Here is an apocalyptic vision that I quite like that I found on Designzzz, an art-type blog where more fantastic art can be found. I don’t really go for this air-brushed style computer art stuff, but I quite like some of this stuff. It will make nice wallpaper on my desktop anyway…
Art work by alexiuss.
The third and last part of my Survivors retrospective where I compare the 2008 re-make with the original show. Which is best? Read on to find out…
Follow the links for Part 1: Survivors 1975-77 and Part Two: The Novel of Survivors
Perhaps the only surprise in Survivors returning to the small screen is the fact that it took over 30 years for it to do so. Despite it’s one off broadcast on terrestrial TV, the influence of Survivors can be seen in many later screen apocalypses, from 28 Days Later to The Last Train. Yes, that’s right: no repeats back in the good old days of British TV. Of course it had a video release and in its day the show was inexplicably successful in Italy for some reason. However the success of 28 Days Later lead to the much anticipated DVD release of the original show and a few years down the line we see a new look Survivors back on our screen. Now, it would be all too easy for me to do the grumpy old man thing and lay into it, saying ‘the original is better’ and how ‘television today is a load of crap,’ but I’m afraid the original is better and television today is a load of crap. Sorry kiddies but its true! Still, the new Survivors isn’t terribly bad in the cold light of day. Just a little bland maybe. Possibly the original too was a little bland in its day. Certainly compared to post-apocalypses in literature the original Survivors wouldn’t score particularly well in man-to-man combat with Triffids or The Drowned World. But this is television not literature and to compare television dramas to novels, no matter how good the drama, is like comparing instant coffee with freshly ground coffee.
Still, the original Survivors would have seemed pretty fresh compared to other science fiction series on the goggle-box in its day. For a start, it really wasn’t for the kids. I’m sure kids liked it but it’s not Dr Who. True, its no Prisoner either, but neither is it as kitsch or inaccessible as The Prisoner.
Survivors was also highly topical in its day. While I suppose the current Swine Flu scare (and past Bird Flu scares) might make the new Survivors seem more probable than the old show, it hardly condenses so many of the issues of its age as the old one did. The Survivors 2008 basically stays fairly true to the premise of the old show (although judging by the number of characters there seems to be a higher survival rate), yet it doesn’t share the original show’s philosophy. It seems to pay only lip-service to Terry Nation’s old query ‘how would you make a candle from scratch?’ Although it does briefly pose the question in passing.
No, the new show is more interested in action and melodrama, two things sadly lacking at times from many of the original shows episodes. Now action and melodrama aren’t necessarily bad things per se, but action and drama are pretty common occurrences on the telly these days, while thoughtful speculation is sadly a comparative rarity in TV or indeed in any medium. Not that the new show is bad. It’s okay. More a post-apocalypse Eastenders than the post-apocalypse Archers.
Like all television programs today the dialogue lacks the naturalistic pacing and theatrical expansiveness of classic British television: the insidious influence of Hollywood I’m afraid. The directing and editing is also much more frenetic and cinematic, although for all its jump cuts and bombastic sound tracking (and I won’t pretend that it is in any way the worst offender on the screens in this regard) it fails to archive what the original show managed with its longer cuts and – almost unheard of today – no soundtrack.
I find it amazing how well the old show depicts the aftermath with almost no on screen physical evidence of the actual apocalypse. While the new Survivors regularly shows us empty motorways and looted shops, yet it totally fails to evoke a feeling of emptiness, loss and loneliness. A classic scene in the original Survivors shows Abby’s awakening into the post-plague world. We get a high lingering shot of her walking down her road, a few close ups on her face as she explores the dead village and an ever present silence as she realises that she is on her own, before the extreme high shot of her leaving the church when she softly asks the heavens “Dear God, don’t let me be the only one.” I stumbled across this scene and its 2008 equivalent on YouTube which perfectly illustrates the difference in style and quality. While both scenes don’t correlate exactly, they both cover Abby’s first steps outside the house.
Press ‘play’ below and see what you think…
Good isn’t it? We don’t need to be told what she is thinking and feeling through opvious cinematic sign-postings: the director has faith in the power of his material and he lets the scene play out slowly and naturally. Okay the final “Please God” bit is a little hackneyed (maybe), but still the scene does a lot, while not trying too hard to do too much.
Now play the following clip showing the same scene 2008 stylee…
Now if you think that is aesthetically better than the first clip you are a plebeian idiot!
It’s a pity the first clip doesn’t also show Caroline Seymour finding her husband’s body, as that is beautifully done in comparison to Julie Graham’s shouting and screaming in the 2008 version. Indeed shouting, screaming and hair-pulling seem to define the whole clip. Instead of the cold silence of the street, we get in-your-face rapid-fire jump-cuts, danger-music, screaming and spinning close-ups. By the time we get the final plea to God there is no power left in the scene because the idiot director has bled all the meaning out of the scene by throwing every trick at it in one go. Instead of capturing my attention I feel sick and bored and I want to die – much like travelling on the National Express coach!
