SOURCE: Wolfe, Gary K. “The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End.” In The End of the World, edited by Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, pp. 1-19. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

In Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story “The Highway,” a poor Mexican farmer who has lived for years beside a highway from the United States, enjoying such odd fruits of this link to technology as sandals made from tire rubber and a bowl made from a hubcap, is startled one day by the sudden appearance of cars speeding northward in great numbers, all filled with apparently panic-stricken American tourists returning home. The farmer, Hernando, cannot account for this sudden flood of traffic. At the end of the flood, however, comes an aging Ford, topless and packed with young Americans who stop at Hernando's shack to ask for water for their failing radiator. The driver explains the reason for the exodus: “The war!’” he shouts, “‘It's come, the atom war, the end of the world!’”—and the tourists are all trying to return to their families. After the young people leave, Hernando prepares to resume his plowing. When his wife asks him what has happened, he replies, “‘It's nothing,’” and sets out with burro and plow, pausing momentarily to muse to himself, “‘What do they mean, “the world?”’”¹

This little parable of holocaust raises, in Bradbury's best elliptical form, some of the most fundamental issues of stories that begin at or near the “end of the world.” Bradbury suggests that Hernando's simple and apparently self-sufficient world will continue much as it has (though, one assumes, without the interruption of tourists), while the “world” that has been destroyed is the world of technology and profligate wealth represented by the highway to the north. As in most post-holocaust fiction, the “end of the world” means the end of a way of life, a configuration of attitudes, perhaps a system of beliefs—but not the actual destruction of the planet or its population (though this population may be severely reduced). For this reason, it is perhaps most enlightening to regard such stories as tales of cosmological displacement: the old concept of “world” is destroyed and a new one must be built in its place. The world—in the sense of economic and political systems, beliefs and behavior patterns—may be destroyed; but more often than not the earth abides—and so, at least in part, does humanity. This kind of “end of the world” has occurred fairly often in human history, most obviously in such dramatic holocausts as the destruction of American Indian civilizations or the Nazi death camps, but also, to some extent, in such broader historical movements as the Industrial Revolution. Often such holocausts are associated with new technologies or the introduction of technologically superior weaponry, and in fact many of the apocalyptic anxieties of the last few decades seem to arise from just such a technological innovation—nuclear weapons. But in the fiction of holocaust, the world is often transformed by a reversal of this historical process: available technologies are removed from the world, rather than new ones introduced. Much of the impact of such fiction arises from the speculations it offers about the effects of the loss of technology on machine-dependent populations—such as the population that Hernando in “The Highway” watches flowing past him.

Bradbury's story reveals a number of themes common to post-holocaust fiction. The highway represents the mobility of a society that contrasts sharply with Hernando's own deep relationship with his little plot of land by the river, but that will quickly have to learn the value of such a relationship. Technology appears in the story in four guises. First, the “big long black cars heading north” suggest a whole complex of industrial civilization: the availability of trained mechanics; the dependability of industries that produce petroleum products, rubber, metal, and plastic; the efficiency of governments in maintaining roads and bridges. After this initial flood of technological marvels has passed, a second, more ominous image of the same technology appears: the dilapidated Ford, its top gone and its radiator boiling over. While this machine is part of the same society that produced the earlier ones, dependence upon it is clearly a precarious matter. It has begun to wear out, it no longer offers full protection from such discomforts of the natural world as rain, and it must be repaired frequently by whatever means are available—in this case, well-water from a farm for the radiator. Significantly, the Ford is driven by young people, since it is the young who will have to make do with such machines in a post-holocaust world: the decaying detritus of a mechanical civilization that has lost the means to service and maintain its machines.

But there is a yet more ominous image of what is to come for these young people. At the bottom of the river that runs by Hernando's hut lie the remains of one of the big American cars that had crashed there years earlier. Sometimes the wreck is visible, and sometimes it is obscured by the muddy waters; in a few years the sediment of the river will cover it entirely. From this wreck Hernando has salvaged the tire from which he carved his rubber sandals, just as his hubcap-bowl has been salvaged from a hubcap that had flown off another car. These images suggest what may become of technology after even the old Fords are gone: the machines themselves turned into raw materials, their parts stripped for primitive implements and clothing before they are reclaimed by the natural world, covered by silt like the car in Hernando's river.

A fourth image of technology suggests what might happen still later, when even salvaging the remnants of technology is insufficient. This image, the last in the story, is essentially one of life and hope: Hernando sets his plow in the furrowed soil and begins tilling the land. It is at this point that he wonders, “‘What do they mean, “the world?”’” and the question is an appropriate one, since Hernando's present world resembles closely the world that may come to pass after industrial technology has faded altogether and the survivors are forced to return to that most basic of all machines, the plow. In the end, Bradbury's story is optimistic in its suggestion of a return to a simpler, less complex life and the promise of a better world to come. Such a vision is presented also in Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), in which the Martian colonists, like the Americans in “The Highway,” return home en masse at the outbreak of nuclear war on earth. One family, however, escapes to Mars, and there the father ceremonially burns such symbols of the old world as stocks and bonds.² This suggestion of starting a new world symbolically cleansed of the sins of the old is not only in keeping with earlier millenarian traditions, but is also common in literary works that begin at or near the world-ending holocaust. As we shall see later, one of the richest of such novels, George R. Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), conforms closely to the pattern implied by Bradbury's “The Highway.”

