Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912)

We’re all familiar with classic scenes of a brutal post-apocalyptic world like this: A group of refugees from the pandemic is holed up in an abandoned building with a cache of food and arms, firing on a gang of assaulting raiders. Or, a former professor of English Literature, clad in goat skins and huddled around a fire, is telling his dirty, illiterate grandsons about life before civilization vanished.

Today these scenes are standard fare in post-apocalyptic fiction, from The Road to The Walking Dead. But when Jack London wrote them a century ago, they weren’t. The genre itself had been around for a long time, and many of the classic themes, settings, and catastrophes had already been introduced. However, nobody before Jack London had described a collapse of civilization so violent or an aftermath so squalid. In the century since, images of a gritty and brutal world in ruins have become almost a requirement in this genre.

RISE AND FALL
Nobody should be surprised that the author of The Call of the Wild wrote a gritty post-apocalyptic novel. London was part of the naturalist literary movement, whose writers were influenced by Darwinism and aimed to write non-sentimental, realistic depictions of the world in all its harshness. Five years before The Scarlet Plague, London had fused his naturalist style with his commitment to the Socialist movement in The Iron Heel, a novel about the violent rise of oligarchy in the U.S. and a forerunner of harsh dystopias like It Can’t Happen Here and 1984. The Scarlet Plague, though much less political, is likewise influenced both by London’s naturalism and his social ideals: the collapse of civilization comes about through an evolutionary process created by the capitalist machine.

The storyline of The Scarlet Plague is straightforward. Professor James Howard Smith was once part of the social elite, as a member of the faculty of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s now an elderly member of a primitive tribe that lives near the ruins of San Fransisco. Sitting around a campfire on an empty beach, he is telling his ignorant, abusive, and disbelieving grandsons about the world as it was sixty years earlier in 2013, right before the plague.

In that year there were eight billion people crowding the world (that’s London’s single good prediction in this book), and capitalism was thriving. America had become an oligarchy, ruled by a hereditary Board of Magnates. For the elite members of society like Smith, life is good. But the end begins when the Scarlet Plague breaks out in New York. The first signs of the disease are red blotches over the victim’s skin, and death follows within hours, or even minutes. The plague spreads rapidly, scientists are unable to stop it, and it finally reaches California.

Smith tells his grandsons about how things quickly fell apart in Berkeley. The first signs of total collapse were the severed bonds of kin and friendship that snapped when the symptoms of the plague appeared. The President of the Faculty turns Smith away from his office, knowing that Smith had been exposed to an infected student. Smith himself refuses to admit his own brother into his home when he sees the telltale blotches on his brother’s face. People try to escape the city, while gangs of armed looters engage in firefights in the streets.

But all efforts to survive are pointless — the plague is thorough and indiscriminate, leaving only a handful of people who turned out to be resistant. They include include Professor Smith and a former chauffeur who became the founder of the “Chauffeur” tribe. The largely empty land is now inhabited by small bands of primitive tribes, descended from these few survivors and living squalid, brutish lives.

UNNATURAL SELECTION
Despite the deceptively simple storyline, The Scarlet Plague is a subtle book, though it took me a second reading to appreciate it. Many of the book’s ironies are embodied in Professor Smith. Though a member of the elite, Smith is aware of the injustices of society; nevertheless, he holds on to his class prejudices decades after that society fell. As he tells his story, it’s clear that Smith is by no means objective. He despises the chauffeur, who was also the grandfather of one of Smith’s grandsons. “Your grandsire was a chauffeur, a servant, and without education. He worked for other persons,” Smith tells him. “But your [formerly wealthy] grandmother was of good stock, only the children did not take after her.”

Smith considers it an injustice that a brute like the chauffeur was spared:

All he could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages—and especially, and with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid swindlings of the persons who had employed him in the days before the coming of the plague. And yet he was spared, while hundreds of millions, yea, billions, of better men were destroyed.

Of course Smith himself was the beneficiary of blind luck as well, and if anything, his education in English literature leaves him much less suited to survive in the present world than the chauffeur.

Smith’s contempt for the chauffeur is not completely unjustified. The chauffeur, now deceased, really was a brute who used to beat his wife, who before the plague was married to one of the ruling oligarchs. He also established a culture of violence in the tribe. As Smith tells it, the chauffeur is the result of the unnatural selection produced by the capitalist machine, which created a savage underclass that made the fall and its aftermath so much worse:

In the midst of our civilization, down in our slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a race of barbarians, of savages; and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us like the wild beasts they were and destroyed us.

There was another selection process that worked in parallel. The increasingly crowded population, a result of industrialization, urbanization, and abundant production of food, was a ripe target for wave after wave of ever-more virulent plagues. Each wave was beaten back by the bacteriologists, but it was only a matter of time before the Big One arrived:

There were warnings. Soldervetzsky, as early as 1929, told the bacteriologists that they had no guaranty against some new disease, a thousand times more deadly than any they knew, arising and killing by the hundreds of millions and even by the billion. You see, the micro-organic world remained a mystery to the end.

