SF, the problem of genre and News Night Review

Recently, in my inane rambles around the world-wide-wub, in the dank subterranean worlds of the mediasphere, such as forums and blogs, such as the one you are reading: where lonely and potentially psychotic individuals rant and rave like inmates in one of Queen Victoria’s less salubrious institutions, I’ve become increasingly aware of a debate, perhaps the debate, which has been haunting philosophers over the ages since the dawn of man; subliminally weaving its way through the subtext of the Gilgamesh, Plato’s Republic, Kant’s ’sublime’ and Dan Brown’s stinking Code. What is this debate which has been setting cyberspace on fire, you say? No, not the War in Iraq, nor the fuckin’ Credit Crunch, not Swine Flu, an no not even bookmarking vs. dogearring. No, none of these. No, the debate that has been springing mostly to my attention is the humble and strangely eternal debate of ‘why do the toffs hate science fiction?’ By the toffs I mean the literati: the mainstream: academia: the bourgeois – call them what you will. By science fiction I mean everything from horror to fantasy to, yes even science fiction. The whole speculative spectrum.

In fairness I’m not sure how many people have really been engaging in this debate. And when I say ’set cyberspace on fire’ I perhaps would have been more honest to say caused it to smoulder – briefly. But Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent criticism of the, ever shite, Booker Prize has certainly stirred things up a bit, but, let’s be honest, beyond a few cantankerous individuals jousting with semantics on a few forums and a few equally narky lit. crits jousting in the broadsheet press, there has been little new to this debate, other than it has made me think more about the problem of genre a bit more than I previously had. However imagine my surprise when, what do I see on the ever pretentious late-night review show, the News Night Review, decides to dedicate a whole half-hour programme on all things SF, while even touching upon the war of words surrounding the innate prejudice of the Booker Prize! Shit! Things must be getting serious. What next? Will the BBC have it’s own science fiction affairs correspondent to cover Obama’s intervention in peace talks between Kim ‘Arafat’ Robinson and the expansionist state of Man Booker?

However, what last night’s News Night Review science fiction special really showed was the total lack of respect that those pretentious cunts have for the subject. The panel, hosted by Kirsty Wark, consisted of Jeanette Winterson, who obviously fancies herself to be Margaret Atwood or some such, Natalie Haynesa, a sexy geekete comedian, and, perhaps the most moronic, banal and wretchedly bad film-maker of all time, Kevin Smith: a man whose films are so fuckin’ bad that he makes Guy Richie look like Kurosawa for fuck sake! Okay it was obvious that all three were loosely familiar with SF – more so in Kevin Smith’s case who turned up in his dressing gown in homage to Arthur Dent – but surely a single dedicated SF author/pundit wouldn’t have been beyond the Beeb’s grasp. They covered the popular rise of SF film and TV (specifically FastForward and District 9), which they seemed to equate with a qualitative rise, they covered the Kick-Ass comic and they covered the new Hitch Hicker’s sequel. Hardly inspiring. Most of the show was dominated by the latest kewl offerings. There was a brief segment upon the status of SF literature, which made the most intelligent points of the show, but other than that they treated the genre with the total lack of respect it deserves (yes, I do mean that in the main SF deserves the lack of respect it gets), by not covering anything beyond the most banal and populist forms and by being unable to discuss SF without also stigmatising it with so-called geek-culture. I think the points the raised about the post-Micro Soft rise of the geek were valid, but I fail to see why they took such a cultural studies stance to SF when the News Night Review as a whole tends to take a more traditional literary art criticism standpoint when reviewing almost every other subject. When did they last cover the latest Shakespearian offering at the Globe theatre by stereotyping the Globe’s demographic as the brown-rice munching, silver-spoon, conservative ass-wipes that they so obviously are? Never. Absolutely never. Instead they have a predominately textual discussion, which is at it should be.

