Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (611 page)

The next category of apocalyptic survivalism narratives reacts not to modern warfare or dangerous technology but to natural disasters and environmental collapse. An early example of this is
The Death of Grass
(1956) by Samuel Youd, a novel about a global famine that forces John Custance and Roger Buckley to compromise their values as they struggle to protect and provide for their families. Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven’s 1977 novel
Lucifer’s Hammer
weaves a similar tale of survival in the wake of a comet colliding with the Earth. Before the global devastation of the impact and the resulting tsunamis, people begin hoarding foodstuffs and making preparations for survival. After the “Hammerfall,” the survivors of the flooding gravitate into different communities and strongholds, and an entirely new social order is created that values useable skills and resorts to violence to protect not only people but also supplies. Kevin Reynolds’ rather infamous film
Waterworld
(1995) represents another example of environmental destruction, this time a world that has been transformed because of extreme global warming. With the melting of the polar ice caps, the entire planet is covered by water, and a new civilization has arisen composed exclusively of ships, boats, and rafts. The Mariner (Kevin Costner) is a mutant dirt trader who fights the sinister Smokers and leads a group of survivors to the dry land of Mount Everest.3

Finally, three exemplary post-apocalypse survivalism narratives that explore brutal survivalism after the end of modern civilization include Harlan Ellison’s
A Boy and His Dog
(1969), George Miller’s 1979 film
Mad Max
, and Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning 2006 novel
The Road
. Ellison’s tale, as well as the L.Q. Jones movie from 1975 starring Don Johnson, charts the violent and sexual survivalist adventures of Vic, a teenage boy with no conscience or sense of morality. Guided only by his psychic dog Blood, Vic must avoid marauders, androids, and genetic mutants in his seemingly never-ending quest for food and women. In
Mad Max
, Australia has become a dystopian wasteland in which Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) strives not only to keep his family safe but also to combat lawless biker gangs as a member of the Main Force Patrol. Tragically, Max’s wife and son are murdered as part of gang retaliation, and the movie becomes more of a revenge picture than a survivalism narrative. McCarthy’s
The Road
, in contrast, is hardly anything
but
a tale of survival, the story of a bleak road trip undertaken to keep the unnamed protagonist’s son alive. The two struggle through sterile landscapes and erratic weather, running from roaming gangs of cannibals and scavenging the most meager of provisions to keep themselves going.

Survivalism has clearly thrived in both castaway adventures and in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic tales, but one of the most popular survivalism subgenres, if the least likely or realistic, is the zombie invasion narrative. Although many of these stories simply emphasize the destruction of society at the rotting hands of the reanimated dead, the more sophisticated texts focus on the needs of the struggling survivors both to remain alive and to reestablish and rebuild society. The first of the apocalyptic zombie films, George A. Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead
(1968), is at its heart a survivalist narrative, being based primarily on Matheson’s
I Am Legend
(Martin). Over the course of the movie, the antihero Ben (Duane Jones) systematically fortifies the rustic farmhouse where he and the other survivors of the zombie invasion are hiding, nailing boards across the windows and doors, fashioning crude Molotov cocktails, and shooting at the encroaching monsters with a rifle. As the film takes place over the course of one night only, the plot focuses not on eliminating all the zombies or finding a cure for their infection, but simply on staying alive until morning. Unfortunately, things go badly for the rag-tag group of antagonistic survivors: their efforts to refuel a truck fail disastrously, the men turn violently against one another, the house’s fortifications fail, and everyone in the house is eventually killed.

Later zombie movies expand the scope of their narratives beyond survival on the short term and instead address efforts at long-term existence. In Romero’s third zombie film, 1985’s
Day of the Dead
, a group of dysfunctional survivalists, including both soldiers and scientists, hide in a Cold War-era bunker, filled with food, weapons, medicine, and other supplies. Rather than being content with just waiting the apocalypse out, however, the survivors work diligently to locate other survivors and to find a way to domesticate the walking dead. Sadly, their efforts on both fronts fail, and the film ends with only a glimmer of hope for the future. Romero’s
Land of the Dead
(2005), on the other hand, depicts a community that appears to be thriving despite the raging zombie apocalypse. Residents of the Fiddler’s Green apartment building enjoy most of the luxuries of their former existence; unfortunately, their opulent lifestyle is only made possible by the desperate efforts of an impoverished, proletarian labor force, and the entire façade eventually collapses against an invading army of quasi-sentient zombies. Only Robert Kirkman’s sprawling
The Walking Dead
graphic novel series (2003– ) has managed to look at the long-term survivalist efforts that would be necessary to outlast a global zombie pandemic. His series, now also a television program on AMC, explores what humans would have to be willing to do to secure the food, fuel, shelter, and safety necessary for survival.