And so technological society, with all of its accomplishments, brought about its own destruction.

The Scarlet Plague reminds us that, despite what we see as progress, our place in the world is still vulnerable. Technological progress may bring a better life, but it also masks the underlying structural weakness, and one day, the whole edifice may fail catastrophically. “All man’s toil upon the planet was just so much foam,” Smith tells us, washed away in the inevitable flood.

It’s not a particularly original theme, and it’s easy to read The Scarlet Plague as an overly simplistic moral fable. And in some ways it is overly simple — we’re clearly not supposed to take Smith’s words at face value, but London isn’t entirely convincing; too often his characters are merely stock types.

But what makes this a good post-apocalyptic novel are the gritty brushstrokes by a master of naturalism, which showed the collapse of civilization as the truly horrifying experience that it would be.

Read more entries in my post-apocalyptic science fiction series, and my other science fiction reviews.

This review is part of Vintage Science Fiction Month. Head on over to the Little Red Reviewer to read more reviews of great early science fiction for the entire month of January.

Image credits: The Scarlet Plague cover art from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database: Cover, 2012 HiLo Books edition by Michael Lewy. Illustrations from the original edition are via Project Gutenberg.

William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912)

Back in 1805, the French priest de Grainville wrote what could be considered the first Dying Earth novel. Despite many obvious science fictional elements, Le Dernier Homme was a religious fantasy, inspired by the pseudo-biblical style of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Scientist-prophets fulfilled God’s will by conquering nature with science, but in the background was an invisible world of mystical spirits who were part of God’s master plan.

A century later, a quirky British poet produced another major dying earth vision by flipping this formula: he brought the mysticism to the foreground, and put the science in the background, creating a completely secular and much darker vision of earth’s final era. William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, a flawed beast of a book, is a milestone in the genre — a forerunner not only of now-classic Dying Earth fantasies by Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe, but also of psychologically refracted post-apocalyptic visions like Galouye’s Dark Universe and Dick and Zelazny’s Deus Irae.

IRRATIONAL ENQUIRY
Hodgson’s narrator is a young man who lives in the waning days of the earth, in humanity’s last redoubt: a giant, completely self-sustaining pyramid fortress that lies deep within an enormous crevice. Here, more than one hundred miles from the earth’s surface, it draws warmth and energy from the planet’s interior. Hundreds of thousands of years before, the sun dimmed, leaving the planet’s surface uninhabitable. Fortunately for humans, a giant rift opened up, and people were able to move civilization to the last habitable place on earth.

This move of course required tremendously advanced technology, but now that technology is all but magic. The community’s survival depends on this inherited technology, but its secrets are lost, along with a rational view of the natural world. The twilight Night Land is filled with fearful mysteries and dimly perceived dangers: “The Giant’s Pit”, “The Headland From Which Strange Things Peer”, “The Road Where The Silent Ones Walk”, “The Watching Thing of the North-West,” and “The Thing That Nods.” Holed up in its bunker, humanity does little more than survive and look out on the lurid landscape.

Hodgson was writing at a time when science fiction writers were still struggling with the issue of a frame story. How are present readers supposed to know about events of the distant future? As Brian Stableford argues, during the 19th century “speculative fiction had been handicapped by the lack of convincing narrative frames.” The works of de Grainville and Mary Shelly were supposed to be recorded visions of the future. M. P. Shiel used a similar technique, framing The Purple Cloud as the record of a patient’s words during a session of mesmerism. H.G. Wells’ Time Machine was revolutionary, because, with the invention time travel, it got around the problem of framing a story as a fantastic vision. A time machine “opened up the farther reaches of time and space to a kind of rational enquiry” that hadn’t been possible before.

The Night Land, however, isn’t much of a rational exploration of the distant future, and Hodgson uses a convoluted frame story. The narrator is in fact a 17th century writer, whose wife, the Lady Mirdath has died. During his sleep, he wakes up as a seventeen year-old youth of the dark and distant future, living in the Mighty Pyramid. As that youth, he remembers his 17th century past and still longs for his lost Mirdath.

One day, he manages to make telepathic contact with a woman named Naani, who he immediately knows is the future incarnation of Mirdath. Naani lives far away, in another pyramid fortress. But her fortress is failing, and she is crying out for help. The narrator is determined to rescue his long-lost love, and so, like Dante pursuing Beatrice, he sets out on a journey through the hellish country of the Night Land. And thus begins one of the classic storylines of the genre: the post-apocalyptic road trip.

