Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2007)

Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction (or, in some cases, the more general category speculative fiction) that is concerned with the end of civilization through nuclear war, plague, or some other general disaster. Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten (or mythologized). Post-apocalyptic stories often take place in an agrarian, non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered elements of technology remain.

Movie poster from When Worlds Collide.
Movie poster from When Worlds Collide.

There is a considerable degree of blurring between this form of science fiction and that which deals with false utopias or dystopic societies. A work of apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic fiction might also be called a ruined Earth story, or dying Earth if the apocalypse is sufficiently dire.

The genres gained in popularity after World War II, when the possibility of global annihilation by nuclear weapons entered the public consciousness. However, recognizable apocalyptic novels existed at least since the first quarter of the 19th century, when Mary Shelley's The Last Man was published. Additionally, the subgenres draw on a body of apocalyptic literature, tropes, and interpretations that are millennia old.

Contents

[edit] History of the subgenre

[edit] Ancient predecessors

The roots of modern apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction lie in the apocalyptic literature of the past. Various mythologies and religions around the globe include stories depicting or predicting an end to the world and human society. In the ancient Kingdom of Judah, apocalyptic notions appear in the prophetic literature after the Babylonian captivity, most notably in the Book of Daniel; they remained popular in Roman Judea at the time of the birth of Christianity, and greatly influenced the development and teachings of the new religion, Jesus himself discussing the issue in the Four Gospels. Even as the Christian faith spread through the Roman Empire and beyond, the idea that Jesus would return to his followers during the end times remained central. The first centuries AD saw the creation of various apocalyptic works, the best known of which is the Book of Revelation, due to its inclusion in the New Testament. The beliefs and ideas of this time went on to influence the developing Christian eschatology.

The Odyssey by Homer fits the definition of post apocalyptic journey ficiton. Although in the case of Odesseus, it is the end of the Trojan war which is the initiating calamity.

Because of its prominence Revelation influenced nearly every subsequent apocalyptic work in Western culture. However, it was not the only representative of its literary genre produced during the period. The corpus of New Testament apocrypha includes Apocalypses of Peter, Paul, Stephen, and Thomas, as well as two of James and Gnostic Apocalypses of Peter and Paul. Some of these works continued to inform the eschatological imagination of Christianity despite their exclusion from the Bible.

The early Middle Ages saw the development of new apocalyptic works, such as the 7th century Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, as well as entirely new concepts, like Islamic eschatology, which is related to Christian and Jewish eschatology. A later addition is the Prophecy of the Popes, ascribed to the 12th century Irish saint Malachy, but perhaps a product of the late 16th century. The 13th century Arabic novel Theologus Autodidactus written by Ibn al-Nafis was the first proto-science fiction novel, in which he used empirical science to explain Islamic eschatology.

The story of Noah and his Ark is also an apocalyptic story focusing on the apocalyptic event itself as an end to a corrupt pre-apocalyptic world and on the hope of a better post-apocalyptic one.

[edit] Modern works

First edition cover art of I Am Legend
First edition cover art of I Am Legend

The first work of modern apocalyptic fiction may be Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man. The last portion becoming the story of a man living in a future world emptied of humanity by plague, it contains the recognizable elements of the subgenre. It is sometimes considered the first science fiction novel, though that distinction is more often given to Shelley's more famous earlier novel, Frankenstein.

The 1885 novel After London by Richard Jefferies is of the type that could be best described as "post-apocalyptic fiction"; after some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life. The first chapters consist solely of a loving description of nature reclaiming England: fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland. The rest of the story is a straightforward adventure/quest set many years later in the wild landscape and society; but the opening chapters set an example for many later science fiction stories. Similarly, Stephen Vincent Benét's short story "By the Waters of Babylon" (1937) describes a young man's coming-of-age quest to a ruined New York City after an unspecified disaster.

An apparently forgotten novel is "The Hopkins Manuscript" (1939).The scenario is that the moon crashes into the Atlantic ocean and the resulting effect on a small community in the south of England (see Lucifer's Hammer). It was broadcast by the BBC sometime in the late 1940's. The author was R.C Sherriff whose play "Journey's End" was performed in London in the early thirties.

