HOLOCAUST AND AFTER

   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 naturalcatastrophe), 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 setthe 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'sMalevil (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 itsoccasionally 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 byDawn (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 efficientenough 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 accountof 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 WorldsCollide (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 notbeen 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. Twostrong UK examples from the 1930s are Alun LLEWELLYN's The Strange Invaders (1934) and John COLLIER's Tom's A-Cold (1933; vt Full CircleUSA); 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 Francerural.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 sincethe 1960s.Among the darker scenarios set after nuclear war are: Judith MERRIL's Shadow on the Hearth (1950); Wilson TUCKER's The Long LoudSilence (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 Die1961; 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 POCKETUNIVERSE; 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 comedyabout 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 ofscientifically 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 pittingbarbarians 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 trilogyconsisting of The Broken Lands (1968), The Black Mountains (1971) and Changeling Earth (1973), but here, despite a tenuous rationale, the toneof 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 rathera 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), andSteve 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-destroyedby 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 toughersurvival 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 JamesTIPTREE 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 the1970s, 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' ULTIMOUOMO 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 1980swas 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 filmindustry, 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 designedto 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 aworld 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) byMichael 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 outstandingpost-holocaust novel of the decade was probably RIDDLEY WALKER (1980) by Russell HOBAN, in which the nature of the future civilization is vividlyevoked 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.

   PN