And this scene is fairly typical of the series as a whole.
Fans of the, once, excellent Peep Show will be pleased to see The Johnson, aka. Paterson Joseph, playing Greg in the new-look Survivors, until they realise that he is an even weaker replacement than Julie Graham is as Abby. At least most of the survivors are good-looking this time around if Robyn Addison is anything to go buy, although Greg seems less than impressed?
Unlike the original Survivors, the acting is fairly mediocre in general, despite having the amazing Zoe Tapper in it (who, alas, keeps her clothes on for a change) and I doubt if any of the actors will express the same enthusiasm and fondness for the show as the original cast do in 30 years time. Despite its difficulties the original being an obvious labour of love for all concerned, while this being little more than another gig and a labour to watch.
Not even the classy British actress Zoe Tapper (left) can save this show. Here she helps the new, soon to be dead, Jenny (Freema Agyeman) with here dying pal.
The new opening credits state that it is based on the novel (a strange claim seeing as the novel was a novelization of a TV show), but as the show progresses it’s interesting to note that the Abby story-arch again diverges from that of Terry Nation’s original idea. Although unlike the original series there are no signs that the producer intends to write this key character out of any future series. Instead they seem to be sowing the seeds for further, and increasingly unlikely, adventures regarding her child and a sinister government research lab… Ho, hum… Still, the new Survivors probably shouldn’t offend too many fans of the old show, it just won’t thrill them too much either.
The show probably owes more to ITV’s melodramatic adventure-focused asteroid-impact post-apocalyptic mini-series The Last Train than it does to the more thoughtful original Survivors and in fairness it’s probably of just about the same quality, i.e. watchable low-brow entertainment with little real depth and little to no aesthetic charm. It’s unlikely to score the same fanatical fan-base as the original show because, frankly, there’s much more ambitious stuff around on television these days, from Lost to The Wire…
It’s not terribly bad, I suppose, but it’s not good either – not even a little bit good. So, which is best? If you even have to ask such as question then there’s no hope for you…
NOTE: When I found the two same scenes on YouTube I thought ‘brilliant, this really shows the difference between the two shows,’ hence I structured this piece around them. Anyway that was a month or so ago, so when I was looking for a scan of the original book cover I found a web-review which does exactly the same thing and (to make matters worse) who I imagine must have been responsible for ripping the respective video clips to YouTube in the first place. Of course it should have been obvious to me that for these two clips to exist like that, someone else must have done the same comparison somewhere. D’oh! Well rather than re-write, I thought I’d just acknowledge my unconscious plagiarism and post a link to the original review here, which does a far better and more detailed job in deconstructing these scenes than I ever could. Anyway, if you want to know more about the first episode of Survivors 2008 and read a superb rant about how shit it is then check it out!
Here follows part 2 of my Survivors retrospective.
Part 1, covering the original series (75-77) can be found here and Part 3 which compares Survivors 1975-77 to 2008 can be found here.
The original cover to the novelization of Survivors
A year after the first series of Survivors Terry Nation published his novelization of the series, which tells the original Abby and Son story-arch and the long-term consequences of the aftermath. Out-of-print since the late 70s, the novel has recently been republished by Orion Books (UK £6.99) in conjunction with the new BBC television incarnation of the show broadcast in the Fall of 2008, which, much like the recent republication of John Christopher’s Death of Grass, allows post-apocalypse and Survivors fans to experience the novel without having to spend an arm and a leg on an overpriced second-hand copy. Unfortunately the new version of the novel comes with a terribly bland cover showing actors from the new Survivors posing like models in a Little Woods catalogue rather than the edgier graphic cover of the original print, although this – I suppose – is a small price to pay to save some cash in these credit crunch times we live in.
The first two-thirds of the novel stays pretty true to the first six episodes of the first series and is probably guilty of spending a little too long on setting the scene before the catastrophe rather than concentrating on what the post-apocalypse junky is really interested: i.e. getting on with the aftermath itself! Nation’s prose is functional and generally terse, but his TV heritage shows, as the novel lacks a literary edge of other better post-apocalypse novels and we get little inner-dialogue of the characters. Still Nation can tell a good story and his writing is no worse than much to be found in genre fiction: his plotting is tight and the action is punchy.
Interestingly he chooses not to go into the minute details of the agrarian rebirth of society as the series does, instead he paints a picture with broader brush strokes. The story told in the first series of Survivors covers no more than six to eight months of th aftermath, whereas this novel finishes some five to six years after the ‘Death’ as the plague is called. Admittedly I think this kind of more expansive storytelling is probably much easier to handle in the context of a novel than an episodic TV drama, but still it is hard to understand why the series spends so much time micro-managing the apocalypse.