GEOGRAPHY OF FEAR
The young man’s adventure is a nightmare journey to the center of the earth. As in Jules Verne’s story, Hodgson’s hero finds a world that evokes the primeval past. There are strange geological phenomena and bizarre creatures who occupy a landscape that is no longer dominated by humans and their technology. At one point, the hero watches a band of “Humped Men” pursuing a giant creature, a scene that recalls Neanderthals attempting to take down a mammoth.

But unlike Verne’s Professor Lidenbrock, Hodgson’s hero sees only mysteries. Scientific artifacts litter the land, but the youth has no rational framework to make sense of what he sees. It’s rarely clear whether the perceived dangers are real or imagined.

For example, the people of the Mighty Pyramid live in fear of mountain-sized monsters called “Watchers.” They had appeared “a million years gone”, and “grew steadily nearer through twenty thousand years; but so slow that in no one year could a man perceive that it had moved.”

On his journey, the narrator creeps by one of the Watchers, crawling on his hands and knees to avoid being seen. He gets closer look:

I was confounded that the mighty chin did come forward… even as the upward part of a vast cliff, which the sea doth make hollow about the bottom; for it did hang out into the air…as it had been a thing of Rock, all scored and be-weathered…

And the thing was squat there, and might have root within the earth, so it did seem to mine imaginings, as I did stare with a dumb wonder. And there were monstrous warts upon the thing, and indents and a mighty ruggedness and lumpings; as it were that it did be pimpled with great boulders that were inbred within that monstrous hide.

This is clearly just a mountain, not a giant monster. But the hero doesn’t recognize this; his courage suddenly leaves him and he flees in terror: “And I gat an abrupt and horrid shaking of the spirit; for I did feel in verity that my soul had come too anigh; and that the Beast had a sure knowledge concerning me.”

As the journey proceeds, there is no revelation of the truth, no lifting of the curtain to see the order behind the mystery. The hero finds his soulmate, and in that sense he succeeds. But the Night Land remains as dimly illuminated as ever.

Something has to be said about the book’s famous flaws, which have doomed it to obscurity. I read the abridged version of HiLo Books’ Radium Age Science Fiction series, which cuts out a third of the book. Axed are the long first chapter, “a corrosive treacle-stream of sentimentality” describing the narrator’s 17th century love life, and “lengthy denouement” that describes the journey home after the hero and Naani are united. Hodgson wrote the book in awful psudeo-archaic prose, and combined with the unvarying pace of the repetitious narrative, it makes even the abridged version a slog. It’s one of those books I’m glad I read, but I wasn’t happy reading it.

Why read it at all? If can you get through it, it’s a compelling, original vision of the world’s end — a dark, psychological journey to the center of the earth, haunted by our most primeval fears.

Read more entries in my post-apocalyptic science fiction series, and my other science fiction reviews.

This review is part of Vintage Science Fiction Month. Head on over to the Little Red Reviewer to read more reviews of great early science fiction for the entire month of January.

Image credits: The Night Land cover art from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database; Cover, 2012 HiLo Books edition by Michael Lewy; Cover, 1972 Ballantine edition by Robert LoGrippo; Cover, 1979 Sphere edition by Solar Wind.

Garrett P. Serviss’ The Second Deluge (1912)

1912 was a good year for science fiction — according to some, it was the best year. Certainly for pulp science fiction, it was a landmark year. Although the first dedicated pulp SF magazine, Amazing Stories, wouldn’t appear for more than a decade, two of the foundational texts of pulp SF were published in 1912: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, which began as the serial “Under the Moons of Mars” in February, and Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+, whose last installment was published in March.

Another contributor to this early pulp ferment, less memorable than Burroughs or Gernsback, was the American journalist Garrett Serviss. Serviss was a popular science writer who had also written an 1898 sequel to Wells’ War of the Worlds, featuring an invasion of Mars led by none other than Thomas Alva Edison. The Second Deluge, serialized in 1911-12, is a pulpy, early instance of a classic storyline that crops up over and over again post-apocalyptic fiction: Noah’s Ark.

THE PROPHET OF SCIENCE
Noah’s Ark is of course one of the great biblical apocalypses, and it has inspired all sorts of SF disaster stories. The Second Deluge sticks very close to the traditional formula: 1) A disaster is foreseen by a prophet, 2) Most people are unwilling to accept the reality of threat, 3) A small group prepares an ark in which they escape.

In this case, the prophet is an independently wealthy, iconoclastic New York scientist named Cosmo Versál. Versál has collected data that convinces him that the earth is about to pass through a watery nebula, which will flood the earth up past the tallest Himalayan peaks. Versál tries to warn the world and is of course laughed off by the establishment. He prepares an unsinkable ark out of a special metal alloy called levium, which is the only material that will withstand the the rigors of the flood. Versál distributes his engineering designs for the ark for free, hoping that others will follow his lead. But of course they don’t. The flood comes, New York is drowned in a dramatic scene, and only those in the ark survive – with a few exceptions.

