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In my first post, I talked about different categories of apocalyptic tales. Much of post-apocalyptic fiction is comprised of environmental precautionary tales (think No Blade of Grass, The Stand, or Alas, Babylon) whose warnings absolutely bear consideration in the public consciousness.
Yet nothing's in the public consciousness more these days than the 2012 prophecy. You know what I'm talking about. It's everywhere.
2012 is a triple-whammy. It's part environmental precautionary tale (our ruined Earth is out for revenge); it's arriving whether we like it or not, since we have not yet discovered a means of controlling the passage of time (and therefore the Earth itself has no choice); and it's partly religious prophecy (causing a mass psychological paralysis).
I've read my share of fringe stuff, and been scared by it in my time. Nowadays I take these things with a grain of salt. I haven't gone out of my way to read any 2012 doom-and-gloom books, the current crop of which has been around since 2006 or so. I'm sure some of them have a legitimate, logical case. Some of them may even be attempts to refute the 2012 theory. But the majority seem like shoddy attempts to separate me from my money. To be true, I didn't even see the film 2012. Because I just don't believe in it.
Also, I couldn't envision John Cusack as an action star. What's he going to do, make the perfect mixtape while he awaits the bitter end?
What also keeps me from reading Those Books is this: Just who is qualified to write about the future effects of a centuries-old prophecy of indigenous origin, anyway? It's the same kind of conundrum faced by the Internet in its early stages (remember when practically everyone had a GeoCities page), and most recently by Wikipedia. Anyone can throw information out there. It's why professors and teachers ask for (and librarians warn people to use) qualified sources of information.
But information and interpretations can contradict each other. Who is the final authority on 2012? Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (I totally hope he had a nickname), who initiated the theory in 1872? Madame Blavatsky, the famous nineteenth-century spiritualist? You? Me? My history teacher? My dog?
Shouldn't the final authority be the Mayans themselves?
About those Mayans: They were astute astronomers, mathematicians, and master builders whose lives revolved around three separate but intertwined calendars; they employed both a spoken and an artistically written language; and the remains of their cities are full of sacred geometry. Yet they pretty much wiped themselves out.
I hate that our society, which by and large refuses to learn from history, chooses to be absurdly fascinated by such a weird aspect of a brilliant culture. Whether the prophecy is true or not, paying attention solely to it while disregarding the Mayas' achievements and their rightful place in history smacks of cultural appropriation.
What is cultural appropriation? A couple of examples. Our relationships with Native American sovereign governments is deplorable, but we stick the likeness of Sacajawea on our new gold dollar coins. Australia has an equally horrible history with the Aboriginals, yet the country is associated with the boomerang and with Uluru, or Ayers Rock. In short, we appropriate and use symbols—mythological, linguistic, or otherwise—to gloss over the past. The 2012 prophecy is just one more example of the same.
This is the only article I've seen that presents a balanced view of what's going on: http://stevebeckow.com/2011/03/carlos-ba
The Earth may fold in on itself; it may not. It may upchuck humanity into the cold reaches of space; it may not. I prefer to look forward to 2013.
And if for some reason we don't get there, I stand by the Christopher Titus approach when it comes to endtimes: “Hey--no one's watching the Lexus dealership. We're going to the Apocalypse with leather and a CD changer.”
Right on, Titus.
Five names now, and next post, a glossary of post/apocalyptic terms. Like "ruined earth," "dystopia," "cozy catastrophe," et cetera, et cetera.
JG Ballard. Best known outside science fiction circles as the subject of Stephen Spielberg's 1989 Oscar-winner Empire of the Sun, in which the young Ballard was portrayed by none other than 13-year-old Christian Bale. Ballard passed away in April 2009. It's obvious to anyone who reads his fiction that WWII was a sort of line for Ballard in terms of innocence, since war is in and of itself a kind of apocalypse. Ballard's fiction (and I haven't read it all) is either dystopic in nature or explores very extreme themes. Ballard's work has its own postmodern cult following, discussing everything from his near future settings to the art that influenced his writing. His nonfiction includes his autobiographical trilogy, Empire of the Sun, The Kindnesses of Women (a very different book from the first, you have been warned), and Miracles of Life. His first few books concerned different types of apocalypse (none of which have to be read in order: The Drowned World (1962; London as swamp), The Burning World (1964, aka The Drought), and my favorite, The Crystal World (1966, everything becomes crystallized) will both provide the reader with post-apocalyptic storylines and give them a nutshell view of the kinds of themes he tackled in his works.