Parts of the novel are a little clunky. Perhaps it is also a little episodic in places and the emphasis on Abby’s sexual fantasies/frustration (an aspect which the series doesn’t delve into at all) is hackneyed to say the least. However the real reason to check out the novel if you are a fan of the original series is to find out what exactly happens to Abby’s search for her son, which the television series drops like a brick after series 1. And here the novel gets a big two thumbs up! The Survivors novelization delivers a sucker punch that puts many ‘real’ novels to shame. Of course there are other ways of finding out the plot if you just want to know without the hassle of reading the novel (the extras on the DVD lets it slip for a start and I’m sure you wouldn’t have to Google too long for our friend the good old internet to spill the beans), but if spoilers were good enough then no one would ever read a book or see a movie. No, we want to experience the ending through the story (or at least I do) and not just be told what happens. Needless to say that there is a sting in the tail for Abby, although I won’t spoil it for you here.
Although Survivors: the novel, is no classic, it is a decent enough read if your expectations are not too high and probably quite enjoyable for even for those who don’t know the series. For fans of the series, it is pretty much essential reading: for it shows a direscton in which the series could have gone in (surprisingly in the direction of the Mediterranean as it turns out) and – more importantly – it shows us dramatically what happens to Abby in the end, poor thing.
If you think this cover is better then you have the aesthetic tastes of a toad and should poke your own eyes out - you don't deserve them any more
Here follows my first part in my mini-Survivors retrospective.
Part 2, covering the novel, can be found here and part 3, commparing the new show to this the original, can be found here.
First broadcast in 1975 on BBC television Survivors tells the story of a small group of predominately middle class ’survivors,’ who by some natural immunity, have manage to pull through a mysterious man-made virus that has wiped out 99% of the world’s population. Pretty lucky for them! The brain child of Terry Nation, cult scriptwriter and inventor of the perennial Dr. Who baddies Daleks and Blake 7, Survivors was a brave attempt to show how helplessly dependent modern British had become upon pre-manufactured technology and how disconnected we had become from the natural world. Very much jumping on the self-sufficiency Zeitgeist of the times, Survivors in many ways echoes the lighter message of the British sit-com The Good Life, which was also first broadcast in the same year. Survivors’ philosophy is very much a spiritual predecessor to the modern Green-movement.
Its poignancy doesn’t end there: the classic opening title sequence (see below) shows an unnamed Chinese man collapsing in an airport and a succession of visa stamps in a passport, which seem to foreshadow the 2003 SARS outbreak and, coincidentally, the current Swine Flu pandemic scare! Honestly, this isn’t just a piece of shallow opportunism on my part, I had decided to cover Survivors on here over a month ago.
A message often repeated in the show is this: could you make something a simple as a candle from scratch? Or a table? Could you fell the tree, find the ore, smelt the ore, to forge the ore, to make the tools, to fell the tree, to make the table? With the modern worlds complex division of labour Terry Nation argues that no one person has the knowledge to do all these things and without that knowledge, if you remove us from our technology and society, we will become less capable than stone-age man.
Terry Nation’s concept for Survivors was to produce an adventure series that would deal with these issues as motivations for the action; however clashes with series producer Terence Dudley who was more interested in producing a more pastoral series of agrarian rebirth meant that ultimately the series failed to tackle its mission objective, instead it becomes guilty of meandering into terribly earnest pseudo-philosophical debates and too many scenes of rural domesticity.
The original Survivors: (L-R) Greg, Jenny and Abby
But forgetting these ultimate failing for a moment, Survivors starts of amazingly strongly. The first couple of episodes sets the scene of a society rapidly collapsing under the grip of the plague and the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe as we follow separate stories of the series protagonists: Abby, Greg and Jenny, until they eventually met and join forces. The main ’story-arch’ of the first series is Abby’s search for her missing son; despite the statistical unlikelyness of him surviving as well (as no hereditary link with immunity is evident in the show at this stage). However the search is a great plot-device and helps give the show much needed direction. All three of the characters are well conceived and appealing, and the cast is strong. The three leads, played by Carolyn Seymour, Ian McCulloch and Lucy Fleming are all compelling and likeable – despite their toffyness! All helped by a strong supporting cast, including: Peter Bowles, George Baker and Talfryn Thomas – among others.