Although in one sense the very notion of beginning a narrative with a climactic holocaust seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be optimistic, such a fantasy is very much in keeping with traditions of millenarian thought. As Mircea Eliade writes, “the idea of the destruction of the World is not, basically, pessimistic.”³ Norman Cohn has traced medieval millenarian movements to the unrest, disorientation, and anxiety of the rootless poor who sought to improve their lives but found little cause for hope in existing social and economic structures.⁴ While modern fictional versions of the end of the world differ in key respects from these earlier millenarianists—few involve supernatural agencies or clearly messianic leaders, for example—they often share the fundamental belief that a new order can come about only through a complete destruction of the old—that, in Eliade's terms, “life cannot be repaired, it can only be re-created by a return to sources.”⁵ Or, in the words of J. G. Ballard, one of science fiction's own master catastrophists, “I believe that the catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game, to remake zero by provoking it in every conceivable way.”⁶ “‘Now we have finished with the past,’” thinks the protagonist of Stewart's Earth Abides after surviving a mysterious plague that all but wipes out humanity. “‘This is the Moment Zero, and we stand between two eras. Now the new life begins. Now we commence the Year One.’”⁷

The promise inherent in the idea of “remaking zero” is certainly one of the reasons this genre has survived as long as it has, and in so many guises. On the simple level of narrative action, the prospect of a depopulated world in which humanity is reduced to a more elemental struggle with nature provides a convenient arena for the sort of heroic action that is constrained in the corporate, technological world that we know. The “true” values of individual effort and courage are allowed to emerge once again, and power flows to those who possess these attributes—to a “natural aristocracy” uninhibited by political and economic complexities. (Perhaps, in this sense, the ancestry of the modern disaster novel should include James Fenimore Cooper, whose works also depict the emergence of a new aristocracy in the wilderness of a new world where the conventions and constraints of the old have been annihilated.) This simplification of relationships also permits a simplification of the forces of good and evil, making it possible to depict a world of easily discernible heroes and villains. Thus, merely in terms of the action story, the notion of starting the world over is appealing.

As science fiction, end-of-the-world stories provide a convenient means of exploring at least two of the genre's favorite themes without necessitating the sometimes cumbersome narrative apparatus usually associated with these themes. One such theme, the impact of technology on human behavior, is most often dealt with through the introduction of new technologies into fictional worlds—robots, time machines, spacecraft, computers, etc. But the problems of developing both the details of the new technology and the details of the fictional world create a rather complex dialectic for the reader, who must try to understand the impact of a fictional technology on a fictional world and draw from that some insights concerning our own world and our own technology. By removing familiar technology from a fictional world, however, the end-of-the-world story simplifies this dialectic considerably. Rather than introduce new machines, an author can remove or reduce the functioning of the familiar ones and still explore issues of technology and society. A number of science fiction stories—including E. M. Forster's “The Machine Stops” (1909), S. S. Held's “The Death of Iron” (1932), and Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis's Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1972)—construct the entire holocaust around the failure of machines; the latter two stories concern worldwide plagues that affect only machine parts such as iron and plastic.

Another science fiction theme made accessible by the device of beginning at the end is that of humanity's relationship to its environment, or its alienation from that environment. Like new machines, new and strange environments are likely to require a great deal of narrative exposition concerning alien planets, climates, and the like. In the post-holocaust story, this problem can be circumvented by defamiliarizing familiar environments through the transformations wrought by the disaster. A city emptied of its people, whether through nuclear disaster or disease or environmental catastrophe, becomes a strange and alien place. Similarly, a pastoral landscape becomes a foreboding wasteland by the implied danger of holocaust survivors reduced to savagery, disfigured by radiation, or given to strange new beliefs. Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorow (1955) and John Wyndham's Re-Birth (1955) depict wasteland journeys detailed with such geographical verisimilitude that they can be traced on current maps of North America; the territory is that familiar, and yet so alien that we can have no idea of what it may contain. Robert Merle's Malevil (1972) spends much time before the holocaust detailing the landscape surrounding the ancient fortress of Malevil, so that after the disaster we can better appreciate the devastating transformation this landscape has undergone. Generally, geography is an important recurrent element in post-holocaust narratives, and almost always it serves to establish a link between the strange new environment and the world we know.

Related to these familiar science fiction themes is what is probably the fundamental reason for the emotional power of post-holocaust narratives: the mythic power inherent in the very conception of a remade world. The sources of mythic power in this genre are at least threefold, for in most post-holocaust narratives we see the reemergence of chaos into the experiential world (and the attendant opportunities this provides for ritualistic heroic action); the reinforcement of cultural values through the triumph of these values in a final, decisive “battle of the Elect”; and the assurance of racial survival despite the most overwhelming odds—a kind of “denial of death” on a cultural rather than individual level.