Now I’m probably overstating the level of offence I took at the show. In fact I took none (I just like the sound of my own rant). SF and geekdom are intricately linked and the genre is dominated by kewl yet banal products, so it’s coverage was probably about right. However I think the attitude of the News Night Review helped sign-post the real problem with genre: they (the literati) have no fuckin’ idea what the fuck SF is. The Natalie Haynes tried to establish her SF credentials by saying that comparing all SF to the lowest common denominator is like hating Pride and Prejudice because you don’t like Mills and Boon novels. A fair point. But one undone by her going on to name check War of the Worlds, Brave New World, etc… as good examples of SF literature and saying that it would be wrong to dis these novels just because someone doesn’t dig the worst of the genre. Again a fair point, but one I’m afraid that underlines her own total lack of knowledge of the contemporary SF. All the books she mentioned come before the widespread division between the pulps and literature, and the eventual artificial birth of genre. All the books she mentioned are widely considered classics among the literati already and can hardly be said to be excluded. She, and (not wanting to just target her) no one else on the show, failed to mention any examples of current SF literature in the discussion, instead concentrating on the popular forms of film and TV. No mention of Iain M. Banks or China Mieville or any of the other current wave of genre writers, which really just emphasises Kim Stanley Robinson’s point. Now I’m not saying that SF’s current crop of authors are necessarily comparable to the proto-SF mentioned in the show, but not to discuss any contemporary SF novels, other than the comedy cash-cow sequel to Hitch Hiker’s and a brief mention of Kim Stanley Robinson in regards to the Booker Prize, only shows the panellist’s colossal ignorance. Why were they, and they alone, on the panel? Why no Kim Newman, Brian Aldiss or Iain Banks? All of whom are regular SF pundits in the media? Even the inexplicably ubiquitous Mark Gattis would have been a more knowledgeable improvement. I’m not wanting to dis the panel entirely. They all have at least some knowledge and obviously like the genre. But they blatantly weren’t good enough.

Anyway, as I said, for a while I’ve been thinking about the little problem of Sf and genre. And I don’t think the problem lies wholly at the door of the lit. crits. As some one whose name I can remember on the News Night Review’s Booker Prize featurete said last night: SF’s ghettoization stems both from the prejudice of the mainstream and from the appalling low standards of the genre’s fandom; a fact which I’m sure will be received like an angry elephant’s cock up the ass for many SF fans, but something they desperately need to hear. Yes, almost everything you like isn’t actually good enough to win the Man Booker Prize! Yes, it is also true than almost everything that wins the Man Booker Prize shouldn’t be good enough to win it either, but don’t assume that it is just prejudice which is stopping Peter F. Hamilton’s latest space opera from gaining mainstream respectability. It might have something to do with it, but it’s not the whole story. I think the widely touted myth that the only thing which separates Ringworld from Slaughterhouse Five is acceptance by the mainstream is wholly wrong and utterly moronic. Don’t get me wrong, I love both pure genre SF (well some of it) and the other stuff which has some how gained acceptance in the mainstream (well, again, some of it), but I think it is wrong to say that 1984 is just Dune that got lucky is simplistic and actually undermines the case for SF.

I think the problem stems from the fact that genre SF has been terribly diagnosed, both by its idiotic fan-base and the ignorant mainstream. Few definitions seem to satisfy me. Of course distinctions between genres are wholly artificial and subjective, but as Bruce Sterling says in his intro to Mirrorshades: labels are both ‘a valid as a sauce of insight’ and ‘great fun.’

We all label things anyway. Feminism has labelled (ha ha) all objectification as evil, but in reality we all do it and rarely is any harm done. Let’s face it, we have to objectify. To take every human being as an individual, all the time would be exhaustive. Our assumptions are great for time saving, if nothing else and can save us a huge amount of hassle. ‘He looks like a nutter, I’ll cross the road.’ But from our assumptions prejudice can raise its ugly head. Labelling genres is the same, although admittedly the results are exponentially less significant. The SF section in a second hand bookshop allows me to bypass all the guff I couldn’t give a shit about. We all use labels all the time. Yes, even Kim Stanley Robinson does when he belittles historical fiction. SF authors slag of fantasy novels all the time. Of course labels are subjective, but that still doesn’t reduce their validity. Anyway, I’ve written up some thoughts on genre and have come up with a definition which satisfies my own criteria. Only problem is it’s about 10 pages of A4 long, which is too long for anyone to read online, so I need to cut it down a bit before I post it. But as I’m one of those lonely and psychotic individuals who occupy the depths of the media-wub , I feel it’s only right that I too have my say…

Sex Galaxy Trailer…

I hope this is real!

The Death of Grass by John Christopher

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:

• StarShipSofa review can be found here
• John Christopher’s Fantastic Fiction page is here with links to AbeBooks, eBay and amazon
  
• Lost Books review here

And some old covers here:

Great ways to die in Post-Apocalyse fiction…

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

• Degeneration: collapse into idiocy, such as Bacigalupi’s  ‘Pump Six’ or evolutionary, such as the end of The Time Machine, which obviously shares much with the dying earth sub-genre too

• 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?

• Mad/Evil Science: Vonnegut’s Ice Nine in Cat’s Cradle

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…

The Post-Apocalypse Recipe

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.