Of course Survivors is very much of its age and that’s part of its charm. The good guys are terribly middle-class, while the working-classes are, at best, lazy idiots and, at worst, murderous and/or power crazed scum-bags. Survivors is also hideously ‘cosy.’ If Brian Aldiss finds The Day of the Triffids too cosy* (see below) for his tastes then I can’t imagine what he would make of this. Of course elements of the show are dated – some badly. The script at times is far too wordy, over-written and preachy, but compared to today’s’ comic-book-like scripts, the dialogue feels incredibly naturalistic. Survivors is not alone in this regard, as one of the defining aspects of pre-90s TV is the naturalistic pace and relative wordiness of the scripts which gives so much of retro-TV a greater theatrical feel and made the TV experience back then distinct from the filmic one: being more like telly-plays than mini-movies.
The low budget also plays its part in the look of the show. Apart from a few bodies in Abby’s village and one or two in the outskirts of London, I don’t think we see any direct signs of the plague in the first series. Instead Survivors depicts the new post-plague world by a growing sense of stillness, loneliness and isolation. Jenny’s relief when she finally meets Greg near the end of the second episode is evident. The show neatly avoids having to deal with the scenes of bodies in the streets by setting the action entirely in a rural setting, which presumably was a decision partial driven by budget constraints, although this obviously detaches the characters and us, the viewers, from the true horror of the situation.
However, when watched today, the lack of attention to detail does hurt the show and is less forgiveable. Throughout the first two series the characters all have immaculate hair and clean new clothes. A situation only remedied by series 3 when it finally clicked with someone that these guys should be starting to hum at least a little bit by now. Still even then the hedgerow and gardens are mysteriously immaculate. There are no Hieronymus Boschesque landscapes from our primal Id here to haunt our dreams, I’m afraid.
The first six episodes of series 1 were recorded in the standard way of the time, i.e. a mix of video shot studio set work and 16 mm location work, which is eventually changed to 100% outdoor broadcast video location work. The change allowed faster filming, although sadly this also heralded an uglier aesthetic, probably due to the faster work rate. However despite the poorer video quality, I find myself liking the crunchier saturated pallet of early video. It’s a pity that they didn’t try to shoot the show in a more handy-cam mockumentary mode to accompany the outside broadcast unit technology that, at that time, was almost exclusively used for news and sports coverage on British TV.
Episode six and seven also heralds another disappointing milestone in the first series: a splitting off from Terry Nations initial eco-adventure premise to Terrance Dudley’s agrarian soap-opera vision of Survivors. Although the first six episodes aren’t all written by Terry Nation, they all stayed true to his vision and the characters remain constant. The remaining seven shows lack that consistency, with character motivations being thrown out for heavy-handed moralising storyline and the total abandonment of the Abby’s son storyline. The blame can’t be entirely lain at the door of the two supporting script writers, Jack Ronda and Clive Exton, who both had to contend with Terrance Dudley’s constant script amendments. The interference was so bad that Clive Exton changes his screen credit to M.K. Jeeves in order to distance himself from the series.
That is not to say that the second half of the series isn’t without its moments: episode 9: ‘Law & Order’ shows their embryonic community deliberating over the fate of a murder suspect and is a perennial favourite of fans of the show. However for me the crime and punishment issues raised in this episode is still handled far too heavily, and the behaviour of the characters is frankly bizarre and inconsistent. After contending with feuds, thieves and internal strife the series kind of peters out and the queen of Survivors, Abby, or more pertinently Caroline Seymour, got written out of the show by the time of series 2, which is also the point that Terry Nation left the series in Terrance Dudley’s agrarian hands: chnages from which the show never recovers.
Should I stay or should I go now? Sorry Abbey, you'll be going, I'll be staying...
Series 2 must be held up as some of the most boring 12 hours of television ever broadcast in Britain. Highlights include copious arguments on who will do the washing up for fuck’s sake! In fairness the double ‘Lights of London’ episodes are pretty good, which for the first time gives us a glimpse at the urban aftermath and the dystopia that has filled the gap left by the pre-plague society. Also the Ian McCulloch’s scripted episode ‘The Last Laugh’ is also okay. But little can compensate for the lose of the character Abby and series creator Terry Nation, although the return of actor Charles Lill from a one-off early episode from the first series to one of the main characters in series two works well.
Jenny looking surprisingly clean considering the situation, wearing her famous blue coat
Series 3 is a partial return to form of the first series and a much needed return of more adventurous storylines. Still the series seems to meander too much and ultimately Survivors failed to deliver all it promised too. Still there are few post-apocalypses that cover the aftermath in such detail and despite its inconstancies, it compares favourably to much to be found in genre TV over the years. Despite its faults (of which there are many) Survivors is a fine example of the potential of television to discuss ambitious and topical issues in a populist and accessible way. A potential that, alas, TV rarely achieves nor even aspires to do, and remains a fascinating example of how creative differences in a production team can ruin what would have been one of the finest pieces of British television.