The cosy catastrophe is a name given to a style of post-apocalyptic science fiction that was particularly prevalent after the Second World War and among British science fiction writers. An early example of this, however, is the1890 Caesar's Column by Ignatius L. Donnelly (under the pseudonym Edmund Boisgilbert), where the violent uprising of the lower class against a plutocratic oligarchy leads to the destruction of civilization, while the protagonist survives back home in a now-fortified European colony in the Ugandan highlands.

The term was coined by Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. A "cosy catastrophe" is typically one in which civilization (as we know it) comes to an end and everyone is killed except for a handful of survivors, who then set about rebuilding their version of civilization. English author John Wyndham was the figure at whom Aldiss was primarily directing his remarks, especially his novel The Day of the Triffids. The critic L. J. Hurst dismissed Aldiss's accusations, pointing out that in the book the main character witnesses several murders, suicides, and misadventures, and is frequently in mortal danger himself.[1]

However, "cosy catastrophe" is also used for more limited-scale disaster stories popular around 1900, like "The Thames Valley Catastrophe" (where a volcano bursts forth to destroy London) or "The Four Day's Night" (where smoke from a great fire and fog combine to create a choking black smog). In this case, the coziness comes from the limited scale and protagonist survival off somewhere safe and unaffected.

Pilgrimage to Hell - the 1st novel in the series
Pilgrimage to Hell - the 1st novel in the series

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (1949), deals with one man who finds most of civilization has been destroyed by a plague. Slowly a small community forms around him as he struggles to start a new civilization and preserve knowledge and learning.

The Cold War saw increased interest in the subgenres, as the threat of nuclear war became real. Since this measure of destruction was no longer imaginary, some of these new works, such as Nevil Shute's On the Beach and Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, shun the imaginary science and technology that are the identifying traits of general science fiction.

Others include more fantastic elements, such as mutants, alien invaders, or exotic future weapons such as James Axler's Deathlands. Andre Norton wrote the definitive, post apocalyptic novel, Star Man's Son (AKA, Daybreak 2250), published in 1952, where a young man, Fors, begins an Arthurian quest for lost knowledge, through a radiation ravaged landscape, with the aid of a telepathic, mutant cat. He encounters mutated creatures, "the beast things" which are possibly a degenerated form of humans. There have been many retellings of this basic story, yet little or no acknowledgment is paid to Andre Norton, despite sales of more than 1 million copies of Star Man's Son, for her thematic development, and popularization of this genre. The novel set a pattern for many future movie plots.

A seminal work in this subgenre was Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). Many subsequent stories were clearly derivative of this novel. Ideas such as a recrudescent Church (Catholic or other), pseudo-medieval society, and the theme of the rediscovery of the knowledge of the pre-holocaust world were central to this book. Paul Brians published Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, a study that examines atomic war in fiction published in short stories, novels, and films between 1895 to 1984.

In 1978, Stephen King published The Stand, which follows the odyssey of a small number of survivors of a world-ending influenza pandemic. Although reportedly influenced by the 1949 novel Earth Abides, King's book includes many supernatural elements and is generally regarded as part of the horror fiction genre. Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) is a recent work of post-apocalypse fiction. It won the Pulitzer Prize, rare for a post-apocalyptic or science fiction book.

Lucifer's Hammer by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven (1977) is about a cataclysmic comet hitting the Earth, and various groups of people struggling to survive the aftermath in southern California. The similarly themed "Footfall" (1985) is about aliens bombarding Earth using controlled meteorite strikes to exterminate life.

The award winning novel Emergence by David Palmer (1984) is set in a world where a man-made plague destroys the vast majority of the world's population. The work was nominated for a Hugo Award, a pair of Locus awards (for first novel and science fiction novel), was a finalist for a Philip K. Dick Award, and won the Compton Crook Award.

The Postman by David Brin (1985) is set in a time after a massive plague and political fracture result in a complete collapse of society. It gives a very unflattering portrayal of survivalists as one of the causes behind the collapse. The quasi-survivalist "Holnist" characters are despised by the remaining population. The Holnists follow a totalitarian social theory idolizing the powerful who enforce their perceived right to oppress the weak. However later Brin stated that when he was writing the book survivalist was the best term to describe the militia movement.