Brian Stableford described this type of early, pulpy SF as “a zygotic fusion of European scientific romance and American other-worldly exotica, lightly leavened with casually extravagant tall tales of scientific miracle-making.” It’s an apt description: The Second Deluge is little more than an SF tall tale, and it features a scientific miracle-maker of the sort that would later be familiar in the classic works of A. E. Van Vogt. The characters have goofy names: there is the somewhat wise, somewhat foolish U.S. President Samson, the arrogant wealthy businessman Mr. Blank, the doubting Professor Pludder, the believing Professor Moses, and of course Cosmo Versál (‘the entire cosmos’).

Everyone and everything in this book is a caricature. Versál, our scientist Noah, is almost never wrong, except in a few minor things. The science moralizing here is equally simple. Those who accept and believe in science are saved, and those who don’t largely perish. Versál makes a selection of 1000 chosen ones to join him on the ark (along with all of the animals of course), and they are the ones who will repopulate the world.

There is even a repentant scientist, who at first fails to believe, but is later saved when he comes around. Professor Pludder is a scientific adviser to the U.S. President. Once Pludder gets over his stubborn pride at being upstaged by a non-establishment scientist, he puts his brilliant brain to work and manages to save the President and his family.

THE ARK IN SF
As fiction, The Second Deluge is forgettable and boring. But its theme makes it a landmark in the post-apocalyptic genre. As far as I know, it’s the first SF deluge novel, with successors that include great works by Fowler Wright, John Wyndham, J.G. Ballard, and Stephen Baxter. More importantly, it’s an early version of the ark in science fiction, which in the 1930’s took the shape of a rocket ship – in Wylie and Balmer’s much better treatment of this theme, When Worlds Collide.

The idea that only a handful of humans can escape the coming disaster raises an important question: who gets on the ark? In the asteroid collision movie Deep Impact, the U.S. Government decides to save a core group of scientists, soldiers, engineers, artists, etc. who can rebuild civilization in the aftermath. Cosmo Versál does much the same thing, but his concerns are more explicitly eugenic, rationalized by the incorrect idea that society’s one thousand most talented people will breed a race of talented children.

Shortly after The Second Deluge was serialized, the smaller-scale but very real catastrophe of the Titanic occurred. The people involved faced some of the same survival decisions as the characters in Serviss’ book. This real-world tragedy showed just how dissociated Serviss’ fantasy vision of super-science and survival was from the actual limits of science and the complexities of human psychology.

The pulp magazine era was about to begin, and although this era produced many of the great classics of the genre, it was also, as Brian Stableford writes of the era, “from this point that the collaborative work of horizon-expansion, social extrapolation and moral re-sophistication which has been the labour and triumph of modern science fiction began anew.”

Read more entries in my post-apocalyptic science fiction series, and my other science fiction reviews.

This review is part of Vintage Science Fiction Month. Head on over to the Little Red Reviewer to read more reviews of great early science fiction for the entire month of January.

Image credits: Amazing Stories cover, November 1926 by Frank R. Paul, via The Pulp Magazine Project, Wonder Stories May 1934 cover by Frank R. Paul, via Wikimedia Commons

J.-H. Rosny aîné’s The Death of the Earth (1910)

As I wrote when I first began this series on post-apocalyptic science fiction, what makes this genre so compelling is how its writers put our mastery of nature up against the possibility of human extinction. The extinction of a species is a routine event, and has been for the entire history of life on earth. So what about us? Will our species eventually disappear, or will our mastery of science and technology protect us from nature’s ruthless assaults?

This theme is beautifully explored by one of the early masters of science fiction, the Belgian writer J.-H. Rosny aîné. Rosny, whose career began in the 1880’s and ended with his death during the Campbellian Golden Age, can be considered the father of hard science fiction because, as his translators argue, unlike Verne or Wells, he “was the first writer to allow science to write his narratives” from a “neutral, ahumanistic” perspective.

In this way, Rosny is much like the scientifically realist Camille Flammarion; but unlike Flammarion, Rosny’s purpose is novelistic rather than didactic. The result is fiction that is as compelling as that of Verne or Wells, told in a detached, analytic style that makes Rosny’s voice unique in early SF. This voice has a powerful effect in The Death of the Earth, a ruthless evolutionary vision of human extinction, in which our species cedes the planet to a completely new form of life.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXTINCTION
The Death of the Earth is in many ways a secular version of the biblically-themed, original Last Man story: The aging earth is no longer a fertile habitat for humans, and the remaining population has to confront the fact that they are facing the end. In Rosny’s distant future, nearly all of the planet’s water has been lost to space or drained deep into the earth’s crust. A few communities survive in desert oases. They have adapted remarkably well to this nearly uninhabitable world. Technology is so good, that most of the physical needs of human society are provided almost effortlessly: energy, materials, engineering, transportation, communication are all completely solved problems. But two problems can’t be solved by any technology — the lack of water on the planet, and the frequent earthquakes that obliterate the wells and springs on which people so desperately depend.