Fashions change: by Series 3 Jenny finally gets tough
If you want to buy Survivors on DVD today then you’ve got a problem. Originally Survivors was released in three DVD box-sets: one for each series, which sensibly were available separately. Meaning that you could just buy the first series and forget the rest unless your are a fanatic or have no critical faculties. However since last year those individual box-sets are no longer available and all three series have been made into one huge box-set: not the most convenient of ways to attract new fans and obviously quite expensive. Of course there is still the second-hand market, but – as always happens – greedy sellers used the ‘deleted’ status of the individual box-sets to crank up the prices. I’m glad to say that the prices seem to be setling again to more realistic levels and careful browsing of eBay and amazon MarketPlace should yeild reasonable results for the Series 1 box-set. Series 2 is still expensive, which isn’t a problem because its rubbish, and Series 3 is comming down in rice. Alternatively you could just suck-it-up and buy the Series 1-3 box-set and be done with it.
Some useful links:
*: By ‘cosy’ I’m basically quoting Brian Aldiss’ ‘cosy-catastrophe’ a term/insult he uses to describe those pre-new wave classic British post-apocalypses, especially Day of the Triffids, where almost all of the population is effectively wiped out (by dying of plague in Survivors or through mass blindness in Triffids) leaving the protagonists largely untouched in an increasingly empty world. By wiping out 99% of the population the survivors lot is relatively idyllic, compared to those in the Death of Grass, where the whole pre-catastrophe population is fighting for its piece of pie. Also the psychology of the protagonists in these so-called ‘cosy-catastrophes’ remains largely untouched and the new society that replaces the old is basically a reproduction of the pre-catastrophe society, complete with bourgeois norms and values.
However the cosy-catastrophe shouldn’t be mistaken for the ‘last-man’ sub-genre, which I think its fair to say explores slightly different themes.
Now there are many who disagree with B. Aldiss’ view on Triffids, saying that there is too much , death, violence and social disruption in it for it to be fairly labelled ‘cosy.’ Personally I do think B. Aldiss is being a little harsh (or should I say that I think he’s being deliberately provocative in order to create a debate), but at the same time I know what he’s getting at. While I found the old 1980s BBC production of Day of the Triffids excellent, the novel failed to excite me as much as I hoped. I’m not saying that it isn’t very good or that I didn’t enjoy it, but I did feel slightly frustrated by the conservatism of its aftermath. Still a massively important and enjoyable book, if a little underwhelming at times IMO.
Anyway, while there are many who might rush to defend Triffids from this ‘cosy’ charge, I doubt many but the most hardcore of Survivors fans would ever consider it worthwhile doing so with Survivors, which is about as hard-hitting as The Waltons!
After many false alarms regarding the prospect of Bird Flu virus a few years ago, it looks like Swine Flu could be the global flu pandemic that the media have been baying for for years. The key difference with Bird Flu is that this one is passing from human to human, where as almost all cases of Bird flu in humans were contracted by close proximity with infected chickens. However one positive aspect of the story is that cases of Swine Flu in the US schools have so far been fairly benign, suggesting that other factors could be at work in Mexico City.
Here is the BBC report on Swine Flu in Mexico and here is their rather basic Q&A.
Obviously this story has parallels with Survivors and 12 Monkeys/La Jettée, among others. Funny to think I was in Mexico City briefly only a few months ago, although I’d like to make it clear that I wasn’t carry test-tubes of experimental germ-warfare viruses. Honest!
EDIT: Shit! Where did I go when I cam back for Mexico? Scotland, And where are the first cases of Swine flu in the UK? Scotland. And what am I? A swine!
Not sure if you noticed but last month (March 2009) John Christopher’s (real name Samuel Youd) post-apocalyptic novel The Death of Grass came back in print for the first time since the late 1980s: meaning that I, and presumably many others like me, could check out this lost gem from the British sf cannon without me having to justify spending £30-40 on a tatty old paperback. I’ve literally lost count of the number of times that I have competed against equally desperate bidders on eBay for a dusty old copy, only to loose out, yet again, to another last minute bid only to feel the grinding irritation as yet another copy of The Death of Grass slips through my fingers. Of course now The Death of Grass is available at the more affordable and justifiable sum of £8.99 in the Penguin Modern Classics range, I can sit back cigar and brandy in hand and congratulate myself for my obvious, cunning, prudence and foresight in not giving in to the temptation of gazzumping my virtual competitors with some colossal bid that I could ill afford. Of course I’m kidding myself. It could have been me had my eyes been only slightly bigger than my wallet. Well, presumably those tatty paperbacks have still retained some value and, despite the musky smell, they probably retain more aesthetic charm than the current edition does, although I do quite like the semi-abstract close-up of dewy grass.