‘Post-Apocalyptic Fiction’ from Science Fiction in the 20th Century

One classic theme in the sf of the late 1940s and 50s – one very obvious ‘What if….?” – was ‘What if there is nuclear war?” This clearly responded to the deep-seated worries of ordinary Americans and British, and the published fiction on this theme represents only a fraction of what was actually written. H L Gold, the editor of Galaxy, complained in 1952 that ‘over 90% of stories submitted still nag away at atomic, hydrogen and bacteriological war, the post-atomic world, reversion to barbarism, mutant children killed because they have only ten toes and fingers instead of twelve….The temptation is strong to write: “Look, fellers, the end isn’t here yet”.’

Some of the most impressive contributions to the theme of the destruction of civilization in fact came from outside the sf field; George R Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), Neville Shute’s On the Beach (1997), Alas, Babylon (1959) by Pat Frank, and Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 (1959). The last three depict the actual events of nuclear war in horrifyingly plausible detail, two of them ending in the complete destruction of humanity, and Alas, Babylon, which describes the beginnings of the restoration of civilization, only some months after ‘The Day’, ends with the protagonist inuring himself to a thousand years of a new dark age.

It is significant that sf writers have often been more interested in speculating about how disaster might cause the slow breakdown of society, rather than its total elimination, and that they often choose, very naturally, other forms of destruction than nuclear bombs. One thinks of Stewart’s Earth Abides, in which plague causes the collapse of civilization, or Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), or the whole series of disaster novels written by J G Ballard in the early 1960s, beginning with The Wind from Nowhere (1962). Most professional sf writers spent more time looking at the dark ages, the post-holocaust world, than at the event of a nuclear holocaust itself.

Much more recently, in the so-called ‘survivalist‘ novels of the 1980s, the holocaust has been seen as a useful cleansing exercise; according to them, only with the destruction of the corrupt Western world (in which far too much power has been given to feminists, homosexuals, liberals, and blacks) can the good honest values of the American Wild West be reborn. But in the 1950s, the post-holocaust novel was sometimes, much more interestingly, an evaluation of how societies decline into tribalism or barbarism (as in Earth Abides) or develop from barbarism to civilization. Walter M Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) shows three stages. In the first, monastic communities endeavour to preserve something of the past (as in the real Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire), although they drastically misunderstand it, making the few relics of a pre-holocaust engineer called Leibowitz the focal point of a religious cult. In the second, a scholar recognizes that some of these relics actually consist of scientific papers which could make possible the rebirth of a science-based civilization. And in the third, the bombs begin to fall once more. In Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955), two boys are oppressed by the obscurantist fundamentalism of the Mennonite (who better to survive the holocaust than those who live today without modern technology?), and dream of returning to the scientific wonders of the past, a dream which inspires them to leave their home and seek the home of these scientist, the mythical Bartorstown. Again, there are no simplistic answers, however; as one of the scientists says at the end, ‘You’re forgetting we’re fanatics too.’