John Christopher. An alias for British writer Samuel Youd, who scribed the compelling young adult series called The Tripod Trilogy --The White Mountains (1967), The City of Gold and Lead (1967), and The Pool of Fire (1968). (A fourth book, When The Tripods Came, was written in 1988 as a prequel.) The "ruined earth" setting is one of his favorites; his "Sword of the Spirits" trilogy and Wild Jack (1974), among others, featured characters moving around a civilization built in the ruins of the current one. Christopher also wrote true post-apocalyptic works: viral famine was our undoing in The Death of Grass (aka No Blade of Grass, 1957), a new Ice Age in The World in Winter (aka The Long Winter, 1962) and a progeria plague in Empty World (1977). For fans of The Tripod trilogy, Alex Proyas, he of Dark City and Crow fame, is supposedly producing a film version of The White Mountains, entitled (shockingly) "The Tripods." (If it's good, maybe I can forgive him for the Nicholas Cage travesty called Knowing.)
Kathleen Ann Goonan. Who loves nanotech, baby? We do, we do! Queen City Jazz (1994), Mississippi Blues (1997), Crescent City Rhapsody (2000), and Light Music (2002)—are some of my favorite books of all time. Goonan brings us into an amazing world transformed by nanotech plagues. The protagonist for two of the books, Verity, moves through a landscape containing sentient (and sometimes a li'l insane) houses, cars, cities, and ships. Then humans themselves begin to evolve, adapting to their new surroundings. If you like a little music with your science fiction, Goonan doesn't disappoint; as one might guess from the book titles, her prose sings with analogies to jazz and melody.
SM Stirling. Back in the early '00s, when I saw SM Stirling had been tapped to write a few T2 novels for the Terminator franchise, my first thought was, I'm glad someone can wrap their head around the time-travel issues, and my second thought was, Perfect pick. Because this guy makes a living off imagining how technology has influenced history. An historian, Stirling began the tech theme in his first trilogy--Island in the Sea of Time (1998); Against the Tide of Years (1999); and On the Oceans of Eternity (2000)--which relocated Nantucket Island (and anyone who was on it) to the Late Bronze Age (whoa baby!) and proceeded to chronicle how Nantucket influenced an alternate history Earth--in both good and bad ways. I can't say enough about it here. Another trilogy (Dies the Fire) follows a set of characters in the world Nantucket left behind, a world beset by The Change, in which modern tech no longer works. "The Change" sequence, which Stirling will hopefully finish soon (the latest book just came out this month), explores who or what may have been behind, well, The Change.
John Wyndham. "People, especially children, aren't measured by their IQ. What's important about them is whether they're good or bad, and these children are bad." You tell'em, Major Bernard. All is not right in Midwich, and that has a lot to do with the telepathic kids with glowing eyes. John Wyndham (...Parks Lucas Beynon Harris...) wrote The Midwich Cuckoos in 1957, which was turned into the film Village of the Damned three years later. A spooky film, one I saw late at night on cable TV when I was a kid, and somehow it scared me more than the Outer Limits or Twilight Zone reruns that were also a staple of my weekly diet. The theme of TWC has to do with a quiet alien incursion and the divorcement of humanity from feeling--because humans feel, we will always be inferior. (A popular theme in science fiction, if we haven't noticed.) Wyndham had previously utilized the alien invasion trope in 1951; Triffids, after all, are aliens too; and in The Kraken Wakes (1953). As is John Christopher, Wyndham was a prolific writer of science fiction, sometimes bordering on dystopias or the apocalyptic theme. It was his and Christopher's books that I continually checked out from the library as a kid.
Honorable mention (meaning I haven't read enough of their works to feel comfortable adding them to the list): Margaret Atwood (see Oryx and Crake), Jeanne DuPrau (City of Ember series), and William Johnstone (Out of the Ashes series). If you're familiar with his works, Stephen King is also probably an honorable mention, based on The Stand, The Mist, The Dark Tower series, and Cell.