By “the re-emergence of chaos” I mean the return of Nature as a material adversary in the narrative. The appropriation of chaos and its transformation into cosmos is a fundamental activity of technology, and perhaps of culture. But as the arena for this confrontation moves ever outward, the individual becomes ever more insulated from the central adventure of cultural and technological growth. Much science fiction follows this outward movement; once the natural environment of earth has been subdued, Nature becomes outer space, or alien planets. But the post-catastrophe tale brings this confrontation with Nature closer to home; in these stories chaos may lie just beyond the limits of the village, or outside the family circle, or—especially with “last man on earth” stories—around the next corner. In M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901), the struggle is even internalized; the question is not merely whether Adam Jeffson, apparently the last man on earth, can master the immense environment he inherits, but whether what he calls the “White” forces of his own mind can master the destructive and chaotic “Black” forces that cause him to deliberately burn great cities and almost to kill the only surviving woman. Mythic heroic action depends partly upon confrontation with chaos, and the post-holocaust world repeatedly provides opportunities for such confrontations.

But such confrontation is meaningful only if it can be associated with a set of values, and the reinforcement of such values is another mythic function of the post-holocaust tale. In fact, such tales oftenly become openly didactic, pitting diametrically opposed value systems against one another in a final battle for supremacy. Once the “evil” antagonists are vanquished, such narratives seem to say, so will the evil values they represent disappear, making it possible for the new world to evolve toward greater perfection than the old. One of the most didactic of such novels, Alfred Noyes's No Other Man (1940), pits the devout Catholic protagonist against the mad scientist Marduk, only to vanquish Marduk and thus somehow validate the superiority of religious over scientistic thought. Only slightly less didactic is Alfred Coppel's Dark December (1960), in which the opposed value systems are both military: the conscientious and professional but guilt-ridden (because of his role in the nuclear war as a missile officer) Gavin against the psychopathic, fascistic Collingwood, who sees the devastated environment as an opportunity for men like himself to rise to power. (Needless to say, Collingwood eventually falls off a bridge.) In Merle's Malevil, following the holocaust of nuclear chain-reactions, the rationalistic communal life of Malevil castle under the direction of Emmanuel Comte comes into conflict with an oppressive theocracy imposed on a neighboring village by the hypocritical false priest Fulbert le Naud. The ensuing struggle for supremacy not only validates the humanism of Malevil's system, but also indirectly validates the need for technology, since the struggle convinces the inhabitants of Malevil that they must begin research into the reinvention of weapons in order to protect their interests and values—despite their acute awareness of what the technology of weaponry can ultimately lead to.

A third mythic function of the fictional end of the world is that, ironically, it provides some reassurance of survival. In fact, most such fictions that we conveniently label “holocaust” or “end of the world” stories are in fact quite the opposite, and dwell on the survival of key representative types of individuals and in some cases the key institutions (such as the family) as well. It might be more accurate to label such fictions “almost-the-end-of-the-world” fictions, or “end-of-most-of-the-world” fictions, but works that describe a complete annihilation of the planet and all human life are comparatively rare. And even among this small group of works, such as Poe's “Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” there is some promise at least of spiritual survival. Eliade has suggested that old-fashioned millenialism has suffered under the threat of nuclear holocaust, that modern western thought does not hold out much hope for survival and regeneration. “In the thought of the West this End will be total and final; it will not be followed by a new Creation of the World.”⁸ But the fiction of holocaust belies this, and does provide some reassurance against nuclear anxiety. With the exception of a few works such as Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959) and Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), most nuclear holocaust stories assure us that humanity can rebuild against the most staggering odds—and the same is true for other types of holocausts as well. This promise of survival redeems even the bleakest of post-holocaust fictions. Wilson Tucker's The Long Loud Silence (1952), for example, details the growing brutality of its protagonist in a shattered world. In terms of the survival of values we discussed earlier, there is nothing much promising about Corporal Russell Gary, who finally rejects all human companionship and—in the novel's unpublished original ending—even apparently resorts to cannibalism.⁹ A similar bleakness and apparent destruction of values, leading again to cannibalism, characterizes Harlan Ellison's “A Boy and His Dog” (1969). But each of these fictions holds out the promise of survival, and Ellison's even perversely suggests that values, too, will survive, even if they are comparatively trivial and sentimental ones. After all, Ellison's protagonist says after making a meal of his lover to keep his pet dog from starving, “A boy loves his dog.”¹⁰

Whether these stories aspire to simple adventure, to intellectual science fiction, or to cultural myth, stories that begin at the end of the world have, over the years, evolved a fairly characteristic narrative formula. The formula may be varied in many ways, with some elements expanded to fill nearly the whole narrative, others deleted, and new ones added, but there are commonly five large stages of action: (1) the experience or discovery of the cataclysm; (2) the journey through the wasteland created by the cataclysm; (3) settlement and establishment of a new community; (4) the re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist; and (5) a final, decisive battle or struggle to determine which values shall prevail in the new world. While this formula describes specifically works which begin with the cataclysm itself, elements of it may also be found in narratives that begin before the holocaust or in ones that begin long after.