‘Holocaust and After’ from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

This is part of a giant cluster of themes which has always played a central role in sf, both GENRE SF and MAINSTREAM. It is impossible to dissect out the different aspects of this cluster so that they are mutually exclusive; hence there is some overlap between this entry and ADAM AND EVE (many sf tales deal with a second genesis after catastrophe), ANTHROPOLOGY (the emphasis is often on tribal patterns forming in a brutalized and diminished population), EVOLUTION and DEVOLUTION (evolutionary change has since the 18th century been linked with natural catastrophe), ENTROPY (holocaust is one of the more dramatic aspects of everything running down), HISTORY IN SF (human-inspired disasters are often seen as part of a Toynbeean or Spenglerian process of historical cycles), the END OF THE WORLD (holocaust on a major scale), ECOLOGY (interference with nature is often seen as the bringer of disaster), MEDICINE (the agent of holocaust is often plague), MUTANTS (the use of nuclear weapons is often seen as leading to massive mutation in plants, animals and humans), NUCLEAR POWER (the most popular agent of holocaust in fiction since WWII), OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM and SURVIVALIST FICTION (which is all too often written by men for men, featuring men shooting other men after civilization’s convenient collapse). The catastrophe variants are summarized under DISASTER; particular aspects of catastrophe are discussed in most of the above entries. Here we concentrate on the many stories whose focus is not so much the disaster itself but the kind of world in which the survivors live, and which they make for themselves.The aftermath of holocaust may be the most popular theme in sf; this encyclopedia mentions at least 400 examples at novel length. The genre is as old as sf itself: a convenient starting point is Mary SHELLEY’s second sf novel, The Last Man (1826), in which plague crosses Europe from the Middle East, leaving one survivor in Rome who is possibly the last man. Natural catastrophe, too, strikes in Herrmann LANG’s The Air Battle: A Vision of the Future (1859), in which European civilization is destroyed by flood and earthquake, but a benevolent North-African federation brings peace to the world, Black leading White back to social order.The novel in which the post-holocaust story takes on its distinctive modern form is Richard JEFFERIES’s After London (1885), in which the author’s strategy is to set the novel thousands of years after the catastrophe has taken place; in this way an interesting, alienating perspective is gained. The hero takes his own society (as in most later stories in this vein it is quasimedieval) for granted; he endeavours to reconstruct the nature of the fallen civilization that preceded it, and also the intervening years of barbarism. Ever since Jefferies’s time the post-holocaust story has tended to follow this pattern; for every book whose hero lived through the holocaust itself – John CHRISTOPHER’s The Death of Grass (1956; vt No Blade of Grass US), filmed as NO BLADE OF GRASS (1970), and Robert MERLE’s Malevil (1972 France; trans 1974), filmed as MALEVIL (1981), being examples – there are several whose story begins long after the disaster is over but while its effects are still making themselves felt. Though such stories continue to fascinate, there has been surprisingly little variation in the basic plot: disaster is, in the average scenario, seen as being followed by savage barbarism and a bitter struggle for survival, with rape and murder commonplace; such an era is often succeeded by a rigidly hierarchical feudalism based very much on medieval models. When the emphasis falls on struggle and brutality, as it very often does, we have in effect an awful-warning story. But often the new world is seen as more peaceful and ordered, more in harmony with Nature, than the bustle and strife of civilization. Such stories are often quasi- UTOPIAs in feeling and PASTORAL in their values. There is no denying the attraction of such scenarios: they tempt us with a kind of life in which the individual controls his or her own destiny and in which moral issues are clear-cut.In mature versions of the post-holocaust story there is usually an emotional resonance developed from a tension between loss and gain, with the simplicities of the new order not wholly compensating for the half-remembered glories and comforts of the past. This is the case with George R. STEWART’s EARTH ABIDES (1949), and may explain why, despite its occasionally fulsome prose, that novel has attained classic status.The first two decades of the 20th century saw no particular boom in the genre, but at least two works are still well remembered: Jack LONDON’s The Scarlet Plague (1914) and S. Fowler WRIGHT’s Deluge (1928) (sequelled by Dawn [1929]); in both cases the catastrophe is natural. This was so of most holocaust stories in those days of comparative innocence. Even after WWI, mankind’s capacity for self-destruction was seldom seen as efficient enough to operate on a global scale. Other relevant stories of the period are Garrett P. SERVISS’s The Second Deluge (1912), George Allan ENGLAND’s Darkness and Dawn (1914), an unusually optimistic story of reconstruction, J.J. CONNINGTON’s Nordenholt’s Million (1923) and P. Anderson GRAHAM’s cranky racist The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923).Connington’s book made much of the reconstruction of TECHNOLOGY; from this point on the relationship of technology to the post-holocaust world, and the often ambiguous feelings of the latter towards it, became prominent. Thomas Calvert MCCLARY’s Rebirth (1934 ASF; 1944) is a casually callous account of a SCIENTIST so disgusted by what he self-righteously regards as the decadence of modern civilization that he invents a ray which causes everyone to forget all acquired knowledge, including how to talk: starting from instinct, the smartest and toughest re-educate themselves in technology in about 10 years; most die. Edwin BALMER’s and Philip WYLIE’s When Worlds Collide (1933), with its reconstruction