Post-Cold War Apocalyptic Texts

[Prof.]

Hi everyone,

I'm studying apocalyptic texts next year and am really interested in looking at the differences and similarities between Cold War apocalyptic texts (1949-1960 + 1980's Cold War revival) and post-Cold War apocalyptic texts (1980 onward). There is tonnes of Cold War stuff (On the Beach, Alas, Babylon, etc), but the post-CW stuff is proving harder to find. Thus far I'm looking at the unparalleled brilliance of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2007), and parts of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004). There's also some Vonnegut and PKD that are relevant, but I'd really like to track down some that have been written since around 2000.

Can anyone suggest any titles?

[Freewheeling Andy]

Cloud Atlas and The Road are both brilliant. Although I felt The Road was actually fairly cold-war-ish in tone. It could easily have been written 2 decades earlier.

Are you looking for post-military-apocalypse, or are you looking for other drivers of an apocalypse where the cold war no longer works? With the latter stuff you might want to look at JG Ballard, whose whole genre is basically different forms of dystopian ruined worlds. The most recent 4 novels are interesting because they look at the breakdown of very modern consumer societies. Something like Super-Cannes or Cocaine Nights. Earlier stuff like Hello America or The Drought work on environmental disaster backgrounds. And things like Crash or Concrete Island or High-Rise are are somewhere between the two, I guess.

I feel I've read tons of recent environmental apocalypse stuff but, oddly, I can't actually put my finger on anything.

By the way, of the Cold War stuff, my very favourite is the utterly brilliant A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller.

[Prof.]

Those Ballard novels you mention sound very interesting. I'm specifically looking at apocalyptic lit as a reaction to consumer societies, so I'll definitely take a look at those! I already have Crash on my reading list although I haven't got round to it yet. Got Leibowitz also, which is next as soon as I finish Engine Summer.

I'm interested not so much in the causes of the apocalypse, but when the books were written, and how they respond to their respective societies. Cold War texts seem to be preoccupied with politics and the follies of science, among other things. Whereas texts like The Road are more existential and concerned with fundamental, timeless aspects of humanity. This is more the kind of thing I'm after, although it's all relevant.

Thanks for your help!

[Freewheeling Andy]

The Ballard novels more surround the collapse of civilisation as caused by boredom or excess in very middle class environments, rather than the existential "what the world looks like after the collapse" stuff.

Just thinking, another cold-war era novel maybe worth thinking about is David Brin's The Postman, which is a 1980s one, and, now you mention it, is quite political at its core.

Incidentally, as I think about it, it's odd to wonder that The Road is one of the very few post-apocalyptic landscapes (apart from Mitchell's Hawaii) that's not basically a desert landscape. Is that because of my narrow reading, or is it because authors always want to give the impression of parched, barren and infertile, and thus prefer desert as a medium?

[Prof.]

It's an interesting point. A lot of post-apocalyptic texts are set on beaches as well. I've always thought this was to do with exploring the limits of the actual physical landmass that is a country. Also, has connotations of nationality and geographical borders, which are largely nonsensical at the end of the world. A sense of having nowhere to run to, being trapped, etc. But yeah, deserts clearly put forward ideas of barrenness and infertility which go hand in hand with nuclear devastation particularly due to the fear of birth defects and radiated soil, etc. The idea of the 'nuclear winter' didn't come along for quite some time, I don't think, although I can't recall the exact details of the theory. But until then I suppose a desert seemed the most natural result of a wide-scale bombing, due to everything being scorched. Riddley Walker is set in a lush gloomy forest type environment though, a little like The Road, interspersed with a series of ruined yet recognisable architectural edifices. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle portrays a world completely frozen by a substance called 'ice-9'. In PKD's The Penultimate Truth, most of the populus lives underground while the elite few idle about in massive luxurious estates on the surface.

I've gone off on a tangent. I've got The Postman on my list as well.

I'm really looking at post-apocalyptic stuff as a postmodern reaction to consumer society - i.e., authors who believe there is something malignant about consumer society that removes us from fundamental truths, or conceals truthful states behind mass-produced illusions and ideologies. I know for sure J.G. Ballard was concerned with this type of stuff after having read his intro to Crash. So i'll definitely look into his other stuff.

[Freewheeling Andy]

I'm really looking at post-apocalyptic stuff as a postmodern reaction to consumer society - i.e., authors who believe there is something malignant about consumer society that removes us from fundamental truths, or conceals truthful states behind mass-produced illusions and ideologies. I know for sure J.G. Ballard was concerned with this type of stuff after having read his intro to Crash. So i'll definitely look into his other stuff.

Yep. Ballard's your man for that, really. Particularly the last four books. The most recent (possibly his weakest, where it begins to read like self-parody), actually focuses very hard on this - how an M4 corridor shopping centre brings on a sort of extreme nationalism associated with the commercial enterprise and it becomes a violently brutal fascist mini-state. Super-Cannes and Cocaine Nights are better books, but Kingdom Come is probably closest to the vision you're looking for.

Interestingly, I'd never have thought of Cats Cradle in this context, but it clearly belongs.

I thought all the beach/ocean stuff in apocalyptic literature was all about the offer of hope and redemption coming from beyond the sea. Whether the author wants to give the reader hope that somewhere wasn't destroyed and the characters can get saved; or whether he wants to present the futile, feeble hope of the characters, waiting for the salvation that can never come.

[Raven]

You're reading The Drowned World? You have my pity, I found it to be an incredibly bleak book!

I've been racking my brains and I'm drawing a blank on post-2000 stuff, I can think of plenty of films, but no books.

[Gyre]

Hi Prof :)

A few suggestions for you:

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Zamyatin's satirical novel. It documents a society where citizens are known only as he-numbers and she-numbers, who believe that their totally limited existence, under the watchful eye of the benefactor, is the ideal way to live.

In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, "We" is the classic dystopian novel and was the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr

First there was the Fallout, the plagues and the madness. Then the bloodletting of the Simplification began, when the people - those few who were left - turned against the rulers, the teachers and the scientists who had turned the world into a barren desert, where great clouds of wrath had destroyed the forests and the fields. All knowledge was destroyed, all the learned killed - and only Leibowitz managed to save some of his books. And the monks of the Order of Leibowitz kept the sacred relics, copying, illuminating and interpreting the holy fragments, slowly fashioning a new Renaissance in a barbarous and fallen world.

[Prof.]

You're reading The Drowned World? You have my pity, I found it to be an incredibly bleak book!

I've read bleaker! I actually quite enjoyed it, but I tempered it with some Vonnegut so that took the edge off. :D

Thanks for all the suggestions people. I'll look into that Zamyatin novel, although is it technically post-apocalyptic or just dystopian? It sounds like it might be along the same lines as part of Cloud Atlas and may well be relevant to the postmodern/consumer society aspect, so I'll look it up.

Thanks again!

[Raven]

I've read bleaker!

So have I, ever tried Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks?!!

I actually quite enjoyed it, but I tempered it with some Vonnegut so that took the edge off.

I've only read Slaughterhouse 5 - earlier this year in fact - Catch 22 is much better as an anti-war novel, in my opinion.

[Kylie]

I've only read Slaughterhouse 5 - earlier this year in fact - Catch 22 is much better as an anti-war novel, in my opinion.

I agree! I enjoyed Slaughterhouse 5 a lot but I loved Catch 22. It's one of my favourites.

[Raven]

The Major Major Major Major chapter is pure genius.

Everybody hated Major Major, because he was such a blatant non-conformist . . .