Any others? Feel free to share.
Odyssey 5 was created in 2002 by Manny Coto (The Outer Limits, ST:E, and... anyone remember Dead at 21 on MTV? Yeah.) for Showtime, and reportedly he got the idea when one morning he was thinking ahead to a bad day. What could go wrong? The earth could end. And then he thought, What if it did? What would happen then?
Odyssey 5 was his answer. It had everything, not the least of which was an outstanding cast: a pre-Jake 2.0 & Ugly Betty Christopher Gorman (Neil Taggart); Peter Weller, a scifi staple who really brought depth to his role as the dad of a family of astronauts (Chuck Taggart) ; Tamara Craig Thomas, a Canadian import who played almost-washed-up astronaut Angela Perry; and you might recognize Sebastian Roche (Kurt Mendel) from A Knight's Tale and Fringe, and Leslie Silva (Sarah Forbes) from Numb3rs.
It had plot, too, and a ticking-time bomb plot at that--one that started off with a bang. Five astronauts happen to be on a space mission when the Earth is destroyed in front of their eyes. They're rescued by an alien visitor, who's been tracking the destruction of planets throughout the universe. He always arrives too late to stop it, much less find out who's doing it or why. When he sees the five survivors, he sees his chance and asks for their aid in discovering what happened to their own planet; he has the power to send their consciousnesses into their bodies, five years in the past.
The script didn't hold back on the complications. Twenty-two-year-old Neil returns to high school as a stoner. Chuck has to hide their terrible knowledge from his wife, Paige, and Neil's older brother. Angela wakes up in the middle of a space mission and freezes. Sarah finds herself married to the man she divorced, and her little boy, who died of cancer, is still alive.
Kurt is the only one whose character doesn't change--he's always an ass, but an intelligent one--and he begins to see that any changes the Five make in their personal lives or their quest to keep the Earth from being destroyed might affect the timeline of the Earth's demise. And this is important, because they've discovered the conspiracy lies at the very heart of NASA and the US government. Tricky tricky.
This series was by turns a taut, conspiracy/action thriller, a family drama, a post/apocalyptic story, and a futuristic scifi-quest story complete with nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, all rolled into one. Not to mention it had an unconquerable villain--not as overt as the Borg, but implied (I mean, come on, lifeforms who have a habit of blowing up planets? That's a little more nefarious than your average Vogon).
It had heart, it had jump-out-of-your-seat moments, it had great acting. And it got 20 episodes--for which it also had a bit more closure than the average canceled show. If you're jonesing for some good scifi and you've thought about picking this up off a shelf somewhere, do it. Odyssey 5 is by no means perfect, but it is far superior than more than a few of its shelfmates.
Look no further.
With Halloween and the zombie apocalypse just around the corner, I thought it prudent to say a few words about the vampire apocalypse, embodied (!) by three works in particular: I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson—adapted into two films, The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price and I Am Legend, starring Will Smith (I haven't seen The Omega Man, so I can't comment on it). Then Daybreakers, starring Ethan Hawkes, about vampires on the brink of extinction.
Last but not least, especially since it weighs in at 766 pages, Justin Cronin's The Passage, which will have to go in the next post. These things can only be so long. Tis the weekend after all, right?
To begin: A vampire apocalypse wouldn't be difficult--if vampires existed. The proof that they didn't was found in a Scholastic math book I had when I was ten, and it relied on the geometric progression of vampirism. To-wit: Vampire A goes out one night and bites someone, so the next night you have Vampire A and Vampire B, and each of them bites 2 more; the third night, 4 vampires go out and bite 1 victim each; night #4, 16 vampires; night #5, 256; sixth night, 65, 536... By the end of Week One we could kiss the majority of the world's population goodbye (or hello depending on your inclination). If vampires showed some restraint and fed once a month, the human race would be wiped out within 2.5 years.