From Dr. Strangelove: Major "King" Kong riding a nuclear bomb to oblivion.
From Dr. Strangelove: Major "King" Kong riding a nuclear bomb to oblivion.

The Survivalist is the title of a series of paperback novels by Jerry Ahern, about the adventures of protagonist John Thomas Rourke, in the United States following a massive nuclear attack. The first few volumes are set in the near future, and then story jumps (via a suspended animation experiment) several hundred years in the future, in the later volumes.

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic settings are commonly featured in Japanese anime, such as Future Boy Conan (1978), The Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982), Megazone 23 (1985), Akira (1988), After War Gundam X (1997) and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (2007). There have also been several video games which could be considered post-apocalyptic such as Final Fantasy VI (1994), Final Fantasy X (2001), and Half-Life 2 (2004), in which a player finds himself struggling to survive in a world ruled by the alien Combine, brought to our dimension by the fault of scientists. The Fallout series is exclusively themed around the idea of life after a nuclear apocalypse.

"World Made By Hand" by James Howard Kunstler (2008) is a cosy catastrophe set in upstate New York. The characters struggle to recreate a pre-industrial revolution lifestyle in an agrarian village. The novel depicts an America that has economically collapsed by 2025 as a result of the combined insults of peak oil, global warming, influenza epidemic, and nuclear terrorism. In this novel, Kunstler dramatizes threats to society that he identifies in his non-fiction work, The Long Emergency. Kunstler's novel presents "old time" Americana-infused skills as superior to the overconsumption and failed urban planning of 20th century America, that ignored sustainability. Kunstler's novel explores the question of what happens when modern technologies, based on electricity, are no longer available. This is also a central theme in S.M. Stirling's novel "Dies the Fire."

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is an example of both dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. The framing story is set after a genetically modified virus wipes out the entire population except for the protagonist and a small group of humans that were also genetically modified. A series of flashbacks depicting a world dominated by biocorporations explains the events leading up to the apocalypse.

[edit] Cultural views on apocalyptic fiction

For the most part, Western literature and cinema on the apocalypse or in a post-apocalyptic setting tend to follow American mores, with the exception of British apocalyptic fiction. While American apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction tend to emphasize the fantastic, with the possibility of world-ending meteor collisions, global warming events, mutants, and jury-rigged vehicles roaming a desolate countryside, British fiction is more pessimistic in tone.

Post-apocalyptic literature was not as widespread in communist countries as the government prohibited depictions of the nations falling apart. However, some depictions of similar-themed science fiction were accepted by government censors, such as Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (which was later adapted as the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky), made during Russia's Soviet era, which features the bombed-out landscape and survival-based motives of its characters and was inspired in part by the 1957 accident at the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. Recently, Wang Lixiong's Yellow Peril was banned in the People's Republic of China because of its depiction of the collapse of the Communist Party of China, but has been widely pirated and distributed in the country.

According to some theorists, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in its modern past has influenced Japanese popular culture to include many apocalyptic themes. Much of Japan's manga and anime is filled with apocalyptic imagery.[2] It has, however, also been claimed[who?] that disaster and post-disaster scenarios have a longer tradition in Japanese culture, possibly related to the earthquakes that repeatedly have devastated Japanese cities, and possibly connected to Japanese political history, which includes strict adherence to authority until a sudden and dramatic change. See Meiji Restoration and the earlier ee ja nai ka phenomenon.

[edit] Criticism

The use of post-apocalyptic contexts in movies and the typical accompanying imagery, such as endless deserts or damaged cityscapes, clothing made of leather or animal skin, and marauding gangs of bandits, is now common and the subject of frequent parody.

The number of apocalyptic-themed B-movies in the 1980s and 1990s has been attributed to film producers on post-apocalyptic films working around their low production budgets by renting scrapyards, unused factories, and abandoned buildings, saving them the cost of constructing sets. As a result, many films that would have been rejected by major studios on the basis of script or concept ended up being made, while other stories were adapted to a post-apocalyptic setting following the success of the Mad Max series.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ *Essay by L.J. Hurst
  2. ^ Murakami, T.: Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture, Yale University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-300-10285-2

[edit] References

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Doomsday