Anyway, even better than this is the news that, despite my ludicrously high expectations that have so often in the past been my undoing in these things, The Death of Grass is in every way the missing classic British post-apocalypse masterpiece I’d hoped it would be. First published in 1956 it only missed out in winning the 1957 International Fantasy Award to that long forgotten novel Lord of the Rings by that little known author J.R.R. Tolkien. 
Later in the same year being adapted to film under its American book title No Blades of Grass. Very much set in the Wyndham tradition, made famous with Day of the Triffids, The Death of Grass depicts the collapse of British society following a plague which is in the process of wiping out all the grasses across the globe. Now on the face of it that might not sound too bad. Sure the Lawn Tennis Association might not be to happy but it hardly seems up there when compared with all the other inventive ways that sf authors have wiped us out over the years: killer plagues, asteroids, killer plants, alien invasions, zombies and nuclear holocausts… But wheat, barely, oats and rye are all affected, and this is only after the virus has mutated, having previously wiped out rice crops across Asia: killing millions in the aftermath. In response the smug powers in Europe and the US starts tightening their collective belts while hoping on a miracle cure, but the cure doesn’t come and in a matter of months rationing is in place. Here John Christopher doesn’t miss a trick in showing us how interrelated our food-chain is: without grass crops there’s no cows, no sheep, therefore no dairy industry – just potatoes and pig farming: a diet of bangers ‘n’ mash, maybe? Sounds like a one way trip to rickets country to me. But the virus isn’t giving the world the time it needs to make the switch to non-grass based agricultural methods and the democratic governments are found wanting in making that decision, instead pinning their hopes that a cure will be found in time. But like real life there are no miracles to be found in this novel. In The Death of Grass when society falls, it falls hard and it falls fast.
The novel follows a haphazard collection of refuges fleeing the chaos of London, lead by John, an architect, in a desperate attempt to reach the safety of his brothers farm in a sheltered, highly defensible valley op’ North. The novel immediately distinguishes itself from Wyndham’s cozier Triffids by showing the extreme solution the new semi-fascist emergency British government who give orders to implement a nuclear strike on a militarily locked-down London in a futile attempt to cull Britain’s population to more sustainable post-grass levels. Tipped off of the impending nuclear cleansing by his cynical friend Roger, a civil servant, John and wife Ann, both bourgeois liberals, find their values immediately challenged as they are forced to decide who to leave and who to take. The Death of Grass pulls no punches and assumes that even before the full extent of the situation is understood that law and order will soon break down. En route the refuges are subject to assault, rape and banditry, and they themselves soon find their bourgeois morality irrelevant to their new world. To survive the journey John finds himself having to make a deal with the Devil: the Devil in this case being a gun shop owner and crack marksman called Pirrie, who has taken advantage of the new situation by executing his unfaithful wife, replacing her with a under-age sex slave, only after killing the young girls parents; but realising that Pirrie is vital to the group’s chances of survival, John accepts his behaviour in the short term, while considering killing him later once his usefulness is over. Indeed it is interesting that the most cynical character at the start of the book, Roger the civil servant, finds himself unable to adapt to the amorality of the violent grassless era. It isn’t till the chips are down that we find out what stuff we’re really made of and how much of the things we believe in are actually just empty posturing. With grim inevitability the novel grinds towards the sanctuary of the brother’s valley in the North leading to a highly satisfying allegorical confrontation between the bothers and rival survivors.
The introduction to the new edition, written by environmental author Robert Macfarlane, draws comparisons with the social breakdown in The Death of Grass with that in Lord of the Flies and the parallel is a strong one. Unlike many post-apocalyptic novels where the danger remains some force outside society, usually in the form of a monster or improbable scientific disaster while the norms and values of the protagonists remain largely unchanged, The Death of Grass shows that the threat to us comes from the very interdependence of the modern infrastructure on which society is built upon and society’s dependence upon these infrastructures; a dependence surely more complex and fragile today than in 1956 as we find ourselves even further removed from the natural world. The threat in The Death of Grass comes from the potential brutality that hides behind the veil of bourgeois morality.
The inner apocalypse of The Death of Grass really paves the way for so much of what came later in the new wave of British sf, being an obvious spiritual predecessor to J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World and Brian Aldiss’ Greybeard, but being less conceptual than the entropy obsessed new wave The Death of Grass is in many ways a more robust read, having more in common with later post-apocalypses, such as Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island. Possibly the only area where The Death of Grass really fails to deliver is in its relative lack of attention given to the new apocalyptic landscape. It lacks the poetry of the apocalypses to come out of the new wave: the dream-like devastation of Ballard’s ‘elemental’ apocalypse novels. Although John Christopher mentions Britain’s new brown scenery, he fails to evoke a sense of barren otherness as the iconic green green grass of home falls under the spell of desertification. The ecological and sustainability issues it raises were later echoed in more detail in the original 1975 TV series Survivors. It’s a cliché but I’ll say it anyway, The Death of Grass is probably more relevant today that ever. While probably better know in the UK for his children’s novels The Tripods, and the TV series it spawned, The Death of Grass deserves to be better known and more widely read than it is.
