Apocalypse Watch: January 2008 Archives

Earth Abides, by George R Stewart, is the story of one man, Isherwood Williams, who survived a viral apocalypse that wiped out most of mankind. Except it's not just the story of Ish, it's the story of a tribe that forms around him.

It took me a while to get into the book. The character seemed cold and distant, scientific and analysing. I wanted to know why he didn't panic more, fear more. And yet the story ends with intense emotion, Ish being a character that I deeply cared about, and the journey that Ish takes to get there is wonderful.

In many ways it's a great complemetary novel to Alas, Babylon, which tells the story of a year after an nuclear war, as opposed to a lifetime after a disaster. It's interesting to see how the focus can shift when the time length of the novel is elongated. Also in Earth Abides, there are fewer survivors in a larger city, which affects the populations survival methods quite drastically. There's a single sentence that mentions how (in later years) everyone has a tin opener, which is a lovely restrained way of making the reader realise how the scavenging becomes a normal way of life.

The story left me with hope, but also feeling a strange flavour of depression: that questioning feeling, the wondering of what is this all for. Jobs, houses, money, cars. The world. Life. It's a book that has set me off thinking deeply, and feeling deeply.

There are so many questions dealt with in the novel, and maybe they are not original, or even mind blowing on their own, but they accumulate throughtout the story, build and build, until by the end I was left longing for a simpler life.

Truly brilliant. Stay with it through the detached start of the story, it's part of the masterplan, and you will be rewarded.

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank was published in 1959, in the time of The Missile Gap where the US assumed that the USSR had far greater nuclear capabilities than itself. It's hard to imagine now: Russia were the only country to put something in orbit, America didn't have ICBM's. The Cold War was in full force.

Alas, Babylon is the story of that American fear, a pre-emptive nuclear strike by Russia. The novel follows Randy Bragg, who lives in a small town in Florida. It is the story of how people cope with a nuclear attack, and how they survive in a town that is cut of by contaminated zones.

Again, it's hard to imagine the affect that the novel had when it was published. Nowadays we know the post-nuclear stories, we know about radiation and fallout, we know that hiding under your table is useless, we can imagine losing power and food. Alas, Babylon spells out these facts from a late fifties point of view. Suprisingly it's not bleak, but infused with hope. The main characters change as they struggle to create a new life, and change for the better. Although they encounter some lawlessness civillisation attempts to reassert itself upon the situation.

I thought the bank manager failing to cope in a world without money was a telling jab by Frank at the US's obsession with capitalism. The bank manager realises that all he has is paper: bonds, money. Nothing worthwhile. In the buying frenzy that follows the attacks the shop owners make a fortune in dollars but are left with no supplies themselves. That realisation is handled very well.

The story focuses on what you would need to do to survive: finding food, keeping healthy, managing petrol, managing the battery for their radio. How you would live in isolation from the world.

Only one line jarred with me, right at the end, when someone asks "who won the war?". It didn't quite work for me.

Overall it's an intelligent, interesting novel, and one that believes in hope after the nuclear apocalypse. Highly recommended.

The Road begins with brief sections, sometimes just a paragraph, highly descriptive, very evocative, like blinking: each time opening your eyes to see something new. The overall feel of the novel is cold, bleak, scary, harrowing. It is post-apocalyptic in a generally unspecified way: there is ash, and a burnt landscape and cold and dark. The plot follows a journey of a man and his son, to somewhere, anywhere.

It captures the hopelessness of an apocalypse better than anything I have ever read. Forget electricity, there is not even food. And fire is sometimes avoided so as to not attract unwanted attention. No one can be trusted. Everywhere is abandoned.

I read most of it with a knot in my stomach.

There is no hope. Just fear. Perhaps the ending is supposed to provide hope, to illuminate the good in some of mankind. It just left me depressed.

Undoubtedly great writing to make me feel so much. But not pleasant.

Jericho is up to episode 15 on ITV4, and I'm really enjoying it. But somehow I feel like I shouldn't. In an attempt to explore those tensions as shall do what has become traditional on blogs, and make a list...

5 Reasons I Should Hate Jericho

1. It's not original. Small town survival after a nuclear apocalypse has been done by Alas, Babylon (Pat Frank). Multiple nukes exploding throughout the USA has been done by The Wild Shore (Kim Stanley Robinson). And that's just the two that come to mind, there's probably lots more.
   
2. Its too American. All that small-town stuff is so cheesey. Hokey is I believe the word. It's so foreign and false and UnBritish. Every small town I've been to in the USA was more like Twin Peaks.
   
3. There are mistakes. Logical mistakes, probably deliberate and used to drive the plot e.g. Hawkins uses his computer inside, then for some reason opens a big dish outside, just so that Jake can see it.
   
4. It reminds me of Dawson's Creek. Or maybe Echo Beach. One of those airbrushed soaps aimed at teenagers where relationships are off and on and off again.
   
5. One of the main characters is / was "the mayor". It just doesn't translate. Have you seen an example of a British mayor?
   

5 Reasons I Like Jericho

1. It's set today. Which means that there are modern twists on surviving the apocalypse. When they go to the library to find out about nuclear fallout they discover that all the books were written in the 50's.
   
2. It concentrates in survival issues. Keeping warm, maintaining electricity production, getting food, all the basic apocalyptic things that need to be taken care of.
   
3. It steals the good bits. Okay, it's not original, but it takes the cool bits from all the compost of previous apocalyptic fiction and pulls out some golden flowers. Sometimes they're just little references ( e.g. the mass migration to warmer climes), but I like them
   
4. There's something bigger going on. It's all still a mystery. What actually happened?
   
5. It's a nuclear apocalypse! And you just can't beat that.
   

Whilst there seems to be a large crowd gathering to read The Baroque Cycle, I've done that, so I thought I needed a new year reading resolution.

The resolution is called Apocalypse Watch. Spurred on by how much I'm enjoying Jericho (even though I feel like I shouldn't be), I've decided to read some apocalyptic books.

Here's what I have so far:

• Alas, Bablyon - Pat Frank
• The Road - Cormac McCarthy
• Earth Abides - George R Stewart
• On The Beach - Neville Shute
  
• Dr. Bloodmoney - Philip K Dick
• The Postman - David Brin
• Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M., Jr. Miller
• The Last Man - Mary Shelley
• The Stand - Stephen King
• Summer Of The Apocalypse - James Van Pelt
• Oryx And Crake - Margaret Attwood

...and last but not least...

• Wastelands : Stories of the Apocalypse, edited by John Joseph Adams. (I used its online associated reading list to give me some ideas).
  

The first three were Christmas presents, I don't own any of the others... yet.

There are some books I want to read but aren't available (except for £100 on ebay), notably Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow, John Christopher’s No Blade of Grass and Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence.

What have I missed? Or what shouldn't I bother with?