1. Experience or discovery of the cataclysm. Works that begin at the end of the world usually limit their viewpoint to that of one or two central characters, and the manner in which the cataclysm is revealed to these characters traditionally takes one of two forms: either the central character is isolated from others when the event occurs, and thus has no immediate knowledge of it, or the character witnesses the event indirectly from a relatively safe vantage point. The former case, in which part of the drama is the character's gradual discovery of the nature and extent of the disaster, includes Shiel's The Purple Cloud (and Ranald MacDougall's considerably different 1958 film from this novel, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil), Noyes's No Other Man (which coincidentally was also briefly considered for filming by Frank Capra), and Stewart's Earth Abides. Of these, only the Shiel novel attempts to forge a direct moral link between the protagonist's symbolic isolation from human society and the destruction of humanity. Adam Jeffson is off discovering the North Pole when the strange volcanic gas kills all of humanity, but he achieves his goal only by committing a series of murders; furthermore, he describes himself from childhood as being “separate, special, marked for—something.”¹¹ Jeffson sees his subsequent isolation alternately as a monumental punishment for his evil deeds and as a monumental reward for his being “special.” He is cursed by loneliness and madness, but he also inherits the earth and founds a new race—resembling one of the Nietzschean supermen of Shiel's later fiction. Stewart and Noyes each provide some moral justification for the survival of their protagonists; in Earth Abides, Isherwood Williams is helplessly recovering from a snakebite while on an ecological expedition in the woods, and in No Other Man Mark Adams is trapped in a wrecked enemy submarine where he had been held captive. In each case, the character is relieved somewhat of the responsibility of being isolated, since the isolation is enforced by external circumstances. But in neither case is a direct moral link established between the actions of the survivors and the destruction of the rest of humanity.

Stories in which the survivors witness the cataclysm from a protracted vantage point are somewhat more common. The protagonists of both Roshwald's Level 7 (1959) and Coppel's Dark December are military personnel stationed in underground bunkers. Philip Wylie's The End of the Dream (1972) and Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), both of which deal with complex series of ecological catastrophes, portray isolated strongholds specifically designed to withstand the impending cataclysms. The central characters of Merle's Malevil happen to be gathered in a deep wine cellar whose stone walls protect them from the holocaust of flame, and the collision of earth with another planet is witnessed from aboard a spaceship by characters in Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's When Worlds Collide (1933). In S. Fowler Wright's Deluge (1928) and John Bowen's After the Rain (1958), the good fortune of being on high ground or finding boats save the protagonists from worldwide floods. Geography also protects the survivors of nuclear war in Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959) and Wilson Tucker's The Long Loud Silence (1952); both novels begin in small towns isolated from major target areas. And in one of the few openly comic treatments of this theme, Robert Lewis Taylor's Adrift in a Boneyard (1947), a mysterious thunderclap annihilates everyone except a family in their car on the way to the theatre—clearly suggesting the family was deliberately “chosen” for survival. (Though the two novels may seem odd bedfellows, Adrift in a Boneyard shares with The Purple Cloud the implication that the end of the world is brought about largely to force moral choices upon the main characters of the novel.)

2. Journey through the wasteland. Perhaps because of its mythic aspect, this is often one of the most important elements in post-holocaust fiction; occasionally—as with Robert Crane's Hero's Walk (1954) or Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley (1969)—it occupies virtually the whole of the novel. But extensive journeys also figure in the works mentioned by Noyes, Shiel, Wright, Coppel, Stewart, Taylor, Tucker, Brackett, and Wyndham. Such journeys serve two major functions: to provide an overview and confirmation of the disaster, and to serve as a kind of purgation of despair on the part of the central character. The longest such purgation, in Shiel's The Purple Cloud, takes Adam Jeffson through decades of madness and destruction. In the Noyes and Taylor novels, the journeys also serve to satirize the trivial aspects of pre-holocaust life by revealing people caught up in petty matters at the time of death. Stewart's protagonist sees on his cross-country journey the various ways people may relate to their environment, most poignantly observed in the contrast between a self-subsistent black farm family and a hopelessly technology-dependent Manhattan couple, trying to survive in an empty but still mostly functioning New York.

In Coppel's Dark December and Wright's The Deluge, the journey is motivated by the desire to reunite families separated by the cataclysm, with despair mitigated by the increasingly irrational hope that a wife or husband has somehow also survived. Such hope also motivates some of the survivors in Shute's On the Beach (1957) and Frank's Alas, Babylon. In Tucker's The Long Loud Silence, Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, and Wyndham's Re-Birth, rumors of a better society somewhere beyond the wasteland motivate the journey. And in nearly all these novels, the search for additional survivors with whom one might establish a new community is a central motivation for the journey.

But the journey has another aspect, too: the promise of new frontiers, of exploring a new or remade world. In Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's After Worlds Collide, which begins following the destruction of the earth, the world to be explored is literally a new planet where the survivors hope to settle (though the ruins of an ancient technological civilization make it seem curiously like the landscape of a future earth). But even earthbound disaster fictions suggest that the frontiers have been remade, especially if we remember that the classical nineteenth-century definition of “frontier” was based on low population density rather than simply whether an area had once been explored. These new frontiers thus might include even urban areas. Despair is once again mitigated, then, by the hope, restored by cataclysm, of renewed patterns of growth and exploration, and by the sense of immense freedom that comes from being able to choose openly where and how one will live. Shiel's Adam Jeffson does not hesitate to make himself at home in various palaces (the illustrations accompanying the original appearance of The Purple Cloud in The Royal Magazine even portray him as a sort of Oriental potentate), and the family in Taylor's Adrift in a Boneyard quickly takes advantage of the situation to move into the mansion of an eccentric millionaire, enjoying the security that this provides against ravaging animals and such luxuries as a fine wine cellar as well.