Links:
And some old covers here:
Sad news: JG Ballard, post-apocalypse and kinky sex author of the new wave has died today.
>>CLICKY<< for the best online tribute to Ballard that I’ve seen. A nice tribute to him here as well. And for the next few days you can play the BBC Night Waves special featuring Michael Moorcock and that arch-twat Will Self.
It’s been a bad 12 months for sf with the deaths of Thomas Disch, Philip Jose Farmer, Patrick McGoohan, and Jim Cawthorn.
Another reason to love post-apocalyptic fiction as it allows us all to witness all the amazing ways in which we all could die. Here’s a few…
Plague or Biological: either natural (Death of Grass) or anthropogenic (Survivors)
Environmental disaster: again either natural (The Wind from Nowhere) or anthropogenic (The Day After Tomorrow). Bill McGuire’s Apocalypse sets out many fictionalized natural apocalypses based on real geological evidence of past cataclysms, including: asteroid impacts, tsunamis and best of all super-volcanoes, which up until I read the ambiguous and utterly brilliant post-apocalypse novel The Road hadn’t appeared to have been used as a device. Still hasn’t, I suppose – at least not explicitly.
Extraterrestrial or Cosmic: either natural, such as an asteroid impact (The Last Train) and solar-flairs (Drowned World) or an invasion (War of the Worlds)
Weird: with the most common being zombies (Dawn of the Dead) but sometimes crossing over with other catastrophes, such as the alien ghost eco-invasion that hitches a ride an asteroid in the underrated CGIed Final Fantasy movie. Killer plants are also strangely more common than real-life might lead you to thinking, although the threat from terrestrial animals is rarely used: killer moles maybe
Biblical or Wrath of God: often crossing over with another category but clearly felt in the moralizing tone of the aftermath (The Strand)
Nuclear Holocaust: the ultimate anthropogenic global suicide (too numerous to mention), although less popular since the collapse of the soviet union.
Pollution or Radiation: various bizarre and illogical side effects of anthropogenic waste products have cause everything from rainclouds to stop forming (The Drought) to global sterility (Greybeard)
Population: too much fucking cause our downfall in Make Room! Make Room! And Stand on Zanzibar, although these novels seem to fall somewhere in the grey-area between post-apocalypse and dystopia, while also evoking something of cyberpunk. Too small a population or the extinction of animals could also fit here, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Technological: from rampant nano-tech to GM crops to robots to the Y2K Bug that never was…
Supernatural: less apparent than you might think, as the zombies, etc… that usually plague us are usually given a speculative pseudo-scientific explanation. Zombie Flesh-eaters being an obvious exception. The only ghost apocalypse that I can think of is the alien ghosts that I’ve already mentioned in the Final Fantasy film. A Cthulhu-base post-apocalypse is surely asking to be written
Resource: lack of oil causes the collapse in Tooth and Nail and I suppose Mad Max. While not always the actually catastrophe itself, resource scarcity is often, if not always, vital in the aftermath which follows it. Recourse shortage in general is often a side effect of some other disaster, such as famine in the grass plague in The Death of Grass or population pressures in Stand on Zanzibar
Political, religious or ideological: probably best described as dystopias, but what happens when the dystopia falls? The civil war in the old Yugoslavian territories could be a model
Economic: could the Depression of the 1930s be described as post-apocalyptic? Led to Europe’s most famous dystopias, so it fits the criteria. Seeming not one explored very much in fiction. What about the current Credit Crunch? Tribes of cannibal law-clerks could be picking on your bones in a years time – no change there then!
Conventional War or Civil War: certainly in real-life it is war that causes the breakdown of society as much as anything. The current situation in the Sudan comes to mind
Personal or Microcosm: the micro-catastrophes in Ballard’s middle period (Crash and High-Rise) seem to cause the disintegration of the norms and values of those effected. Does the post-apocalypse really have to be global to count? Lord of the Flies also seems to tick the right boxes, although is it a micro-dystopia?
Obviously many post-apocalypses fit more than one category and the aftermath usually throws up a few more into the mix too. I guess a true post-apocalypse story needs to be on a global or at least regional scale to count, although I would argue that the micro-apocalypse shouldn’t be entirely dismissed.