sequel After Worlds Collide (1934), has a scientific elite escaping a doomed Earth in a giant rocket and rebuilding on a new planet, at the same time fighting off communists; it was filmed as WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951). Stephen Vincent BENET’s “The Place of the Gods” (1937; vt “By the Waters of Babylon”) blends superstitious fear and plangent nostalgia in telling of a barbarian boy’s response to the technological wonders of a ruined city; its sentimentality was to become a recurrent note in many such tales after WWII: it ends, “We must build again.” Many of the authors cited have not been closely connected with GENRE SF. The post-holocaust theme, particularly in the UK, has had a strong attraction for MAINSTREAM writers, perhaps because it offers such a powerful metaphor for exploring Man’s relation with his social structures: it pits art against Nature. Two strong UK examples from the 1930s are Alun LLEWELLYN’s The Strange Invaders (1934) and John COLLIER’s Tom’s A-Cold (1933; vt Full Circle USA); both evoke the atmosphere of a fallen society with considerable intensity of feeling. An interesting French novel published during WWII was Ravage (1943; trans Damon KNIGHT as Ashes, Ashes 1967 US) by Rene BARJAVEL, in which the disappearance of electricity turns France rural.After the Hiroshima bombing a new period began in which, unsurprisingly, the post-holocaust story came to seem less fantastic; it also became more popular, and developed a distinctively apocalyptic atmosphere, a heavy emphasis on a supposed antitechnological bias among the survivors, and a concentration on the results of nuclear power in general and radiation in particular. The mood was darker in that imagined catastrophes were now primarily manmade. Man became pictured as a kind of lemming bent on racial suicide – through nuclear, biological and chemical warfare in stories of the 1940s and 1950s, and through POLLUTION, OVERPOPULATION and destruction of Earth’s ecosphere in many stories since the 1960s.Among the darker scenarios set after nuclear war are: Judith MERRIL’s Shadow on the Hearth (1950); Wilson TUCKER’s The Long Loud Silence (1952); Ward MOORE’s “Lot” (1953) with its sardonic sequel “Lot’s Daughter” (1954), the uncredited bases for PANIC IN YEAR ZERO (1962); Mordecai ROSHWALD’s Level 7 (1959); Pat FRANK’s Alas, Babylon (1959), more optimistic than the others about the possibility of re-ordering society; Alfred COPPEL’s Dark December (1960); and Fritz LEIBER’s extremely savage “Night of the Long Knives” (1960; vt “The Wolf Pair”), which can be found in The Night of the Wolf (coll 1966). Novels which place a greater emphasis on the kinds of society developed after the holocaust are: Algis BUDRYS’s False Night (1954; text reinstated and exp, vt Some Will not Die 1961; rev 1978), a very grim book; Margot BENNETT’s The Long Way Back (1954), in which civilized Africans send a colonizing expedition to legendary Great Britain, where they find Whites still living in caves; Dark Universe (1961) by Daniel F. GALOUYE, set in an underground POCKET UNIVERSE; Edgar PANGBORN’s DAVY (1964), The Judgment of Eve (1966) and The Company of Glory (1975); Brian W. ALDISS’s Non-Stop (1958; vt Starship USA) and Greybeard (1964), the latter dealing with life after mass sterility has struck humanity; Philip K. DICK’s DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968), where pollution has destroyed the animal kingdom, and which, much changed, was the basis of the film BLADE RUNNER (1982); and John BOWEN’s After the Rain (1958), dealing with the psychology of the survivors of a great flood.Paramount among such books is Walter M. MILLER’s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (fixup 1960), an ironic black comedy about the ways in which a post-holocaust civilization’s history recapitulates the errors of its predecessor. The story is set largely in an abbey, where fragments of half-understood technological knowledge have been kept alive by the Church. The book is vivid, morose and ebulliently inventive; it has been very influential. Miller’s vision of technology as being (though morally neutral) at once saviour and destroyer is echoed in several books, including some already cited, in which an antitechnological majority, usually medieval in social structure and rigidly conservative in outlook, is unable to suppress the scientific curiosity of young malcontents; two good examples are Leigh BRACKETT’s The Long Tomorrow (1955) and John WYNDHAM’s Re-Birth (1955 US; rev vt The Chrysalids UK). (The English disaster novel at this time was dominated by Wyndham and by John CHRISTOPHER, both writing several post-holocaust novels.) At a more popular, adventure-story level, several writers have picked up the idea (found also in the Brackett and Wyndham novels) of a secret enclave of scientifically advanced technocrats in an otherwise primitive world. Such is the situation in Piers ANTHONY’s trilogy collected as Battle Circle (omni 1977), which began with Sos the Rope (1968). A film pitting barbarians against an island of technology is ZARDOZ (1973), where the sympathy, as often happens, is with the barbarian. In stories of this type technology is generally feared, since it was through technology that mankind almost destroyed itself; a furtive technology is pitted against MAGIC in a FAR-FUTURE post-holocaust venue in Fred SABERHAGEN’s trilogy consisting of The Broken Lands (1968), The Black Mountains (1971) and Changeling Earth (1973), but here, despite a tenuous rationale, the tone of the story is more that of SWORD AND SORCERY than of sf proper. Indeed, many sword-and-sorcery stories are set in a post-holocaust period when mankind has taken the route of magic rather than science; the rather silly idea is presumably that if we give up depending on technology we may be able to work miracles instead. In one of the commonest variants the magic is rationalized: the post-holocaust society develops PSI POWERS.With the increased publicity given to the so-called counterculture in the late 1960s (reflected in sf by the NEW WAVE), post-holocaust stories of rather a different kind became popular. Hell’s-Angels-style motorcycle gangs roam a ruined world in two colourful romances, Roger ZELAZNY’s Damnation Alley (1969), badly filmed with many changes as DAMNATION ALLEY (1977), and Steve WILSON’s The Lost Traveller (1976); the same idea is used more subtly in a grimmer work, Brian W. Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head (fixup 1969), as motorcyclists roll through the debris of a Europe half-destroyed by the use of psychedelic drugs as weapons. J.G. BALLARD’s oeuvre is made up largely of post-holocaust stories; he has evoked catastrophes of all sorts, manmade and natural, sudden and protracted, and often his protagonists act in psychic collaboration with the forces that threaten humanity’s security. Scarred motorways continue to link up the decaying communities of M. John HARRISON’s forceful first novel, The Committed Men (1971), which has something of a Ballardian bleakness but a rather tougher survival mentality in the protagonists. Other notable post-holocaust stories of the late 1960s and the 1970s are HEROES AND VILLAINS (1969) by Angela CARTER, “The Snows are Melted, the Snows are Gone” (1969) by James TIPTREE Jr, “The Lost Continent” (1970) by Norman SPINRAD, The End of the Dream (1972) by Philip Wylie, returning to a theme he first worked with 40 years earlier, Hiero’s Journey (1973) by Sterling LANIER, Winter’s Children (1974 UK) by Michael CONEY, Earthwreck! (1974) by Thomas N. SCORTIA, WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974) by Suzy McKee CHARNAS, WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG (fixup 1976) by Kate WILHELM, THE STAND (cut 1978, text largely restored and rev 1990 UK) by Stephen KING, and DREAMSNAKE (fixup 1978) by Vonda N. MCINTYRE.A fine story from this period was “A Boy and his Dog” (1969) by Harlan ELLISON, interestingly filmed as A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975). Indeed, the 1960s, and more prolifically the 1970s, saw many variations on the post-holocaust theme in the CINEMA aside from those already mentioned, including ON THE BEACH (1959), The WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959), The DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1963), L’ ULTIMO UOMO DELLA TERRA (1964; vt The Last Man on Earth); KONEC SRPNA V HOTELU OZON (1966; vt The End of August at the Hotel Ozone), NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), The BED-SITTING ROOM (1969), GAS-S-S-S (1970), GLEN AND RANDA (1970), The OMEGA MAN (1971), NIPPON CHINBOTSU (1973; vt The Submersion of Japan; vt Tidal Wave), The ULTIMATE WARRIOR (1975), JUBILEE (1978), QUINTET (1979) and MAD MAX (1979); UK tv took up the idea with SURVIVORS (1975-7). The success of Mad Max not only produced two sequels but began a whole cycle of post-holocaust colourful-barbarian action thriller films that continued right through the 1980s, including 1990: I GUERRIERI DEL BRONX (1982; vt Bronx Warriors) and CITY LIMITS (1984). In fact the 1980s was a period in which the post-holocaust venue became primarily used as a conveniently barbaric backdrop for feats of romantic adventure and, perhaps more worryingly, for the macho acts of rapine and savagery that characterize SURVIVALIST FICTION, which became very popular at this time. Although the post-holocaust genre remained popular in the 1980s film industry, and produced a strange variety of films, it produced no great ones, perhaps the most telling being George A. ROMERO’s DAY OF THE DEAD (1985). Others were FUKKATSO NO HI (1980; vt Virus), MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981), Le DERNIER COMBAT (1983; vt The Last Battle), RED DAWN (1984), NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984), The QUIET EARTH (1985), SLIPSTREAM (1989) and HARDWARE (1990).Earlier, post-holocaust venues had by the 1970s become popular in CHILDREN’S SF, a particularly good book being Z for Zachariah (1975) by Robert C. O’BRIEN. Too often, however, such books were designed to teach moral lessons of the currently approved kind, often simplistically; the typical holocaust of 1980s children’s books features ecological spoliation brought about by evil capitalists, one of the livelier examples being Scatterlings (1991) by Isobelle CARMODY.While post-holocaust scenarios in films (and in COMICS, where they became extremely popular) were tending to trivialize the genre, it remained an important and still very popular element in serious sf in book form. Interesting and rather admirable are the 7 Pelbar books of Paul O. WILLIAMS, beginning with The Breaking of Northwall (1981), in which fragmented societies in a rural post-holocaust USA begin slowly to knit themselves together. Another good series was Richard COWPER’s Corlay trilogy (1976-82), a contemplative PASTORAL work set in England centuries after low-lying areas have been covered by the rising sea. William BARNWELL’s Blessing trilogy (1980-81) features a fantastic quest in a world recovering after a holocaust deliberately brought about for metaphysical reasons. Storm CONSTANTINE’s Wraeththu trilogy (1987-9) presents luridly but with some flair a hermaphroditic race arising in a devastated world. Notable single novels from the 1980s and since include Voices in Time (1980) by Hugh MACLENNAN, In the Drift (fixup 1984) by Michael SWANWICK, The Postman (1985) by David BRIN, Wolf in Shadow (1987; vt The Jerusalem Man 1988 US) by David GEMMELL, The Sea and Summer (1987; vt Drowning Towers 1988 US) by George TURNER, The Wall around Eden (1989) by Joan SLONCZEWSKI, WINTERLONG (1990) by Elizabeth HAND and BONE DANCE: A FANTASY FOR TECHNOPHILES (1991) by Emma BULL. But the outstanding post-holocaust novel of the decade was probably RIDDLEY WALKER (1980) by Russell HOBAN, in which the nature of the future civilization is vividly evoked through its devolved language ( LINGUISTICS).Life after the holocaust is a theme that continues to grip the imagination. The idea of destroying our crowded, bureaucratic world and then rebuilding afresh offers an exciting psychic freedom. The rusting symbols of a technological past protruding into a more primitive, natural, future landscape are among the most potent of sf’s icons.