3. Settlement and establishment of a community. Following the confirmation of the cataclysm brought about by the wasteland journey comes the establishment of a permanent settlement which will be the basis of the new community and, by extension, of the new civilization. In Shiel's The Purple Cloud, in which there are only two survivors, this community has to be rather loosely defined, but the novel nonetheless provides the archetype for post-disaster communities, which are frequently associated with the “marriage” of the protagonist, and hence with the prospect of a new family and eventually a new community. Contrary to many readers' memories of The Purple Cloud, Jeffson's discovery of the sole surviving woman, Leda, occurs scarcely more than two-thirds of the way through the narrative, and it is Leda who causes him to cease his restless, destructive wandering and to settle with her: at the end of the novel, when in despair he deliberately abandons her to return to England, her telephone message that the purple cloud has reappeared on the horizon causes him to flee back to her and protect her. It is practically Jeffson's first motivated action since the cataclysm, and the motivation is that of protectiveness and preservation. Jeffson is clearly thinking of a good location for a settled community by the end of the novel. Both Stewart's Earth Abides and Wright's Deluge also associate the founding of the new community with a woman; in the Stewart novel the new community accretes around Isherwood Williams and his newly found wife Emily, while in the Wright novel the community is associated with the simple values of Mary Wittels, an almost archetypal “wise woman” who nurses the wife of the protagonist back to health and is eventually instrumental in reuniting them. Their reunion, we are led to believe throughout the novel, is the single action most necessary to validate the stability of the new community. In Frank's Alas, Babylon and Merle's Malevil, both novels in which the symbolic journey is confined to short exploratory trips in the immediate neighborhood, the growing internal stability of the community occupies a proportionately larger role in the narrative. In Alas, Babylon, the journey motif is effectively replaced by a local ham radio operator who provides the necessary confirmation of the disaster by monitoring messages from other parts of the world. The narrative thus can focus on the problems the small Florida community of Fort Repose faces in defending itself from looters and obtaining necessary supplies. Malevil, perhaps the most determinedly localized of all post-holocaust novels, establishes at the outset the isolated, almost medieval aspect of the French countryside surrounding the small village of La Roque and focuses throughout on the problem of establishing a new social contract and the need for authority. It is interesting that both of these novels, with their paramount concern for the integrity of the village, end with the rediscovery of the necessity for military organizations and weapons, despite their demonstration of the dangers inherent in such institutions.

The novel that perhaps most clearly and thoughtfully explores the relationship between the outward journey and the community is Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976). In this novel, the integrity of the community is intensified by the presence of large numbers of human clones, who form social groups among those cloned from the same “donors.” These “clone families” develop intense empathic relationships with one another, but when the necessity arises to make journeys to urban areas for supplies, they suffer a kind of separation anxiety experienced by ordinary humans during early childhood. As a result, the journeys nearly fail, and the community is forced to turn for guidance to an “outsider,” a normal child born without the genetic permission of the community who has learned the techniques of wilderness survival as a result of his isolation. The dangers of a community turned too much inward are emphasized even more strongly at the end of the novel when this outsider, Mark, establishes a community of normal “exiles” that survives long after the community of clones has failed. Mark's community, it is suggested, may mark a return to savagery compared with the protectiveness of the clone village, but it also represents the dynamic interaction with the environment that must take place in order to rebuild. Civilization cannot be preserved; it must be rebuilt.

4. The re-emergence of the wilderness. By “wilderness” I include not only the encroachments of the natural world on the community—the proliferation of rats, wild animals, disease, etc., and the erosion of such technological support systems as roads and electricity through the elemental forces of weather, fire, earthquakes, and vegetation growth—but also the challenges brought on by unorganized bands of fellow survivors, who commonly revert to savagery and thus threaten the stability of the frontier-type settlement. In many post-holocaust novels, the first great challenge to the survivors, once they have formed a community, lies in making the difficult transition from dependence on the detritus of the destroyed civilization—for example, raiding grocery stores for prepackaged foods—to reinventing an agricultural and mining economy that confronts the wilderness on its own terms. Hence, in Alas, Babylon, a major triumph of the survivors is discovering a natural source of salt to preserve meat following the loss of electrical refrigeration; in Malevil, a triumphant moment occurs with the successful raising of a small wheat crop. Stewart's Earth Abides details, through separate expository passages presented apart from the main narrative, the various ways in which natural forces over the years destroy the remnants of civilization upon which the survivors are initially dependent; and a continuing theme in Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is the growing inability of the isolated community to remain self-sufficient in the midst of growing wilderness.

