the minibiles’ solid rubber tires could at worst find traction on the horse or cablecar rails, for the morasses or washboard roads which were the only highways north of the Harlem River.

When one did, the jolting, jouncing, and shaking inevitably broke or disconnected one of the delicate parts in its complex mechanism. Then the only recourse—apart from telegraphing back to the city if the traveler broke down near an instrument—was the closest blacksmith. Smiths rarely knew much of the principles of the minibiles, but with the broken part before them they could fabricate a passable duplicate and, unless the machine had suffered severe damage, put it back in place. It was customary for such a craftsman to compensate himself for the time taken away from horseshoeing or spring-fitting—or just absently chewing on an oat straw—by demanding exorbitant remuneration, amounting to perhaps twenty-five or thirty cents an hour, thus avenging his rural poverty and self-sufficiency upon the effete wealth and helplessness of the urban excursionist.

Such a golden opportunity befell my father, as I said, during the fall of 1933, when I was twelve. The driver had made his way to the smithy, leaving the owner of the minibile marooned and fuming in the enclosed passenger seat. A hasty visit convinced Father, who could repair a clock or broken rake with equal dexterity, that his only course was to bring the machine to the forge where he could heat and straighten a part not easy to disassemble. (The driver, the owner, and Father all repeated the name of the part often enough, but so inept have I been with “practical” things all my life that I couldn’t recall it ten minutes, much less thirty years later.)

“Hodge, run and get the mare and ride over to Jones’s. Don’t try to saddle her—go bareback. Ask Mr. Jones to kindly lend me his team.”

“I’ll give the boy a quarter dollar for himself if he’s back with the team in twenty minutes,” added the owner of the minibile, sticking his head out of the window.

I won’t say I was off like the wind, for my life’s work has given me a distaste for exaggeration or hyperbole, but I moved faster than I ever had before. A quarter, a whole shining silver quarter, a day’s full wage for the boy who could find odd jobs, half the day’s pay of a grown man who wasn’t indented or worked extra hours—all for myself, to spend as I wished!

I ran all the way back to the barn, led Bessie out by her halter, and jumped on her broad back, my enthralling daydream growing and deepening each moment. With my quarter safely got I could perhaps persuade my father to take me along on his next trip to Poughkeepsie; in the shops there I could find some yards of figured cotton for Mother, or a box of cigars to which Father was partial but rarely bought for himself, or an unimagined something for Mary McCutcheon, some three years older than I, with whom it had so recently become disturbing as well as imperative to wrestle, in secret of course so as not to show oneself unmanly in sporting with a weak girl instead of another boy.