The roots of the post-apocalyptic themes can be found already in nineteenth-century fiction. Mary Shelley is mostly known for one of the first modern science fiction novels, Frankenstein. Although Frankenstein, without doubt, is one of the darker nineteenth century science fiction novels, and possibly the first one raising the question of scientific ethics, Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) can be qualified as one of the first early post-apocalyptic novels in English. It is possible that Mary Shelley was inspired by the 1805 French novel Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man) by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, which was translated into English in 1806. De Grainville’s story presented a dark futuristic vision of a sterile Earth and the end of the human race. Shelley’s novel, set at the end of the twenty-first century in Europe, tells a story of a plague epidemic that first emerges as a localized phenomenon (during a war in Greece) and gradually spreads throughout the world. Great Britain (and the world) is engulfed in devastation, chaos, plunder, and lawlessness. The main characters struggle for survival and are forced to move across Europe in search of a relatively clean and safe place to live, but there is only one of them remaining at the end, facing the dawn of the twenty-second century. It is interesting to note that the novel was poorly received as both readers and critics were not prepared at the time to entertain Armageddon scenarios. The novel was not reprinted until the 1960s, when the genre came back on a massive scale. Although De Grainville’s and Shelley’s novels may not be classic examples of post-apocalyptic fiction, in both works main characters are faced with the aftermath of the demise of their civilization. De Grainville’s protagonist wanders the empty face of the planet in search of surviving human beings; when faced with the option to father a new race of beings doomed to eternal darkness in a world without the sun, he prefers to die. Shelley’s characters witness the process of the gradual extinction of the human race as the plague slowly spreads across the continents.
The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries witness more examples of literary work engaging with the theme of the dying Earth. H. G. Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine explores the idea of a gradual degeneration of the human civilization, seemingly left without a purpose. As the protagonist continues to travel into a more distant future, thirty million years ahead, he witnesses a bleak picture of a dying planet, with very few simple life forms left and, as he ventures further in time, the end of the Sun’s cycle and, by implication, the end of the living Earth. Although in itself an apocalyptic (rather than post-apocalyptic) novel, it raises questions about the possibility of human survival on a physically declining planet and the role of human reason, social structure and intelligent social purpose in the continuation of the human race. Many critics also see elements of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre in Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), which explores the theme of a massive alien invasion. A lesser known novel, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), is closer to the treatment of the post-apocalyptic subject matter. In Hodgson’s fictional world, the Earth is plunged into darkness due to the dying sun, and the surviving few millions of the human race are living in a huge pyramid structure (the Last Redoubt, a megapolis of sorts) that protects them from the antagonistic outside forces, the nature of which remains ambivalent. The novel deals with the theme of survival of a small oasis of the remaining human civilization facing a hostile environment. At the end, the novel may be interpreted as having an optimistic ending as the narrator comes out victorious after having undertaken a mission outside the Last Redoubt; it may be assumed that there is a hope for the remaining humanity to survive. The same year saw the publication of Jack London’s novella The Scarlet Plague (1912), which takes place in the futuristic San Francisco some decades after a plague wipes out most of the planet’s population.
The sub-genre of post-apocalyptic science fiction becomes fully developed in the second half of the twentieth century. A number of genre-defining novels appear in the 1940s and ’50s. Thus, George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) continues to develop the idea of struggle for survival after a global epidemic. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) deals with a mass-scale spread of a manmade virus as a result of which infected people develop symptoms of vampirism. The novel has distinct elements of the horror genre and becomes influential for the later zombie (post-)apocalypse tradition. There are several screen adaptations of the book: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and, more recently, I Am Legend (2007). In The Death Of Grass (1956), John Christopher (pen name of Samuel Youd) explores a post-apocalyptic world following a global famine caused by a grass-attacking virus; the novel was later revisited in the film No Blade Of Grass (1970).
It is, however, the aftermath of WWII, the atomic bombing of Japan and the growing anxiety of the possible repetition of a global military conflict and of a threat of a nuclear holocaust that provide material for a lot of the post-apocalyptic fiction of the time. In 1960, Walter M. Miller Jr., by that time the author of a substantive body of science fiction short prose, published A Canticle for Leibowitz, which became a canonical work of the post-apocalyptic science fiction. The novel is a poignant, but also a witty and parodic commentary on the idea of an almost complete annihilation of life on Earth as a result of a nuclear disaster and a subsequent gradual rebuilding of a civilization. As part of his military service during the Second World War, Walter Miller participated in the bombing and destruction of the ancient Roman Catholic monastery in Monte Cassino, Italy, which was founded by St. Benedict in the sixth century. The ensuing trauma and the feeling of responsibility for the irreparable loss of an important part of our cultural and spiritual heritage led him to write a short story and, eventually, a novel influenced by his personal experience.
The plot of A Canticle for Leibowitz is set in a depopulated southwestern desert on the territory of the former United States six centuries after the civilization on Earth is destroyed as a result of a global nuclear conflict in the twentieth century. The story revolves around the life of a Catholic monastic order founded by a converted Jewish military engineer, Isaac Leibowitz, who survived the nuclear war (called “Flame Deluge” in the novel) and founded the order. Leibowitz belonged to the movement of “bookleggers” who were dedicated to saving whatever little was left of the books and protecting them from destruction by the supporters of “simplification,” a movement that was a reaction against advanced technological knowledge that was perceived to have resulted in the nuclear holocaust. Leibowitz’s order serves the role of primarily recovering and preserving the knowledge lost in the war. Later Leibowitz is martyred by the “simpleton” mob and is eventually beautified by the church, thus also becoming part of the perpetuation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The novel’s plot develops around the life of the order through three chronological parts, each one of them roughly corresponding to what is recognizable as the (new) Middle Ages, Renaissance, and a variation of a technologically advanced capitalist society. Apart from the relationship between the church, state, and the institution of knowledge, Miller also engages with the problems of epistemology (concerned with the nature and validity of knowledge): instability and unreliability of knowledge, oral or recorded; human memory; and the interpretive—and thus highly subjective and variable — nature of our cognition. The writer emphasizes our inability to know the past and to interpret material data; for example, one of the lighter moments in the novel involves the monastic order’s revered treatment of one of the historic “memorabilia” which strongly resembles a mundane twentieth-century shopping list scribbled on a piece of paper. Part of Miller’s commentary on the evolution of our civilization consists in postulating its cyclical nature with an inevitable self-destruction when technological advancement reaches a certain point of self-saturation. The novel ends in another nuclear war thus perpetuating the cycle of self-annihilation. Although we may assume that a rebirth will follow, it is a largely pessimistic interpretation of history repeating itself.
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.
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.
WARD MOORE
(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.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 237