Anyway, as I continue to read, watch and listen to various post-apocalypses on my to do list I shall add them here…
Stating the feckin’ obvious here, but after reading a good few post-apocalypse novels and films (well, not reading films literally you understand) I’ve come to realise that they usually share the same key ingredient – only the exact quantity seems to vary. So here is my recipe for a good post-apocalypse…
The pre-apocalypse: a time, possibly mythological or ancient, when civilization is it was known contemporary to when the post-apocalypse concept was envisaged. Modern pre-apocalypses are Western Europe and North America, i.e. stable, relatively secular, technological advanced and dependent. Often only hinted at, if at all, as a writer can assume a shared knowledge between himself and the reader, but its presence, if only apparent by its very absence, to evoke a sense of loss and decay. Often a moralizing tone is used by apocalypse writers, suggesting that in our decadence and arrogance that the apocalypse is deserved
The nature of the catastrophe: or the trigger or event that causes the fall of civilization. Sometimes the nature is highly pertinent to how the post-apocalypse story plays out, sometimes it is largely irrelevant. The nature is often irrelevant because it is just a convenient devise to explore other elements of the post- world (Ballard and new wave) or just because of narrative inconsistencies within the text. The nature often dictates the particular apocalyptic landscape evoked. Sometimes the nature is vital to the story but stories which concentrate on the catastrophe with little or no attention to the aftermath which follows it are usually more closely associated with the more sensational ‘disaster’ genre, such as those written by Michael Crichton. Often unavoidable and cataclysmic in scale (asteroid or nuclear war), but sometimes minute (grass-liking virus): showing the precarious nature of our reliance upon modern infrastructure. The nature of the catastrophe seems to indicate the secret desires and overt fears of the society that invented it – and is often intentionally satirical or just plain biblical. The nature is often driven by the Zeitgeist of its age, but is often highly inventive, surreal and, sometimes, just a little bit weird.
The aftermath: shows the psychology and sociology impacts upon the survivors and is usually the crux of the post-apocalypse genre. Perhaps more than anything else the post-apocalypse genre has become a means of putting the morality of bourgeois society under a microscope, and showing how potentially fragile we are. Ultimately, this is often the most telling part of the post-apocalypse: showing that in reality the threat to humanity comes from within us rather than from outside us. In every way the aftermath is the post-apocalypse and without this all you have is a disaster movie/novel or a load of shit. The aftermath doesn’t have to be explained for more than a couple of narrative days (The Death of Grass), but it should be the crux of the narrative and not just the last chapter.
The landscape: the inevitable environmental change, usually depopulated ruins, decay and disease. Often depicted as nature, either organic or mineral, reclaiming the Earth, while evoking the modern mythology of post-war Europe, Western perception of the Third World and Myan ruins. The apocalyptic landscape is often biblical, dream-like and/or surreal.
Rebuilding or entropy: the ultimate fate of the survivors and their descendent. The longterm aftermath sometimes crosses over into the dystopia/utopia genres or showing a pastoral rebirth and a new beginning, but one that often hints that the fate of man might be cyclical: eternal recurrence: a process of continues collapse and rebirth: of forgetting the lessons of history. Or, in the case of the new wave, there is a greater cosmological metaphor of ultimate entropy.
As stated, post-apocalypse stories can sometimes share elements with dystopia works as many ideological dystopias use a catastrophe and its aftermath as a means of establishing control. However true dystopian novels seem to only pay lip service to the catastrophe and the immediate aftermath and, much as post-apocalypse stories are more concerned with the aftermath than the catastrophe itself, they should only use the chaos of the aftermath as a means of getting to the dystopia rather than exploring how a particular apocalypse will shape a given dystopia, for example: V for Vendetta and Handmaid’s Tale. Whereas dystopias may exist in a minor form in post-apocalypse fiction, but they rarily dominate the post-apocalyptic landscape in the same way. Indeed they seem to fulfil two main functions: a) as a source of potential conflict for the more enlightened survivors (Day of the Triffids) and b) to further illustrate the retreat of bourgeois values: usually as just an expression of organized barbarism (Day of the Dead).
The post-apocalypse genre also seems to share much with the ‘dying earth’ or ‘far-future’ sub-genre of SF. Certainly it is hinted at that an ancient cataclysm of global proportions is responsible for the decay and stagnation found in the distant future (History of the Ruin Staff), although just as often it is the unrelenting grinding force of entropy that is responsible for the fragments of decadent civilization to be found at the end of Earth’s existence (Books of the New Sun), but as many of these stories have more in common with the ’sword & sorcery’ genre than the post-apocalypse genre I think they should remain a seperate enterty. The nature of the cataclysm is usually more mythological than historical (if it is mentioned at all), and certainly beyond the living memory of most of the protagonist. Also in atmosphere they tend to be more Arabesque and Romantic than the stark realism/surrealism of the post-apocalypse.