Survivalism exists across the literary spectrum, from action adventure to science fiction to horror, but what accounts for the popularity and longevity of this subgenre and its associated tropes? On the one hand, survivalist narratives provide the catharsis we need to face an uncertain future and potential social, political, and global destruction. On the other, watching others survive against terrible odds is both exciting and fun—in many ways, we wish we could be there with them. The survivalist fantasy thus indulges our hubris that we are smart enough, advanced enough, and strong enough to overcome any challenge or obstacle, but the post-apocalyptic scenario also gives us a world in which anything and everything we may want or need is ripe for the taking. A. Loudermilk calls this idealized depiction of the apocalypse the “Mall Fantasia” (93), a kind of capitalist utopia with commodities but no currency. Boris Sagal’s 1971 film version of I Am Legend, The Ωmega Man, includes a famous scene in which Robert Neville (Charlton Heston), in need of a new sports car, simply takes one from a dealership, driving it nonchalantly through the showroom’s plate-glass window. Such a consumerist fantasy is repeated, with minor variations, in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), Thom Eberhardt’s Night of the Comet (1984), and most recently in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004).

Of course, the popularity of the survivalist fantasy is not limited to the realm of fiction alone; a real-world obsession can be seen in the number of survivalist guides, handbooks, training courses, clubs, and online communities that exist today. Real people can prove themselves in the manner of Robinson Crusoe on a number of reality television shows, including the Swedish Expedition Robinson (1997– ) and the US series Survivor (2000– ), and a post-apocalyptic community of survivors can test their mettle and resourcefulness on the Discovery Channel’s televised “experiment, The Colony (2009–10). Even those convinced a real zombie apocalypse is just days away can diligently prepare themselves by devouring the pages of Max Brooks’ bestselling The Zombie Survival Guide (2003). The bottom line is that we as a society love stories of perseverance, struggle, and survival, and although this trope can most often be found within the bounds of science fiction narratives, our world resembles such scenarios more and more with each passing year. In fact, these fictions may just be the very things that save our lives someday, as long as we have been paying close attention.

Works Cited

Klotz, Irene. “Journeying to Mars—on a One-Way Ticket.”
Discovery News
. Discovery Communications, 1 Nov. 2010. Web. 27 Nov. 2010.

Loudermilk, A. “Eating
Dawn
in the Dark.”
Journal of Consumer Culture
3.1 (2003): 83–108.

Martin, Perry, dir.
The Dead Will Walk
. Disc 4.
Dawn of the Dead
ultimate ed. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

Ross, Angus. Introduction.
Robinson Crusoe
. By Daniel Defoe. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985. 7–21. Print.

Notes

¹
In fact, Heinlein may soon be proven prescient, as scientists Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies reason that “sending astronauts—particularly ones past their reproductive years—on one-way journeys to Mars is the most economical way to pioneer the space frontier and establish humans as a multi-planet species” (Klotz).

²
This microgenre continues despite the end of the Cold War, as evidenced by the short-lived CBS television series
Jericho
(2006–2008).

³
In recent years, such tales of environmental destruction and the resultant struggles for survival have become popular in young adult literature as well, as with Susan Beth Pfeffer’s
Life as We Knew It
(2006).

* * * *

Dr. Kyle William Bishop
is a third-generation professor at Southern Utah University, where he teaches courses in American literature and culture, film studies, fantasy literature, and English composition. He has presented and published a variety of articles on popular culture and cinematic adaptation, including
Metropolis
,
Night of the Living Dead
,
Fight Club
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, and
Dawn of the Dead
. He received a PhD in English from the University of Arizona in 2009, and his first book,
American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture
, is now available through McFarland & Co., Publishers.

(1952– and 1954– )

Jim and Debra were two of the first writers I worked with in my first publishing job. They had a reputation for being good storytellers who were fast and professional if you were in a crunch and needed, say, a new Tom Swift book by next Thursday. Over the years I found they weren’t just good at rescuing books, but seem to have a unique ability to show up in a crisis with genuinely helpful skills. Perhaps as a result of all this rescuing, Jim has become a widely known expert on publishing scams, has been a sysop and moderator for many genre-related internet sites, and spends his non-writing time as an EMT on rescue crews in mountainous northern New Hampshire.