Traditionally, with the wilderness comes the savage, and savagery in post-holocaust tales usually takes the form of individuals or groups who, rather than attempting to form stable communities of their own, roam in predatory bands across the countryside, threatening what stable communities have been established. Often, these roving bands are presented with some sympathy; one of the most traumatic moments in Malevil follows the massacre of such a starving band, whose pillaging of the wheat crop threatens the survival of the community at Malevil. Similarly, Alas, Babylon features the reluctant murder of outsiders; in both novels, the event teaches the community the necessity of military and police authority as an essential part of the social contract. Other kinds of “savages,” though, are presented less sympathetically: these are often individuals who, fulfilling personal fantasies of power, represent a moral viewpoint antithetical to that of the novel's main characters. Wright, in The Deluge, goes to great pains to explain how weak or repressed individuals—accountants and government functionaries in the pre-holocaust world—find in the new world a chance to seize power by whatever means. Marxism, or anything that resembles it, does not generally fare well in these novels (Malevil in particular, which features a Marxist as one of the secondary characters, repeatedly demonstrates the failures of this character's schemes in reorganizing the new society). But novels in which the antagonists threatening the community represent a strong moral viewpoint usually do not associate such characters with the wilderness; such characters, instead, prepare us for the decisive moral battle discussed below.

5. The decisive battle of the Elect. This phrase, borrowed from Norman Cohn (who sees it as an aspect of Marxist and National Socialist fantasies as well as of medieval millenarianism),¹² may seem a rather melodramatic description of the struggle between good and evil that concludes many post-holocaust narratives, but in some cases it is scarcely an exaggeration. Marduk in Noyes's No Other Man, Collingwood in Coppel's Dark December, Fulbert le Naud in Merle's Malevil are figures of almost consummate evil, direct descendants of the “Black powers” that threaten to overwhelm Jeffson in Shiel's The Purple Cloud. These are false prophets whose potential victory would transform not merely a community or an historical movement, but the entire future history of the human race—and in a few cases, such as Bowen's After the Rain, these prophets literally set themselves up as gods, as self-consciously supernatural figures in the mythology of the age to come. “‘You had better begin by worshipping me,’” says the villainous Arthur to his subordinates in After the Rain. “‘What is recorded of your behaviour will live on as revealed religion.’”¹³ Stephen King's Randy Flagg in The Stand (1978), which begins with an influenza pandemic that nearly annihilates the human race, is a figure of consummate, archetypal evil, the “rough beast” of Yeats's “Second Coming”; and preparations for the final, cosmic battle against him make up the bulk of the very lengthy novel.

Much of what is so threatening about these evil figures lies in the recognition on the part of the reader—and usually on the part of the protagonist as well—of how much they have in common with us. In Shiel, this identification of good and evil is internalized: the struggle for dominance takes place within the mind of Adam Jeffson himself. Coppel's Dark December is not far removed from this. “‘I am you and you are me,’” says Collingwood to the protagonist Gavin. “‘We're two sides of the same coin. … Yin and Yang, if you prefer.’”¹⁴ Gavin realizes that such taunts from Collingwood nearly tempt Gavin to murder—which, of course, would be an ironic triumph for Collingwood's point of view. Gavin hates Collingwood most of all, he says, “for making me what I could feel myself becoming.”¹⁵ Similarly, the protagonist Martin in Wright's Deluge finds himself fearfully aware that he is learning to adopt the strategies and duplicities of the “savages” he is fighting; and in Merle's Malevil, Emmanuel Comte is compelled to imitate some of the actions of his rival Fulbert le Naud—such as making himself a false abbé in a religion he does not fully accept to counter the sway the false priest le Naud holds over the villagers. Clarke, the narrator of Bowen's After the Rain, is nearly swayed by Arthur's bizarre arguments, at least until Arthur's madness becomes undeniable.

But in each of these cases, a fatal ideological or moral flaw finally separates the protagonist from his opponent. In Dark December, Collingwood eventually reveals himself as nothing less than an agent of Chaos (“‘Chaos is the natural condition of man,’” he claims¹⁶), his rationalism nothing more than a front for a vicious brand of fascism. Arthur's flaw in After the Rain is his obsession with natural selection and his reductive view of humans as nothing more than reasoning animals. “‘Imagination,’” he says, “‘is the enemy … when we have destroyed it, we shall have proved ourselves worthy of survival.’”¹⁷ In both Malevil and Deluge, sadism and sexual excesses reveal that the actions of the villains are self-indulgent and wasteful, while sometimes apparently similar actions on the part of the hero are revealed to be part of a larger plan for the survival of the human race.

Other novels present this final struggle less as a moral confrontation than as a simple ideological argument. The culminating battle in Wylie and Balmer's After Worlds Collide turns out to be a struggle between democracy and communism after the survivors of a destroyed earth find themselves competing with another band of survivors, from communist nations, for dominance of the new planet. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer (1977), Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, and a number of other works seek to validate the importance of science and technology in the face of post-holocaust neo-Luddite movements. Noyces's No Other Man may be the closest thing we have to the same story told from the neo-Luddites' point of view; in this novel, the apparently last surviving scientist, Marduk, is done in shortly before the two protagonists join a band of Franciscan monks. Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, seems, in the end, to be a validation of sexual reproduction over technological cloning—hardly a burning issue at this point in history—but in a larger sense, the novel also demonstrates the necessity of interacting with the environment rather than withdrawing from it protectively, as the community of clones attempts to do.