But: you're not a vampire, insisted the Scholastic book! So there are no vampires. See? The bad combination of logic didn't make me feel any better. I kept my curtains closed and the door to my bedroom wedged shut. For all I knew, Vampire A had just bitten Vampire B in Poland, or China, Russia or Brazil, and it would be just a matter of days until Missouri became the Bite-Me State.
In 1954's I Am Legend, Richard Matheson introduced vampirism spread by pandemic, and a virus or bacteria was a great way to explain the biological mechanics of becoming a vampire. Robert Neville alone survives the virus that turns everyone else into creatures of the night. He transforms his Los Angeles home into a fortified base of operations. By day he hunts vampires, determined to stake them all, but makes sure to return home just before sunset. By night he pours over his research, turns up the phonograph over the sound of vampires assailing his house and drinks himself to sleep. And then one day, out staking vampires, he finds Ruth—who is not what she seems. While Neville has been busy staking vampires and attempting to find a cure for their disease, the vampiric humans have been adapting to their disease and (gasp) forming a society—one that has no place for Neville in it.
Having seen both 2007's I Am Legend and 1964's The Last Man on Earth, I have to say that the latter film is probably closer to what Matheson intended, even though it's rumored he hated it (and I can see why). Vincent Price does a great turn as Dr. Robert Morgan (yep, they renamed the main character), a scientist who may have discovered a cure for those pesky vampires that come a-knockin' on his door. This isn't to say I don't like the 2007 version; I do. I Am Legend follows in the footsteps of Last Man and also casts Will Smith as a scientist, marooned this time in New York; whereas in the novel Neville was just a factory worker. Check out the “alternate” [original] ending on that DVD, which has a hiccup or two, but is still closer to Matheson's original ending, and gives more meaning to the title of the film and novel than the wide theatrical release. What it did do, among other things, was to showcase "fast" vampires--something that wasn't seen in the 1964 adaptation, perhaps because it couldn't be done.
Daybreakers (2010) starring Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke, Isabella Lucas and Sam Neill, takes Matheson's novum one step further and addresses the issue of what happens if that geometric progression ever came to pass? What would life look like on the other side of that? The film is set in a future about thirty years from now when, following a weird vampire-bat-bite outbreak, everyone is a vampire. Vampire is the new normal. Work shifts begin at night and end at dawn; cars are endowed with tinted windows, shields and tons of GPS machinery; street cafes sell blood by the coffee cup; and if you want to commit suicide, well, pick a clear day and wait for sun-up. But another apocalypse is coming. Vampires require human blood to survive, but unfortunately the vampire majority means humans are just about extinct. Those vampires who begin starving and/or feeding on other vampires' blood begin to Subside—to revert to bat form. Ah, there's the second apocalypse! If the Bromley Marks corporation's lead hematologist, Ed Dalton (Ethan Hawke), and his team don't find a viable blood substitute, the vampire, and consequently the human, race is doomed. Vampire Ed, however, falls in with the last humans left, who promise him they've found a cure, a way to save all of humanity--but they have to battle corporate greed and a few Subsiders to get the point across. Don't order pizza and watch this one. But watch it you shall.
So see? There are no vampires. Because we'd all be extinct.
Yeah, yeah, whatever.
This is getting too long, so next up, that review of The Passage, by Justin Cronin. I busted my butt to get this thing read in the 2 weeks I had it from the library (can we say request list?) and it's worth a look by anyone, whether you like science fiction or not.
The Werewolf, or a person who transforms into a wolf at every full moon. Usually active maybe 1-3 nights per month, sometimes as long as 5 nights, depending on the story. Safeguards: Only a survivor of a werewolf attack runs the risk of becoming a werewolf. (sorry about the pain, bub!) A werewolf in human form can't infect another human, if for some reason s/he chooses to bite another human (and far be it from me to speculate upon said reasons) unless completely transformed into a werewolf. And for at least three weeks out of every month, normal humans can feel safe enough to go about their business. Weapons: During that one special week, though, load up with silver bullets.