When they met through Philadelphia-area fandom and married, Jim was a Navy man from New York State and Debra was a Texas-born Ivy League grad student finishing her doctorate in Medieval and Icelandic literature. Jim’s military career took them to Panama, where their transition to the writing life started in an odd way: during the “torture” phase of jungle school training, Jim resisted by writing a werewolf story in his head. While recovering afterward, he wrote down the rough story, Debra polished it into publishability, and they sold it as “Bad Blood” (1988, eventually expanded into a three-book young adult series).

As they made the transition into a field which did not require torture training, Jim and Debra became a major part of the space opera revival of the early 1990s, combining traditional adventure with more contemporary views of gender and society.
Price of the Stars
(1992) and its sequels formed the popular Mageworlds series, and they’ve written more than thirty books in all. Recently they’ve turned to historical fantasy such as
Land of Mist and Snow
(2006) and
Lincoln’s Sword
(2010). One of their four children is an editor and author herself.

The post-apocalyptic coming of age story they chose for this book was inspired, in part, by images of soldiers in full chemical warfare gear, and wondering how they’d look to a character with no frame of reference to understand what he’s seeing. The story was later expanded into the 1996 novel
Groogleman
.

First published in
Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters
, 1993

In the First Year came the Plague, and in the Tenth Year the Burning, and afterwards came the Grooglemen out of the Dead Lands….

—A History of the New World From the Beginning to the Present Day, by Absolom Steerforth, Speaker of the Amity Crossroads Assembly.

Groogleman, groogleman,

Take one in three.

Groogleman, groogleman,

Don’t take me.

—Children’s Counting-Out Rhyme, Foothills District.

* * * *

Daniel Henchard was sixteen and a bit, and Leezie Johnson was almost fourteen, when the grooglemen came down out of the mountains into the new-settled country.

The grooglemen came between hay-making and harvest-time, on a moonless night when the lightning flashed and the thunder boomed across the hills. In the dawn, a column of smoke rose from the Johnson homestead off to the east. Those of the Henchards who were eating breakfast in the kitchen saw the smoke, and made up their minds to go have a look. They would see the trouble and help if they could, for the Henchards and the Johnsons were kin as well as neighbors.

The Johnson place was more than an hour away to run, and longer at a walk. It was mid-morning before the farmhouse came into view, and what the Henchards saw then was as bad as could be. The whole house was burnt, and the ashes gone white from burning out without being quenched—the outbuildings too, and never a sight of living man or beast.

The farmyard told the rest of the story: nine burned patches in a straight row, nine tidy black rectangles on the hard-packed earth, and in each rectangle, a lump of burnt bone and blackened meat. Dan Henchard said later that you could tell which one was which, almost—the big one would have been Rafe, who was tall, and at the end of the row, the little patch no more than two feet long and half that wide, that one would have been the baby. Its bones were gone entirely.

“The grooglemen,” said Aunt Min Henchard.

“There’s only nine here,” Sam Henchard said. He was the oldest of the Henchard brothers, and Dan’s father. “There were ten Johnsons.”

“Sometimes the grooglemen take one back with them to their castle,” said Bartolmy Henchard—Aunt Min’s husband, and Sam’s brother. “There’s worse things than being dead, and that’s one of them. I hear sometimes the grooglemen get hungry.”

“Who is it that’s missing?” asked young Dan Henchard.

“Leezie,” said Uncle Joshua. He’d been standing by, saying nothing, for that was his way. “None of her size here,” he said, nodding at the row.

Uncle Joshua wasn’t anyone’s blood uncle, but a wanderer who’d come by the Henchard farm one day two winters gone, traveling on foot from some place farther north. He wasn’t much of a farmer, but when he went off into the woods for a day or a week at a time with his long flintlock rifle, he always came back with meat. He brought in more than enough food to earn his keep, and in the evenings by the fireside he told marvelous stories of distant lands.

So he stayed on, and became a part of the family by courtesy if not in fact. Aunt Min said he was only waiting for Leezie Johnson to grow old enough for a husband, and then they’d both be off to whatever foreign place it was whose accent still marked Joshua’s speech. Dan Henchard had always hoped that Min was wrong, because Leezie had been like a sister to him while they were young, and he would miss her sorely if she grew up to marry an outlander and leave the settlement. But even that was better than being dead, or a prisoner of the grooglemen.

“We have to bury them,” Sam Henchard said.