This five-part structure for post-holocaust tales might seem at first a bit mechanical, but it appears less so when regarded in terms of a representative novel of this kind. For this, there is probably no better candidate than George R. Stewart's Earth Abides, winner of the 1951 International Fantasy Award and one of the most fully realized accounts in all science fiction of a massive catastrophe and the evolution toward a new culture which follows. The novel has not received the attention it deserves among students of science fiction perhaps in part because it came from outside the genre; indeed, the sources of the novel seem to lie less in the tradition of science fiction catastrophes than in Stewart's own abiding concern with natural forces which seem almost consciously directed against human society. In two earlier novels, Storm (1941) and Fire (1948), Stewart presents these elemental forces as narrative protagonists. His studies of Western American history also often focus on natural catastrophes, while other anthropologically-oriented novels reveal his concern with the way societies evolve. But only in Earth Abides, freed from the constraints of historicism, was Stewart able to fully explore the themes of nature, myth, and society that his other works tended toward.

The title of the novel comes from Ecclesiastes 1:4—“one generation goeth, and another cometh, but the earth abideth forever”—and the action of the novel is in many ways a dramatization of the philosophy of that most oddly agnostic of the books of the Bible. Isherwood Williams, a young ecologist, suffers a rattlesnake bite while alone in the mountains and gradually recovers both from the snakebite and from another, inexplicable illness. Upon returning to a nearby village, he finds no other humans; but week-old newspapers tell him that a virulent new disease has attacked virtually the entire world population. Ish begins his wasteland journey by taking possession of a car and traveling to San Francisco, where he finds few survivors but observes that the automated processes of civilization, such as electric street lights and running water, continue to function, adding an eerie note of irony to the cataclysm. Still not certain of the extent of the catastrophe, Ish begins a transcontinental trek through the Southwest, the Plains, and the Midwest. In Arkansas, he finds a black farm family continuing much as they had before the disaster, figures reminiscent of the Mexican family in Bradbury's “The Highway.” For them the world has not really ended at all. But at the end of Ish's journey, in New York, he meets a couple gamely trying to maintain a technology-dependent urban lifestyle amid the vast resources of an empty Manhattan. This couple, Ish realizes, provides a dramatic contrast to the black farmers and will probably be unable to survive once the automatic processes begin to break down and the wilderness begins to reassert itself. Having thus confirmed the range of the cataclysm, Ish returns to California “to establish his life” (p. 82). He adopts a dog named Princess—the first, slight indication of the new community—and locates himself in a place convenient to libaries and food supplies. In his despair, he seeks solace in books, but finds it only in the Bible and specifically in Ecclesiastes, with its “curious way of striking the naturalistic note, of sensing the problem of the individual against the universe” (p. 96). Only when he meets and falls in love with another survivor, however—a black woman named Em—does the third phase of the narrative, the establishment of a community, really begin. The nature and values of this future community are strongly hinted at by the interracial marriage which begins it.

Ish and Em begin to raise a family and take in other survivors, but the re-emergence of the wilderness—the fourth phase of our formula—threatens the budding community from the start. Plagues of ants are followed by plagues of rats from the nearby city and, in the years that follow, insects, crows, and even mountain lions reclaiming the territory they had lost to the advance of human civilization. Later elk, too, appear, balancing the threatening image of the mountain lions with a more uplifting image of wildness. Forest fires rage out of control with no one to fight them; a mild earthquake destroys many of the remaining human buildings, rotted with age; and diseases that might once have been easily dealt with—including the common cold—threaten the community, which nevertheless grows and begins to think of itself as a tribe.

Fighting the encroachments of the wilderness eventually ceases to be the aging Ish's main concern, however. “After twenty-one years … the world had fairly well adjusted itself, and further changes were too slow to call for day-to-day or even month-to-month observation. Now, however, the problem of society—its adjustment and reconstitution—had moved to the fore, and become his chief interest” (p. 159). The struggle to determine which values shall prevail in the new world occupies the entire second half of Earth Abides, and this struggle takes on a much more complex and ambivalent form than it does in such novels as Coppel's Dark December or Noyes's No Other Man. This struggle takes place on two fronts. The first, and more traditional, follows a second wasteland journey, undertaken by explorers of the second generation sent out by the community to see how others have fared in to the two decades since the catastrophe. Returning, the young men bring with them Charlie, who comes as close as any character in the novel to representing the kind of evil usually associated with the battle of the Elect. Charlie threatens to corrupt the youth of the community and is described by one elder as “‘rotten inside as a ten-day fish’” (p. 242)—literally as well as figuratively, since Charlie is a carrier of venereal disease. The elders of the community discuss banishing Charlie, but decide the only safe route is to execute him. The execution is reluctantly carried out, but not before Charlie's venereal disesae spreads throughout the community killing, among others, Ish's son and chosen successor Joey, the only child of the new generation who has learned to read. The community thus assures its survival against the kind of evil Charlie represents—but at the same time it sacrifices, in the person of Joey, its only real link with the precatastrophe culture and the values that culture represents.