The Vampire, or a person who's technically undead and must have blood to survive. Most works agree one lil bite will not turn the bitee into a vampire; however, if the vampire completely drains the bitee, the participant dies, only to return to what Prince refers to as “this thing called life”. Another way is to drink the blood of a vampire. The vampire is usually active during night-time. Safeguards: Avoid sunless places like crypts and windowless gas-station bathrooms. Don't go out at night and never, never journey to Transylvania. Weapons: Sunlight, first and foremost, because it can kill vampires. Quickly. Any other type of light might work, too; the brighter, the better, depending on vampire sensitivity. Fire is good. Also, garlic, crosses, and wooden stakes.
The Zombie, or a person who died and is now reanimated; they exist solely to spread the infection. Safeguards: Not many. That is to say, very few. That is to say, really none at all. Zombies aren't smart, and they're not fast, but there are a lot of them. Adopt military combat tactics. Seek high ground, stock up on canned goods and guns and ammo. If there are enough humans, move in large groups and make sure you're near the center. Callous, I know. Weapons: Guns and ammo, cricket bats, records. Run for colder climates. We hear Alaska is good this time of year. Go.
Thought: It would really suck if people ran north from a zombie apocalypse... only to find vampires. Who's writing that book?
Another thought: Outside of the video game world, I've never heard of a werewolf apocalypse. You?
If it was transmissible by virus or bacteria... Maybe.
But that's another post, to be written another time.
Sweet dreams.
Actually, I can't think of anyone who really does, unless there's some underlying pathological problem... in which case, I am vastly underqualified to be of any assistance /koff-koff/. But let's face it, when confronted with stories of infinitesimally small organisms that could cause death in a relatively short span of time, we all become hypochondriacs. Who among us has read Richard Preston's The Hot Zone and not checked the status quo of our ears and noses? Or made sure to scrub our hands at least one extra time after touching the book?
The Hot Zone, published in 1995, is a non-fiction account of the identification and outbreak (not necessarily in that order) of the Ebola and Marburg viruses. Which makes it scary. Each age seems to have had its own outbreak (counting backwards): HIV/AIDS, influenza, yellow fever, cholera, the plague...
More about why apocalyptic scenarios scare us so much later... Right now, submitted for your consideration, a few titles:
Film/TV
The Navigator
12 Monkeys
The Andromeda Strain Blindness (Jose Saramago)
Zombieland!
Jeremiah
The Tribe
I tried to leave out things like I Am Legend, Night of the Living Dead, and World War Z because those are about vampires and zombies--sometimes created by man-made viruses, but originally (at least in the case of George Romero) those viruses came from space. Therefore, I hereby decree vampire viruses and zombie outbreaks will get their own posts, as will dystopias and biotech stories (bionanites, for instance).
But I couldn't help including Zombieland. Cardio!
There are a few ways to break down these entries into categories. One is by time travel. Connie Willis's excellently written and well-paced Doomsday Book centers around a time-travel grad student sent back in time to work on her history project--and ends up in the middle of a plague-ridden village. I include The Navigator, which is a little-known Australian 80s film, because it deserves some recognition. Hardly anyone I know has seen it, yet it's just as mind-blowing as 12 Monkeys, if in a more quiet, sad way. James van Pelt's protagonist Eric takes two concurrent journeys in alternating chapters--as a teenager who has just survived a virus, and as an old man at odds with his few descendants, in the bittersweet Summer of the Apocalypse.
Second category: Survivors struggling to rebuild civilization, or some semblance of a society. If one has read Stephen King's The Stand, then one must also read sociologist George Stewart's Earth Abides.
And then there are the kids. The 2 seasons of Jeremiah, the TV series that starred Luke Perry & Malcolm-Jamal Warner, is set 10 years after the Big Death--a virus which wiped out anyone over the age of puberty. (The comic line on which Jeremiah was based teamed our protagonists, black and white, against a world torn apart by race wars.) Jeremiah's kind of in the middle here; since it's set so late, the kids are now adults--but they are adults who grew up without rules; who had to scavenge to exist, and are trying to figure out what it means to build a whole new world. However, Jeremiah's premise was similar to (and might have been influenced by?) The Tribe, a New Zealand series whose premise was similar to OT Nelson's The Girl Who Owned A City--chronicling the lives of teenagers who must fend for themselves after all the adults have succumbed to a virus.