“You bury them,” said Uncle Joshua. “I’m off to find the girl.”

“You can’t,” Aunt Min told him. “You’re a hunter, but the grooglemen leave no footprints to trace: they fly through the air by night.”

“Min’s right,” said Bartolmy. “The grooglemen see in the dark and you can’t hide from them. No one has ever been to their castle and come back down again.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Uncle Joshua. The outlands accent was strong in his words. “One man at least has been to their stronghold and come back, for I’ve done it.”

“Then there’s never a man done it twice!” Bartolmy said. “And when he finds where you’ve come from he’ll follow you back and kill us too.”

Uncle Joshua shook his head. “He’ll not trace me.”

“How can you say that?” said Aunt Min. “Everybody knows that when a groogleman asks you a question, you have to tell him the truth. Can’t help yourself.”

But Uncle Joshua only slung his rifle over his shoulder and said, “What’s worse—being taken by the grooglemen, or knowing that nobody will ever come to win you back?”

No one answered. Dan Henchard said afterward that his father Sam looked sad and ashamed, but Bartolmy and Aunt Min never so much as blinked an eye.

So Dan said to Uncle Joshua, “I’ll come with you,” because he understood what the answer to the question was. It was worse, far worse, to be abandoned.

Uncle Joshua frowned at him. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Stay home with your father.”

“Walk beside you or follow behind you,” said Dan, “it makes no difference to me. I’m no safer at home than on the road.”

“As you will.”

Uncle Joshua turned without a further word and walked off to the north, and Dan walked beside him.

The two walked a long way, over hills and through a mountain gap, past where Dan had ever heard of anyone going, or anyone coming from. For eight days they walked.

“Whatever was going to happen to Leezie has happened by now,” Dan said. “She’s dead for sure.”

Uncle Joshua looked at him with an angry expression. “If you want to go home, go now and never let me see your face again. Tomorrow, or the next day at the last, we’ll pass beyond the living lands, and then it will be too late to turn back.”

They went on; but it was two more days, not one, before they crossed over the border into the dead lands.

Dan could see why the name was given. The ground here was jumbled and broken stone, and the trees were stunted and misshapen where they grew at all. The sounds of birds and tracks of beasts were left behind as well. The air itself smelled dead, like the taste of licking metal.

At the end of the first day, Dan asked, “Is it like this much longer?”

“Don’t talk,” Uncle Joshua said. “The grooglemen can hear you.”

They didn’t light a fire in the dark that night, nor was there food beyond what was in their pouches, gathered in the days when they’d been walking through fertile country. The next morning they journeyed onward—but they walked warily, and if Uncle Joshua had moved like a hunter before, now he moved doubly so, and at times vanished from Dan’s sight altogether.

And then, without warning, a vast rushing sound filled the air. Dan looked about wildly for help, but Uncle Joshua was nowhere to be seen. Dan cowered beside a rock which rose slab- sided out of the barren dirt, and when he lifted his head again, a groogleman stood before him.

The groogleman had a wrinkled skin all dirty white like fungus, and huge glistening eyes over a round and wrinkled mouth. It shuffled when it walked, and Dan could hear it breathing—a loud hissing noise like a teakettle on the hearth. The creature took Dan and bound him and carried him over hard and blackened fields to the castle of the grooglemen, where the great gate shut behind them.

Then the groogleman laid its misshapen hands on Dan’s shoulders, and looked him full in the face and spoke; and Dan couldn’t understand a word of what it said.

The dungeon cells beneath the castle were carved each from a solid piece of stone, and the air was full of whispers of far- off voices speaking too low to be understood. The groogleman took Dan there, and left him. Though he was not bound, he felt no desire to escape, and in the small part of his mind which was still his own he knew that he was under a spell.

He didn’t move, even when the groogleman put out a claw and tasted his blood; and he didn’t try to run when the groogleman left him and the door stayed open. Nor did he move when the groogleman returned and—in a voice that was harsh and strangely accented—asked him from where he came and why.

Dan tried to remain silent. But he answered every question that was put to him, and told of Leezie, of Uncle Joshua, of the Henchard farm, of his family and his friends. Nothing was secret, and the groogleman was quiet except for its hissing and gurgling breath as it listened.

But what wasn’t asked, the spell couldn’t force Dan to betray. So the groogleman never asked or learned that Dan expected Uncle Joshua to come to Leezie’s rescue, and to his.