The human species is dying out and people know it. Except for some crop plants and a species of intelligent birds, humans are the only carbon-based life that remains. A deep-rooted fatalism has taken over. Suicide and euthanasia are common, and sometimes, when a community’s water runs low, required by law. People are generally willing to embrace death enthusiastically, since they have nothing to live for. Technology has eliminated the need for all labor, and “there was almost no work to be done.”

Thus, nothing occurred to disturb the listlessness of these Last Men. Those best able to escape from these doldrums were the least emotive individuals, who had never loved anyone, and had hardly love their own persons… they were the perfect products of a doomed species.

Young Targ and his sister Arva are an exception — they refuse to accept the obvious fate of their species. Rosny describes them as atavisms, throwbacks to an earlier period when the drive to survive was strong. Targ shows his survival instinct when, after an earthquake destroys the water supply of one community, he relentlessly searches for a new source of water. He succeeds and the community is saved. Targ goes on to get married and keep faith in a bright future for his children.

But inevitably the water runs out again. The community initiates a major program of euthanasia to bring the population down. Targ and Arva are unwilling to give up the struggle to survive, and so they flee with their families to find a new home in an abandoned oasis, where the previous inhabitants all committed suicide. Here they try to build a future for their children.

The tension that drives Rosny’s story is the conflict between Targ’s will to live and his growing realization that human life is becoming impossible. The struggle for survival is no longer self-evidently worthwhile, and Targ is forced to justify his desire. “Why would we live?” asks one young woman, who is about to succumb to euthanasia. “Why did our ancestors live? Some inconceivable madness made them resist, over millennia, the decrees of nature… They accepted to live an abject existence… simply so as not to vanish.”

THE MINERAL KINGDOM
The greatest challenge to Targ’s desire to preserve a human future is, however, not the fatalism of his community. It’s the growing dominance of a completely new form of life: “ferromagnetics.” They are unintelligent, slow-moving microbe-like organisms that consist entirely of various forms of iron, and are at the very beginning of their evolutionary history. To the last remaining humans, the earth is dying. But Rosny makes it clear that the human perspective is too narrow; the dehydrated earth is still the source of new life, just as it was four billion years before when the first proto-cells emerged. The “mineral” future of life on earth is continually before Targ’s eyes, but he refuses to accept it for as long as he can.

In the end, Targ can no longer deny it, because he has become the Last Man. His sister, his wife, and his children are all dead. His desperate hope to see the human race reborn is now impossible, and Targ finally accepts the truth:

He thought that whatever remained now of his flesh had been transmitted, in an unbroken line, since the origin of things. Some thing that had once lived in the primeval sea, on emerging alluvia, in the swamps, in the forests, in the midst of savannas, and among the multitude of man’s cities, had continued unbroken down to him. And here, the end!

He finally gives his body, this flesh descended in an unbroken lineage from the beginning, over to the new life of the ferromagnetics.

Rosny wasn’t the first SF writer to consider the evolutionary end of humanity. But, compared to Flammarion’s sentimental mysticism or Wells socially-motivated evolutionary degeneration, Rosny’s vision is brutally cosmic. Humans, despite their technical mastery and undisputed reign over the earth, are not the exception, and they will in the end pass just like any other life.

Read more entries in my post-apocalyptic science fiction series, and my other science fiction reviews.

Image Credits: View from Rocknest, NASA Mars rover Curiosity via Wikimedia Commons; Jacket cover illustration by Mahendra Singh, from Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind, J.-H. Rosny aîne, tr. Daniele Chatelain and George Slusser, Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction series.

H.G. Wells’ The War in the Air (1908)

After the First World War, wrote historian Barbara Tuchman in her landmark history of the pre-war years, “illusions and enthusiasms possible up to 1914 slowly sank beneath a sea of mass disillusionment.” But there were some who were disillusioned long before that. In the decades leading up to the catastrophic conflict, all sorts of writers and thinkers worried about the possibility of a worldwide war, fought with technologies that were capable of causing destruction on an entirely new scale.

Concerns about a massive conflict were so serious that the major European powers held two peace conferences, in 1899 and 1907, despite the fact that they weren’t currently at war with each other. Fiction writers captured the martial zeitgeist with a steady stream of future war stories (including H.G. Wells’ 1898 The War of the Worlds), exploring military possibilities that would soon be realized.

The most bitingly clear statement of pre-war anticipation and disillusionment is H.G. Wells’ 1908 novel, The War in the Air. The book is a major genre milestone, one that explicitly lays out an important theme of the coming century: Our civilization is headed for a catastrophic end unless our moral progress keeps pace with our technological process.

CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONENTS
Wells’ theme should sound familiar to anyone who has read a nuclear holocaust novel. With great scientific progress comes great progress in our ability to destroy ourselves. The books narrator explains how such progress led up to the apocalyptic War in the Air:

For three hundred years and more the long, steadily accelerated diastole of Europeanized civilization had been in progress: towns had been multiplying, populations increasing, values rising, new countries developing; thought, literature, knowledge unfolding and spreading. It seemed but a part of the process that every year the instruments of war were vaster and more powerful, and that armies and explosives outgrew all other growing things….

Three hundred years of diastole, and then came the swift and unexpected systole, like the closing of a fist.

The War in the Air tells the story of this “unexpected systole” through the eyes of Bert Smallways, an Everyman who stumbles into the center of war. Bert is “a vulgar little creature, the sort of pert, limited soul that the old civilization of the early twentieth century produced by the million in every country of the world.” He is an unsuccessful go-getter, living in the provincial, south English town of Bun Hill. As Bert moves from one failed venture to another, the world changes rapidly in the background. Traditional railways are replaced by that perennial symbol of misguided progress, the monorail. And one day, an inventor named Butteridge finally figures out how to make a successful flying machine. Bert witnesses its virgin flight.

One thing follows another, and through an accident Bert finds himself alone in a hot air balloon with the secret plans for Butteridge’s flying machine. He lands in Germany, near a top-secret fleet of airships that are about to set sail for a surprise attack on America. After trying to pass himself off as Butteridge and making an offer to sell his secret plans, Bert ends up on the flagship of the German air fleet when the War in the Air breaks out.

THE END OF THE HALLUCINATION OF SECURITY
Wells works through the new logic of total war. It turns out that all nations were secretly building fleets of airships. The airships, slow and difficult to maneuver, are not particularly effective against each other, but they are great at bombing cities. And so each side tries to win the war by laying waste to the other side’s cities. The inevitable happens: Civilization collapses as the world bombs itself back to the Middle Ages.

Bert stumbles through it all, with very little control over his fate. He eventually works his way home, across a classic post-apocalyptic landscape, where he becomes a leader of his small community by being more violent than the next guy.

Bert’s story is replayed again and again in subsequent post-apocalyptic fiction. Fortunately for us, two world wars didn’t lead to the total collapse of human civilization. But they were immediately followed by the threat of nuclear holocaust. And today, the potentially existential threat of catastrophic climate change raises the same question that drives these apocalyptic war stories: Can we ever control ourselves as well as we can control nature?

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud famously summed up the tension between our mastery of nature and our own uncontrolled natures:

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction… Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.

Freud was writing after the catastrophic experiences of one war, and as the next one was already brewing. Two decades earlier, during a time of remarkable peace, prosperity, and technical progress, Wells posed the same question and expressed is pessimism about the answer. As his narrator says, looking back from the distant future:

When now in retrospect the thoughtful observer surveys the intellectual history of this time, when one reads its surviving fragments of literature, its scraps of political oratory, the few small voices that chance has selected out of a thousand million utterances to speak to later days, the most striking thing of all this web of wisdom and error is surely that hallucination of security. To men living in our present world state, orderly, scientific and secured, nothing seems so precarious, so giddily dangerous, as the fabric of the social order with which the men of the opening of the twentieth century were content.

Image credits: HM AR 23 Airship with Camel, Imperial War Museum, picture scanned by Ian Dunster June 1973 issue of Aeroplane Monthly, via Wikimedia Commons; Monorail (1907), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; “German Airship bombing Warsaw in 1914″ by Hans Rudolf Schulze, via Wikimedia Commons.

Read more entries in my post-apocalyptic science fiction series, and my other science fiction reviews.

Louis Pope Gratacap’s The Evacuation of England (1908)

Digging the Panama Canal in 1907

One of the pleasures of reading older post-apocalyptic fiction is seeing how the major themes and plot ideas of today’s genre were first introduced more than one hundred years ago. But just because writers came up with these great ideas doesn’t mean that their books are any good. Many of them are; however the American writer Louis Gratacap’s pioneering post-apocalyptic novel wins the prize as the most turgid and unreadable novel I’ve ever read. In fact, I’ll admit it: I didn’t actually read the whole book; my reading quickly changed into a slow skim. Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute has the same opinion:

Gratacap’s range was wide, incorporating much material which has become central to sf, but his books are overlong, choked by his compulsive didacticism, and nearly unreadable today.

So why bother with The Evacuation of England? Because Gratacap came up with a major innovation that is absolutely central to post-apocalyptic SF today. To my knowledge (please correct me if I’m wrong), Evacuation is the first novel in which civilization is destroyed by a natural disaster caused by human beings. It’s the world’s first anthropogenic climate change novel.