I first read Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain when I was a junior or senior in high school. It was his first book, and his best (Timeline being my personal next favorite--which also involves time travel... but doesn't belong here). The Andromeda Strain scared the crap out of me. And it's probably the only book on this particular list in which 1) apocalypse was pretty much averted and 2) apocalypse came in the form of a space microbe (as I said, we'll get to Night of the Living Dead and Threshold later on...)
And having said all that--good night, all--for it is actually morning.
A-choo.
This particular piece is entitled "Panoramic," and occurs near the beginning of the film--a melody that introduces us not only to Eli's journey, but to a horrible new world.
But don't listen to me.
Next post: Bio and/or Tech scenarios
- Music:Panoramic
Before I begin, I do want to say that just because I categorize a work as pessimistic or optimistic doesn't mean you shouldn't read it. By all means, please do. I'm not the ultimate authority here; what I read into something doesn't mean you will (although, in a few works, the intent is just too obvious).
So, what makes a piece optimistic or pessimistic? A few factors. First, obviously the tone of the work. Second, is there a band of survivors, yes/no? (Hope so, or there's not a lot of story, but hey, what do I know?) If no—pessimistic. Third, if yes, will the survivors soon perish for lack of a working world, yes/no? Things have changed, but to what degree? If yes--pessimistic. Fourth, if no—then what happens? Fifth—is there a Randall Flagg, a Doyle Halland, or a not-so-nice T-1000? And sixth—to what degree has the political atmosphere shifted? (Not arguing that the USA should act as a superpower, here, by the way; but what was its original, pre-nuclear status in the respective work?) Seventh--even given the tone of the work, and all these other factors, what happens at the end?
Readers may note I have not included any anime in this (very short) list. That's because most Japanese anime deals with the effects of nuclear war, and so that one probably deserves its own post. There are also plenty of other examples, but these are the ones I know best. I'm not going to include anything I haven't read or seen, and while I've read a lot of this stuff compared to other readers, I do read other things, like hard science fiction, or fantasy, or things like Little Women and/or Shakespeare. Or watch TV shows like Leverage and reruns of Cheers.
Honest.
Optimistic post-nuclear fiction/film
Battlestar Galactica (1978). A band of survivors set out across the galaxy in a fleet of old ships, in search of a legendary lost colony, Earth, fighting merciless robots all the way. No matter what happens there's always the hope that Earth is just the next planet over.
The Book of Eli (2010). To say too much about this film ruins the entire premise, so I won't; nor will I enter into the religious debate; but certainly Eli has earned its own place in the post-nuclear pantheon.
Jericho. CBS's vastly underrated, finely-acted post-nuclear, barely-cancelled-on-a-high-note family drama that featured surprise conspiracy theories, spies, guns, famine, civil war and corporate backstabbers. What more could anyone ask for?
The Postman, David Brin. Partly inspired by Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon!. In the ruins of the Pacific Northwest, a man assumes the identity of a US Postal Service delivery worker, perpetuating the myth that reorganized Easterners have sent him to deliver mail and the message that the world is rebuilding--and finds himself accidentally and unwillingly uniting several villages against a common enemy.
Swan Song, by Robert McCammon. Seven years after a global nuclear war, a young girl brings hope to the survivors eeking out a living in a nuclear winter landscape. Of all the post-nuclear fiction I've read, this book is the best. It's often compared to Stephen King's The Stand, and it's easy to see why—both feature spiritual figures and a charismatic last battle amongst the survivors for the future of humankind. Swan Song is quite the page-turner, with very little of the prevarification or pontification engaged in by King's characters; and since King has difficulty with endings, readers looking for a more satisfying conclusion would do no better than to give Swan Song a chance.
Pessimistic post-nuclear fiction/film
Alas, Babylon! Pat Frank. Takes place in fictional Fort Repose, Florida, revealed at the end of the novel to be the largest settlement in Florida after post-nuclear events reduce the USA to a third-world country.
Battlestar Galactica (2004). A band of survivors set out across the galaxy in a fleet of old ships, in search of a new home, Earth, fighting their vengeful robot creations all the way. Ron Moore rebooted the BSG franchise in a much more believable manner; and for three and a half seasons his characters tackled mythos, disease, religiosity, alcoholism, and more, and found drama and romance amidst war and survival. And then Moore took a page from Pierre Boulle's book, and one from HG Wells's, and all was sad chaos.