Text stolen from Empty World

‘Survivalist Fiction’ from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

During the near-half century of Cold War after the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan in 1945, nuclear holocausts were a commonplace plot device in various genres of popular fiction. Some novels took readers teasingly up to the brink without actually carrying them into the terminal moments; Cold War thrillers of this sort are not generally treated in this encyclopaedia. A rather larger number of novels treated the final war as a given, an assumed premise of the action of the tale, which took place subsequent to the horror of the actual event. One subgenre of this sizeable cohort of post-holocaust novels usually goes by the name survivalist fiction.

Though it takes much of its political extremism and attendant social prejudices from the genuine survivalist movement which flourished in the USA during the Cold War, survivalist fiction as such has little to do with the actual concerns of real survivalists, who tend to concentrate most of their energies on exercises and training and hoarding and forward-planning for the anticipated event; less thought is given to the aftermath, where survivalist fictions are almost invariably set. The significance of genuine survivalists is of the here and now, as an example of the pathos of “self-reliance” in a world too complex and fragile to reward simple solutions.

Of greater potential interest to sf writers than realist stories about survivalists is, perhaps, the apocalypse pathology detectable in the survivalist mentality. Those who live their lives in anticipation of surviving the holocaust are almost certainly geared to welcome its coming, and to feel that – by contrast with the civilian hordes who ignore the tenets of the faith – the comprise an Elect of true believers. Survivalists, in other words, run the risk of seeing the holocaust as a test of Faith: of feeling virtuous about the End of the World. A novel like Robert A Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, though displaced through time travel beyond the normal boundaries of survivalist fiction, does convey the extremist mind-set of some participants in the movement, and the “Darwinian” ruthlessness they long to ape. But Farnham’s Freehold is a tale of wish-fulfilment; the actualities of survival are clearly so unrewarding when faced directly that almost all sf which deals with nuclear holocaust directly treats its human protagonists as doomed. There is, in fact, almost no genuine sf that describes a genuine survivalist agenda without descending into fantasy; even Dean Ing’s Pulling Through which is a good example of an extremely rare breed, has recourse to a magic sports car which enables the protagonist to leap over some otherwise terminal obstacles. Andrew J Offutt’s The Castle Keeps is a scathing analysis of the effects of survivalist doctrines in any plausible post-holocaust world.

There are of course many sf tales of survivors (like Gordon R Dickson’s attractive Wolf and Iron) and post-holocaust stories whose protagonists are oppressed (as in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s False Dawn) by predators whose resemblance to survivalists may not be accidental; but survivalist fiction is something very different from tales like these. From about 1980, survivalist fiction has become established as a very particular kind of male-action story, set in post-holocaust venues where law-and-order has disappeared, and where there is effectively no restraint upon the behaviour of the hero, who therefore kills before he is killed, demonstrating his fitness to survive through acts of unbridled violence (which very frequently descend into prolonged sessions of rape and sadism). The first full-blown example of the subgenre is probably the Survivalist Series by Jerry Ahern, which began with Survivalist #1: Total War and which now extends to more than 20 volumes. A second important open-ended series (survivalist fiction, like pornography, tends to be structured as a series of escalating repetitions of the same material) is William W Johnstone’s Ashes sequence from 1983, in which an extreme right-wing political agenda is used to legitimize the hero’s actions. Other sequences include David Alexander’s Phoenix books, James Barton’s Wasteworld books, D B Drumm’s Traveler books (initiated by Ed Naha, though some or most of the sequence was by John Shirley), Bob Hams’s Overload books, Laurence James’s Death Land books as by James Axler, Mack Maloney’s Wingman books, Victor Milan’s Guardians books as by Richard Austin, David L Robbins’s Endworld books, James Rouch’s Zone books, some episodes in Barry Sadler’s Casca sequence and the Doomsday Warrior books written as by Ryder Stacy. To this list could be added Mad Max (1979) and its sequels, although these are at the top of the heap; the same cannot be said of their cheap imitators. During 1992 several book series were terminated due to declining sales; it may be that the changing world scene had reduced their appeal.