Yes, there were plenty of catastrophes in the future war stories of the late 19th century (of which War of the Worlds is the most original). But the destruction was caused by weaponry and not by nature spinning out of control. Writers from the same era also cooked up images of almost every kind of natural disaster. (The French Omega covers nearly all disasters in a single book.) But their causes had nothing to do with human actions. Shiel’s Purple Cloud comes close, with an expedition to the North Pole triggering, in some mystical way, volcanic eruptions in the tropics. But nobody before Gratacap wrote a story in which humans bring about massive destruction by making major changes to the planet.

THE BIG DIG
The trigger for climate change in this book is one of society’s largest intentional efforts to reshape the planet at the time: the Panama Canal. When Gratacap wrote his novel in 1907, construction of the canal was moving forward on an unprecedented scale. The canal wasn’t finished until 1913, so Gratacap had a few years before his predictions of catastrophe were proved completely wrong.

There isn’t much to the story. Alexander Leacraft is an Englishman visiting the United States in 1909, where he attends a cautionary lecture on the geological risks of the Panama Canal. It’s the classic trope of scientist as prophet of doom. The speaker is a distinguished geologist, and the audience is made up of famous scientists and political dignitaries, including President Teddy Roosevelt himself.

After working through a convoluted theory about earthquakes and the earth’s axial wobble, the speaker predicts that the canal will trigger the geological collapse of the Isthmus of Panama, leading to a merger of the Pacific and the Atlantic. Once that happens, the Gulf Stream, which is so crucial for Europe’s mild climate, will fail, and Europe will be plunged into an ice age. Or, as Gratacap’s lecturer says, in a typically baroque passage:

Science in the last resource to her councils must be austerely judicial. She cannot take cognizance of man’s projects or respect his hopes. The Panama Canal as part of the Isthmus of Panama participates in all the vicissitudes of the latter, and we know that those vicissitudes mean dislocation and subsidence. When such frightful results will happen, it is impossible to say; that they must happen, we can positively assert.

But those who have invested their prestige and money in the Canal won’t hear the message. The distinguished Senator from South Carolina replies to the lecturer:

We are not required to credit you with prediction. This scientific discussion will not alter our confidence nor stop the work on the Canal. It can’t. I’m not inclined to think that this nation will be stultified by the oracles of geology; it is a matter of simple determination that science makes mistakes—and I would advise no one in this room within the hearing of your voice, and no one outside of it, to whose eyes your reported views will appear, to allow them a scintilla of serious import.

(Now imagine 300+ pages of prose like that, and you’ll have a good feel for the book.)

THE DEEP FREEZE
You know how this turns out. The Canal goes ahead, disaster ensues, and the climate changes all over the world. England is plunged into a deep freeze. After some discussion and, as they say in movie ratings, mild peril, the British stiffen their upper lips and execute an orderly evacuation to Australia.

What’s remarkable about Evacuation is how optimistic it is. Unlike the nuclear wastelands or climate change apocalypses of later decades, this novel is not much of a cautionary tale. The effort to build the Panama Canal triggers unintended consequences, but humanity moves on, and even benefits. The discussion in the book is strikingly similar to our conversations about climate change today. There are climate change skeptics who dismiss the risks, and argue that massive climate change will actually benefit the world. Gratacap’s story endorses this latter view. Despite the enormous disruption, society basically shrugs it off:

It is the voice of that very science which has made us such powerful masters of her utilities that now tells us: We must go [out of England]… Nature opposes us, indeed, in forcing us away, but we thwart her niggardliness by subterfuge and endurance and courage. We can make her plastic enough for our purposes if we do not overstep the limits of her last negation.

If only we would be so lucky.

I’ll leave the last words to Gratacap and his hero:

“His thought engaged itself with the mechanical structure of civilization, as affected by new discoveries, allied with an increasing utilitarianism, in which the individual vanished before the imperious supervention of the State, the incorporated multitude, the abstract Wisdom of the most knowing minds, influenced by a solicitous paternalism for the Whole.

But now he found himself confronted by a new exigency, the geological interferences of Nature, and it piqued his curiosity, it assailed his fancy with indubitable fascination. By reason of his intellectual proneness to these questions, which quite deeply occupied his mind, he felt at this moment that the tremendous and supreme chance of his own mighty nation, succumbing to the accidents of a tidal caprice might offer him an alternative refuge of interest which would help to dull the pain of his misfortune. So convulsing a spectacle as the pitiless war of nature upon the embedded bulwarks of a great commercial nation’s prosperity, terrified him as a possible historical factzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Read a copy of The Evacuation of England online (if you dare) at the Internet Archive.

Read more entries in my post-apocalyptic science fiction series, and my other science fiction reviews.

Image credits: Panama Canal construction, 1907, public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons; “The Frozen Thames, 1677″ by Abraham Hondius, via Wikimedia Commons.