A Boy and His Dog, Harlan Ellison (made into film, 1974). A young Don Johnson plays a selfishly carnal drifter who, accompanied by his talking dog (the result of some experiment), skims the post-nuclear wasteland of America looking for whatever meets his needs. When a girl brings him to the underground, 50s-ish city of Topeka, he finds the tables turned and must find a way to escape.
On The Beach, Nevil Shute. Mentioned elsewhere on this blog. Waaaaaaah!
Planet of the Apes (1968). Based on the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle. Hardly a scene is more iconic—and therefore lampooned at will—than the scene in which Charlton Heston discovers just what planet he's really been on all this time.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy. I think everyone knows about this one, so I'm not repeating any premise stuff here. Readers have haggled over whether the ending is pessimistic or optimistic, and the truth is—it's both. Too ambiguous to tell, and not for us to know, but to imagine.
Watchmen, Alan Moore; made into film, 2009. I would so love to use Moore's graphic novel as the basis for a philosophy course. Does the end justify the means? That is the question. And although in the original graphic novel the concept of apocalypse was not nuclear, it was so in the film, which is why I have included it here.
Z for Zachariah, by Robert C. O'Brien (he of Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH fame). A lone teenage girl survives a nuclear holocaust in her valley, which is invaded one day by another survivor, Loomis—who's a bit off his rocker. Zachariah was O'Brien's last book, published after his death, and the last chapter was finished by his family according to his notes. (Note to self: leave notes.)
I Can't Decide
A Canticle for Leibowitz and Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse-Woman, both by Walter Miller, Jr.
AC4L is heartbreaking in its ultimate theme of cyclical history; you want to yell and scream “No no no!” at the book as Miller charts the centuries-long course of the rise of civilization following nuclear devastation. SLWHW, on the other hand, is a “midquel,” the events of which take place during periods of time mentioned in AC4L, and therefore chronicling other, but relevant, events.
The combined total of fatalities from both cities spiked somewhere around 100,000 immediate casualties, not counting the thousands of others who later died from injuries and/or radiation poisoning. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave a new meaning to the word war, as noted by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, in office from 1940-45: "The atomic bomb was more than a weapon of mass destruction; it was a psychological weapon."
No discussion of post-apocalyptic scenarios is complete without an examination of nuclear war and its consequences. The threat of nuclear war weighed heavy on everyone after the Manhattan Project detonated the first fission bomb in the deserts of New Mexico in July 1945; the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sent the world into panic mode. Earlier in our nation's history, the United States had waged war and then enjoyed times of peace; after WWII, the US essentially existed in a state of war-readiness. Russia and the U.S. entered into a nuclear arms race--what we know as the Cold War. In the 1950s, the market peaked for gas masks, fallout shelters and tinned food. The nation was in the grip of McCarthyism; anyone's family, friend or neighbor (even Lucille Ball) could be a Communist sympathizer and/or spy. The USSR could launch a nuclear warhead anytime, anywhere, and on into the 1960s schoolchildren were taught to "duck and cover" and otherwise prepare for some inevitable nuclear disaster.
The Cold War went on for forty some-odd years, and not surprisingly, a number of apocalyptic novels, films, TV miniseries and themed episodes, and even songs were generated during this time. In 1957, Nevil Shute, a British emigre to Australia, published On the Beach, which detailed a horribly depressing, very fatalistic look at what might happen in the event of world-wide nuclear strikes, taking the lessons learned in the wake of Hiroshima's devastation and espousing the Cold War population's worst fears. (Two years later, the film adaptation hit the silver screen, starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Ava Gardner, and, perhaps most shockingly of all, Fred Astaire.)
Some apocalyptic stories focus on a band of survivors who despite the odds push on and brave a new world. On the Beach, like Mary Shelley's The Last Man and the 1983 film The Day After, is not that story.
So I would first propose there are two types of post-apocalyptic stories--optimistic and pessimistic. Next post: examples. I promise.
Until then, a moment of silence.
