The shelves of supermarkets lay bare, the roads are empty and schools are closed. Snowmaggedon has even closed Red Books. Now might be a good time to discuss one of our favourite genres – post apocalyptic fiction, which has shot to mainstream popularity in recent years but has existed from the very beginning of writing.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2000-1500 BC) is the prototype of apocalyptic fiction, detailing an disaster of epic proportions – the flooding of the world. Utnapishtim and his family are saved through the intervention of the god Ea, making them the first post apocalyptic heroes. Similar stories are found later in the bible, with Noahs flood, in the Qur’an, where its Nūḥ who builds the ark and rebuilds humanity, and in the Hindu Dharmasastra where King Manu builds the ark after being informed of the coming deluge by Lord Vishnu. Similar stories pop up in other religions so it’s no wonder that there is a hunger for such stories down through the ages.
In 1805, Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man) was published following the death of its author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, becoming the first work of modern fiction to depict the end of the world and it’s aftermath. Essentially a retelling of the book of Revelation, it follows Omegarus, the son of the last king of Europe and the last fertile man on a dying earth, and his attempts to get to the last fertile woman who lives in Brazil so that they can rebuild humanity. Twenty one years later Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein, wrote a novel with the same title following a man attempting to keep his family alive during a terrible plague. Spoilers, he fails and becomes the titular last man.
Richard Jefferies, an English nature writer and advocate, wrote two short unpublished pieces from the 1870s describing social collapse after London is paralysed by freak winter conditions (Snowmaggedon?). He kept many of the devices he invented for these stories and used them in his post apocalyptic masterpiece, After London, in 1885. Britain has been ravished and depopulated by an unnamed disaster which has left the island to be retaken by nature and the few survivors to revert to a medieval existence. Jefferies divided his book into two sections, the first beautifully describing how nature overcomes the remains of human civilisation through an account of a much later historian. This may have been a secret fantasy of the ecologically minded writer. The second reads as a now standard post apocalyptic adventure story where vile tyrants fight each other for power over the dispossessed. This was completely original at the time and set the template for future classics from Mad Max to The Road.
The Scarlet Plague (1912) is Jack London’s take on the end of the world, set in San Francisco sixty years after a virus had wiped out most of the world’s population. James Howard Smith, one of the few pre-plague era humans left alive recounts the events of the Red Death to his barbaric hunter gatherer grandsons, Edwin, Hoo-Hoo, and Hare-Lip. This was arguably the first novel to deal with the psychological problems of survival where the living might indeed envy the dead. The following year JD Bresford wrote “Goslings: A World of Women” describing a virus which wipes out all of Britain’s male population leaving behind a female led society.
The post second world war period and the cold war era became the golden age of post apocalyptic fiction. Among the best were the following classics;
• Earth Abides (1949). American writer George R. Stewart tells the story of the fall of civilisation following the outbreak of killer disease. Isherwood Williams emerges from isolation in the Sierra Nevada mountains to find almost everyone dead. He travels across the ruins of America finding pockets of survivors before arriving home and meeting a woman called Emma. They have children and attempt to establish a new society but find it impossible to preserve their way of life before the virus with so few survivors.
• The Day of the Triffids (1951). John Wyndham describes a world where the majority of people have been blinded by a meteor shower and are now at threat from an aggressive species of killer plants called Triffids. Wyndham has been criticised in some quarters for creating the cosy catastrophe, which Brian Aldiss said, “The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off."
• On the beach (1957) Nevil Shutes epic cold war disaster follows the crew of an American Submarine which heads for Australia following a devastating nuclear war. They initially believe they are safe until they discover that a fall out cloud is heading south and that every humanity will become extinct in its wake.
• Death of Grass (1956) English author Samuel Youd wrote this cosy catastrophe under the pen name John Christopher. After an experimental pesticide is used to control a wheat virus in Asia, a new mutated virus appears and infects the staple crops of West Asia and Europe such as wheat and barley—all of the grasses (thus the novel's title), engulfing the whole world in a famine.
• I am Legend (1954) American writer Richard Matheson was influential in the development of the zombie-vampire genre of fiction with this intense novel. Robert Neville, the apparent sole survivor of a pandemic whose symptoms resemble vampirism, attempts to comprehend, research, and possibly cure the disease, to which he is immune.
• Hothouse (1962) Brian Aldiss's novel deals with a future earth which has one side constantly facing the sun (which is larger and hotter than it is at present) so it has become a veritable hothouse, where plants have filled almost all ecological niches.
• The Drowned World (1963) JG Ballard describes a terrifying future world where a rise in solar radiation has caused worldwide flooding and accelerated mutation of plants and animals. Survivors live in a now tropical Artic circle.
“What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give them Christ, help restore a culture? Did you remember to warn them that it could never be Eden?” – A canticle for Leibowitz
In 1978 Stephen King wrote one of our favourite post apocalyptic novels, The Stand, which expands on his earlier short story, Night Surf, from 1969. Telling the story of a particular group of survivors through the terrible events of a superflu, accidentally released from an army research base, and the rebuilding of society in two separate camps, Mother Abigails community of Christians at Boulder and the evil Randall Flaggs demonic army in Las Vegas.
David Brins 1985 novel The Postman tells the story of a drifter who stumbles across a letter carrier uniform of the United States Postal Service and pretends to be a representative of the Restored United States of America to gain access to survivor communities in post apocalyptic Oregon. He accidentally inspires a new movement which goes up against a tyrannical army of survivalists. José Saramago's 1995 novel Blindness tells the story of a city, and possibly world at large, in which a mass epidemic of blindness destroys the social fabric and brings about total anarchy.
In 2004 SM Stirling started the fantastical Emberverse series with the release of Dies the Fire, the first of fourteen novels to date set in a world where the ordinary laws of physics have altered preventing the use of electricity, gunpowder and mechanics. Stirling painstakingly creates detailed societies existing under these new rules.
“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” – The Road
The Road is a 2006 critically acclaimed end of the world novel from Cormac McCarthy. In this Pulitizer prize winning novel, a father and his young son cross a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of civilization, trying to avoid hunger, cannibals and other threats.
The twenty first century saw a huge revival in apocalyptic fiction, mainly through the Young Adult genre. Among these new classics are Suzanne Collins Hunger Games Trilogy (2008-2010), James Dashners Maze Runner series (2009-2011) and Hugh Howeys Silo series (2011-2013). Graphic novels have also been an excellent vehicle for these stories, including Robert Kirkmans The Walking Dead and Y-The Last Man.
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