The other, more profound struggle of the last half of the novel is involved with the death of Joey. Ish has struggled for years to transmit, through education, the values and traditions of the pre-catastrophe world, but early on he found his repeated imprecations about the need for science and social institutions coming to be regarded as a kind of eccentric obsession, much respected but little attended to by the youth of the community—with the sole exception of Joey. Ish's attempts to train the young people to become self-sufficient repeatedly fail, and he has so strongly tried to inculcate the value of certain symbols of the old world—such as the university library located nearby—that these symbols become totemic. Ish himself unwittingly evolves into a tribal priest, venerated for the magical knowledge he possesses but brutally pinched and tormented when this knowledge fails because the younger members of the tribe no longer perceive the rationalistic basis for this knowledge. Eventually, as an old man, Ish comes to realize that the tribe is indeed becoming more self-sufficient, not because of his teachings, but because of the “forces and pressures” that cause a society to evolve in the first place. “‘A tribe is like a child,’” an ancient Ish says to his only surviving friend, Ezra. “‘You can show it the way by which it should grow up, and perhaps you can direct it a little, but in the end the child will go his own way, and so will the tribe’” (p. 288).

In an essay on Earth Abides, Willis E. McNelly has noted that the names “Ish” and “Em” derive from Hebrew words meaning “man” and “mother.”¹⁸ This and myriad other details invite a heavily mythic interpretation of the novel, with Ish and Em standing not for a simplistic equivalent of Adam and Eve, as they might in lesser post-holocaust novels, but for a broad range of human institutions. On the broadest level, Ish and Em are indeed Adam and Eve, and their adventure is the adventure of the human species. But they also stand for a culture, since despite their failure to deliberately inculcate codes of values, they nevertheless profoundly influence the behavior of generations to come. At increasingly narrower levels, they also stand for the tribe, for the family, and even for the individual, and the basic five-part structure we have used to explore this novel reveals new meanings when regarded in each of these separate contexts. And it may be that these complex levels of potential meaning account for the remarkable power and richness of all the best post-holocaust novels. Such novels are, in the broadest sense, epics of the power of humanity to remain dominant in the universe. Read this way, the cataclysm is literally a new creation or genesis, the period of exploration a dispersion or exodus, the establishing of a community the invention of a social contract, the emergence of the wilderness a testing of that social contract, and the final battle of the Elect a confirmation of permanence. At the tribal or family level, the five-part structure becomes the separation from existing family structures through cataclysm, the journey in search of new family members, the founding of the new family in a settled community, the struggle to maintain the family against the encroachments of disorder, and the final battle to preserve the sanctity and integrity of the family from “evil” forces that would pollute or destroy it. The story may even be viewed on a level of individual psychology, as an epic of individuation: the cataclysm becomes the birth trauma, the journey a period of growth and exploration leading toward ego development, the establishment of the community the growing awareness of the super-ego, the emerging wilderness the threat of the unconscious, and the final battle the triumph of the emerging personality over forces that would subsume or disintegrate it. To narrowly allegorize any of these novels according to such a system would of course be dangerously reductive, but to ignore such potential meanings altogether would be reductive in an entirely different way; Earth Abides supports each of these readings at least in part, as suggested by Ish's comparison, late in the novel, of the tribe both with human society in general and with the growth of an individual child. Perhaps, after all, the profoundest question we can ask of such novels is that simple question of Hernando's in Bradbury's “The Highway”: “‘What do they mean, “the world?”’” And perhaps it is for all these reasons that fictions which begin with cataclysm often include some of the most luminous visions of affirmation in the whole of fantastic literature.

Notes

1. Ray Bradbury, “The Highway,” reprinted in The Illustrated Man (Garden City: Doubleday, 1951), p. 62.

2. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (Garden City: Doubleday, 1950). The symbolic burning of artifacts of the old world is related to the Adamic mythology of the frontier which Bradbury explores throughout The Martian Chronicles, and thus it is not surprising that a likely source for “The Million-Year Picnic” is Nathaniel Hawthrone's 1844 story “Earth's Holocaust,” about an immense, apocalyptic bonfire meant to cleanse the earth of “the weight of dead men's thought.” Bradbury anthologized the Hawthorne story in his 1956 collection The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories.

3. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), p. 76.

4. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).

5. Eliade, p. 30.

6. J. G. Ballard, “Cataclysms and Dooms,” in The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. Brian Ash (New York: Harmony Books, 1977), p. 130.

7. George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (New York: Ace, n.d. [1949]), p. 122. Subsequent references to this edition will be by page number in the text.

8. Eliade, p. 72.

9. See Bruce Gillespie, “The Long Loud Silence,” in Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1979), III, 1241.

10. Harlan Ellison, “A Boy and His Dog,” reprinted in The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 254.

11. M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (New York: Paperback Library, 1963 [1901]), p. 13.

12. Cohn, p. 308.

13. John Bowen, After the Rain (New York: Ballantine, 1959), p. 124.

14. Alfred Coppel, Dark December (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1960), p. 191.

15. Coppel, p. 197.

16. Coppel, p. 196.

17. Bowen, p. 75.

18. Willis E. McNelly, “Earth Abides,” in Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1979), II, 690.