The dungeon of the grooglemen was never dark—the light there was cold and unnatural, coming from torches which burned without smoke and never seemed to flicker or be diminished—but at last Dan slept. When he awoke, Uncle Joshua was standing at his feet.

“You’ve come,” Dan said.

Uncle Joshua put his finger to his lips and helped Dan to stand. They went out of the cell into a corridor lit by the weird pale fires, going past open doors and closed doors and colored lines and paintings of black and yellow flowers. The wind sighed around them and brought to their ears the muttering of far-off voices.

“How did you find me?” Dan asked as they went.

“You’ve not been here long,” Uncle Joshua whispered back. “Finding you was easy. It’s Leezie will be hard to find. Did you see her—or did the groogleman tell of her?”

“No,” said Dan.

“Then it’s up to us to find her. Can you walk faster?”

Dan nodded.

“Come on, then,” Uncle Joshua told him. “We’ll live as long as we’re not seen.”

“Are we going home without Leezie?”

“No,” said Uncle Joshua.

They went on deeper into the castle, with Uncle Joshua walking a little way ahead, watching in all directions. He carried his rifle in both hands across his chest, with the hammer back and the flint poised above the pan like a wild animal’s sharp fang.

“Can grooglemen be killed?” Dan asked.

“We may yet find out,” Uncle Joshua said. “Now hush and help me search for Leezie. If she lives it will be our doing.”

And so they walked for a long time, silent, through the maze of rooms and corridors and halls, up stairs and down ramps, in the castle of the grooglemen. Some doors were open, some were locked, and at last they came to a place where they heard a girl’s voice weeping.

Uncle Joshua held up his hand to call a halt, and began to step carefully forward. Slowly he looked around the corner of the passageway, then gestured for Dan to come join him. He’d found a door, and the weeping voice was on the other side. But the door was locked, and it had neither latch nor keyhole.”What now?” Dan asked.

We’ll see,” said Uncle Joshua, and cried out in a loud voice, “Leezie, is that you?”

The weeping stopped. “Who is it?” came a girl’s voice from the other side of the door.

“It’s us!” Dan called. “Dan Henchard and Uncle Joshua. We’re here to bring you home.”

“Get away!” Leezie shouted back. “Get away before it’s too late for you. It’s too late for me already. The groogleman can see me here. He’ll see you, too, if you stay.”

“Open the door!”

“I can’t. There’s a spell on it. Only the groogleman can pass through.”

“The groogleman,” Uncle Joshua muttered. “He’ll let me in and you out. Leezie—call the groogleman! Call him loud. Call him now.”

“No!”

“Yes! He gave you words to say to bring him. Say them now.”

“How do you know what the groogleman did?” Dan asked.

“I know,” Uncle Joshua replied. “Come now.”

He walked back to the corner, and sat against the wall where he could look in both directions. There he waited, and Dan Henchard waited with him, until at length a shuffling noise sounded in the corridor.

Then the groogleman appeared, walking its slow and clumsy walk, its feet barely clearing the floor and its head moving from side to side as it looked about.

Uncle Joshua stood and raised his rifle to his shoulder. “Stand where you are!”

The groogleman seemed to see Uncle Joshua for the first time. It halted, and its massive head shook slowly from side to side. There was no expression in its blank eyes, and its tight, wrinkled mouth never moved. But the hissing of its breath stopped, and its hands, with their fat white fingers extended, rose up to the level of the groogleman’s thick waist as if to push Uncle Joshua away.

Uncle Joshua jerked his head in the direction of the closed door. “Open it.”

The groogleman shook its head again.

The rifle fired. A flash of white smoke rose up from the pan and a cloud of smoke came out of the barrel, and a noise like a thunderclap echoed in the cold stone hall. Uncle Joshua didn’t pause. He slung the rifle back on his shoulder and dashed forward, even as the gunsmoke thinned and cleared, torn away by the castle’s undying wind.

The groogleman lay splayed out on the floor, with a huge red stain all over the white hide of its torso. Uncle Joshua reached out and grabbed the groogleman under the shoulders to pull it upright.

“Help me!” he yelled at Dan.

Dan took the groogleman by the arm. The dead skin was cold and slimy to his touch, and loose upon the bones beneath. He and Uncle Joshua carried the groogleman to Leezie’s cell, and Uncle Joshua threw the body forward against the closed door. Whatever spell had let the groogleman in and out still worked, and the door opened as the carcass touched it. The groogleman fell into the open doorway, and Dan saw that more blood ran from a hole in its grey-white, wrinkled back.