There may be some connection between present-day survivalist movements in the USA and survivalist fiction as here described, in that survivalist fiction may seem to express a grotesquely decayed form of Heinleinian relish at the defeat of “civilian” values when the “real” world bares its teeth. But even this is to claim to much. Sadistic, sexist, racist, pornographic, gloating and void, survivalist fiction is an obscene parody of genuine survivalist, and a nightmare at the bottom of the barrel of sf.

Text stolen from Empty World

So many post-apocalypses, so little time…

In my post-apocalypse obsession I thought I’d make a list of stuff I need to check-out, having been checking out or stuff I need to check out again.

BRITISH POST-APOCALYPSES:

Novels

• Mary Shelly: The Last Man
• H.G. Wells: War of the Worlds
• M.P. Sheil: The Purple Cloud
• John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes
• John Christopher: The Death of Grass, The World in Winter, Empty World,
• Brian Aldiss: Greybeard, Barefoot in the Head
• Michael Moorcock: Cornelius Quartet, Breakfast in the Ruins and others
• J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World, The Drought, The Wind from Nowhere, etc…
• Christopher Priest: Fugue for a Darkening Island
• Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor, Children of Violence, Mara and Dann: An Adventure,Tthe Story Of General Dann And Mara’s Daughter Griot And The Snow Dog
• Robert C. O’Brien: Z for Zachariah
• P.D. James: The Children of Men
• Maggie Gee: Ice People

TV and film

• War Game
• Survivors
• Quatermass [4]/The Quatermass Concussion
• Day of the Triffids
• Threads
• The Last Train
• Zardoz
• 28 Days/Weeks Later

Comics

• Judge Dredd: Cursed Earth
• The Last American
• When the Wind Blows
• Tank Girl

US POST-APOCALYPSES:

Novels

• George R. Stewart: Earth Abides
• Richard Matheson: I am Legend
• Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz
• Pat Frank: Alas Babylon
• Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
• Roger Zelazny: Damnation Alley
• Kim Stanley Robinson: The Wild Shore
• David R. Palmer:  Emergence
• Mink Mole & Dr. Adder: Alligator Alley
• Stephen King: The Strand
• Cormac McCarthy: The Road
• Jeff Carlson: Plague Year
• Paolo Bacigalupi: Pump Six (audio here)

Film

• The Last Man on Earth
• Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead
• Omega Man
• Planet of the Apes
• Blade Runner
• 12 Monkeys
• I am Legend
• Tooth and Nail

INTERNATIONAL POST-APOCALYPSES

• La Jettée
• Mad Max
• The Hour of the Wolf
• Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales, White

And obviously there is some crossing over with dystopian fiction, so I’m also considering V for Vendetta, Caesar’s Column, Lord of the Flies, 1984, Swastika Night, The Republic of the Future, Brave New World, etc…

I have also stumbled acros this website: The Empty World, named after the novel by John Christopher that is dedicated to all things apocalyptic, from whih I have found the following links:

• Nuclear Holocaust: Atomic War in Fiction
• Post Modem
• Post-apocalyptic Fiction and Science Fiction
• The Afternoon After the End of the World

Some of which look good, if possibly a tad dry and academic… The other links on The Empty World seem to be dead now, alas. It also has some articles apparently stolen from other sources that I too am going to steal in turn, such as the nature of the internet and digital info, and post here.

The Post Modem site has the following links, which look good, among other that appear dead now:

• Surviving Armageddon
• Heroic Apocalypse
• The Rupture of Rapture
• Witnessing the Unthinkable
• Nuke Pop
• 2019: Off World

Anyone catch The Last Train?

Been thinking about post-apocalypse stuff just lately, which reminded me of the ITV drama series The Last Train which aired way back in 1999. It was fairly good from what my endorphins fried brain can remember and after much hunting about online, finding only dead downloads on bit-torrent sites, I dug up these episodes from a video sharing site called veoh which seems a bit like youtube but with a download option. I’m DLing the required software now to see how it goes, but in the meantime here are some links (WP doesn’t seem to want to embed them, sorry) for each of the six episodes to check out – only 5 min previews I’m afraid, unless you want to sign up too. As I said I haven’t seen them again yet as I’m waiting for them to DL  so I can’t vouch for their quality, but here they are…

• Ep. 1
• Ep. 2
• Ep. 3
• Ep. 4
• Ep. 5
• Ep. 6

For those of you with a conscience (a luxury come the apocalypse you fools!), don’t worry, the chances of this series being released on DVD anytime soon is significantly less than the chance of the Earth being hit by a extinction-sized asteroid, so what have you got to loose?