Van Tassel Sutphen’s The Doomsman (1906)

The Doomsman opens in what seems to be the primitive past: A young man sits on the shore of a bay, dressed in a tunic. In the forest behind him are the heavy wooden walls of a stockade, a clue to the defensive nature of life in this sparsely inhabited country. But not everything fits. The young man is looking across the bay at a vague, dark outline of some tall structure, while in his hands he holds a book: A Child’s History of the United States. He is sitting on the shores of New York, looking out at what’s left of Manhattan.

It would make a great opening shot for a movie — a YA post-apocalyptic movie. The Doomsman is, like After London, one of the earliest examples of the post-apocalyptic YA adventure. The plot follows the familiar pattern: A restless boy is trying to understand his society and discover how it fell from its seemingly more glorious and technologically marvelous past. Excitement, danger, and romance ensue; the boy proves his manhood, discovers the secrets of lost technologies, and seeks to win the girl. (The gender pattern here wouldn’t be swapped until decades later.) Much of what appeals to us in present-day YA blockbusters like the Hunger Games is here in Doomsman, in a form that only feels a little dated.

LIFE IS NASTY BRUTISH AND SHORT
The hero of the story is Constans, son of the ruler of a small walled settlement. America, and presumably the rest of the world, has been set back centuries by some poorly remembered catastrophe. It might have been plague — the specific cause isn’t described, only the ensuing panic. Whatever it was, the narrator tells us, once it got going, “the relapse into barbarism was swift.” Society is now divided into small fiefdoms, each one suspicious of the other. Trade, technological progress, and civilization are inhibited by the basic needs of survival — and especially defense. The small, fortified settlements of the countryside are threatened by a warlord clan called Doom, comprised of the descendants of criminals who inhabit the ruins of New York City. The Doomsmen make their living by raiding the surrounding inhabitants.

Constans’ familiar little world is turned upside down when his father’s stockade is raided by a party of Doomsmen, led by one Quinton Edge. However, Edge isn’t there for plunder — he’s there to claim his secret lover, Constans’ sister Issa. Issa’s father isn’t about to let his daughter run off with some brigand. Words are exchanged and the bloodshed begins. Constans escapes in the chaos.

The rest of the story is about how Constans infiltrates Doom society and how he rallies the rural communities to unite against the Doomsmen. He falls in love with a Doom girl, discovers the secrets of lost technology, and finally comes to understand why his sister took up with Quinton Edge.

JUST A VERY BAD WIZARD
Like many later post-apocalyptic novels, the scraps of the last civilization’s technology have become an object for religious worship in the present one. In this case the technology is electricity, the secrets of which have been lost.

The Doomsmen have a religion that is centered on worship of the “Shining One,” a giant face made of electrical lights and wires (and which bears an uncanny resemblance to the great face of the wizard of Oz). The caretaker of the Shining One is a priest named Prosper, who lives off the sacrifices of food brought by the worshippers. His primary priestly function is to maintain the dynamo that provide’s the Shining One’s power. Unlike the Wizard of Oz, Prosper doesn’t really understand the principles of electricity; all he knows are the rituals of maintenance that have been passed on by his predecessor.

The Shining One and the dynamo that powers it are the key metaphor for society in The Doomsman. The Shining One is a source of mystery; its operating principles are unknown. But (as becomes clear to the book-learned Constans), the building that houses the Shining One is an old execution chamber. The electric chair, once used to execute the criminal ancestors of Doom, is now used to sacrifice prisoners of war to the Doomsmen’s god:

In every state-prison stood the “death-chair,” the visible embodiment of the moral force which the wrong-doer had defied, and which, in the ensuing struggle, had proved too strong for him. No wonder that it was both feared and hated by the citizens of the underworld of crime.

Now that the social fabric lay in ruins, now that the very foundations of law and order had been razed, what could be more natural than the impulse to turn this instrument of legal punishment into one “of unlicensed vengeance?

Constans however, like every hero of these sorts of stories, sees through the mystery and thereby overcomes the fears of his society:

The recognition of those material agencies for the production of the apparition that had so terrified him gave Constans back his confidence; his books had not deceived him, and he was ready now for any fresh marvels that might be on the cards.

The Doomsman owes much to the earlier After London, though it’s not a simple knock-off. Its themes are less well developed, but the plot is much better. Like so many YA novels of this genre, it takes a non-conformist stance towards society’s authorities. In The Hunger Games, that stance is against political authority. But another big target in this genre is authorities who promote fear of technology and work against a rational view of the world: Andre Norton’s Star Man’s Son, Poul Anderson’s Vault of the Ages, and Leigh Brackett’s great classic, The Long Tomorrow. All of these novels can trace their ancestry back to The Doomsman.

Read more entries in my post-apocalyptic science fiction series, and my other science fiction reviews.

Image credits: Illustrations from The Doomsman, available from Project Gutenberg. Book cover via The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.