JF Ptak Science Books Post 2754
"Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory."--The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard,1999, p. 41.
Is there really a need for a plural of apocalypse? There is, of course, even if it is a word that is supposed to spell out the end of times--there can be more than one apocalypse, and they can happen at the same time, although given my very limited knowledge of the scifi genre I don't know of any books addressing dual/multi-combative apocalypses. (And here I'm not talking about one apocalypse generating all manner of associated badness, but a second, completely unrelated, apocalypse.)
So in trying to understand the nature of apocalypse storytelling I decided to make a very abbreviated overview of a vast literature of the end of times/apocalypse/technocaust/end of the world themes. This is just a short working list, really, and includes only short stories or novels, and to keep it relatively crisp I've chosen the artificial delimiter of an alphabet of apocalypse types. In many cases there is just one example (where there could be hundreds, so please don't fault the list for completeness because that would take years of assembly and understanding). The same goes for the categories of apocalypse--I'm certain I not included the majority of them, though I think that this is a good start (There are no movies or television shows listed independent of a text, so Soylent Green will show up but under Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! I think that tv shows/movies etc must be enormously outnumbered and the scale of orders of magnitude by the print media.)
Also--the list is a little heavy with Wells, Christopher, Aldiss, Heinlein, and Ballard; this simply because I'm a little familiar with these writers. Further caveat: this list is highly individualized. I only have a very mild and occasional grip on a very limited number of books in this genre, so if I've missed some great classics for any category, or buckets-full of possible apoca-categories, don't be surprised as you're now armed with this warning--this is only a pushing-off point. So, the list:
Alien Invasion: the great initiator, H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds 1898; Edgar Rice Burroughs The Moon Men 1926; Robert A. Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, 1951. There were other earlier incarnations of extra-terrestrial visits, especially if you considered religious/mythological aspects, though in literature it was far less common--like Swift's mathematicians of Laputa (in Gulliver's Travels... 1726) and Voltaire's titans in his Micromegas (1752). For the modern era though it is Wells who seems to create this idea.
[Flavorwire has a selection of 15 different covers for The War of the Worlds, here.]
Botanical endgame virus destroying all plant life: John Christopher, The Death of Grass. On the opposite end is the 1962 novel Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, where the plants take over everything.
Climate Change: apart from the state of global warming as we know and deny it now, The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard from 1962 is perhaps the best and most well-known adventure in this field. In this book in 2145 solar radiation has shrunk and mostly melted the polar ice caps, which is a lot of water, and has turned most cities into architectural swamplands of vertical mangrove. Conversely Ballard wrote the novel The Drought in 1964 about all of the water on earth drying up. (As a kid the Ballard cover was a great favorite.)
Crystallization (!): this one sounds painful: J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World, 1966. Everyone and everything begins to turn into crystals as the result of a misadventure of a medical doctor innocently making his way through a jungle.
Drought. The Drought by J.G. Ballard was just mentioned--and describes a super drought that evaporates all water on earth. It appeared earlier with a more-provocative title (and more-devastating cover design) as The Burning World.
Dying Sun: The World in Winter, by John Christopher, printed 1962. (Interesting to think about the scientific equivalent of these stories--the first here being I believe the work of Herman von Helmholtz when he figured out the life expectancy of the sun in 1859, which was a big year in the history of science as it also included Darwin's Origin.)
Earthquakes: A Wrinkle in the Skin, by John Christoper, 1965. I really like the title of this one, where tectonic plate shave at one another causing vast devastation and a total change in the physical appearance of the Earth, including the raising of much of Great Britain that turns the Channel into a raised muddy plane. (I'm a fan of engineering projects that call for, say, draining part of the North Sea and lowering the Mediterranean--and in this book something like those for-real plans actually takes place...)
Environemntalism and a conspiracist's dreams come true: D. Keith Mano, The Bridge, 1973; envirofascists exterminate humans to save the world.
Extra-Planetary Threat: When World's Collide, by Philip Wylie and Edward Balmer (1933, along with After Worlds Collide, 1934), in which two extra planets are detected that swing into the path of the Earth, causing deep havoc on the swing-by and then total destruction on the return when the Earth and its Extra-Earth collide.
Flood: Flood, by Stephen Baxter (2008), tells the story of gigantic underground oceans seep to the surface and inundate the world. This sounds vaguely like the origin of oceans theory by Athanasius Kircher, without the inundation part.
Human general malaise, dystopia, ennui: Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End; Clifford Simak City (1952); Robert Heinlein's Friday; Pierre Boulle Planet of the Apes; H.G. Wells' The Time Machine; Kurt Vonnegut Galapagos.
Human Wars: Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826, not all that good, or so it seems, but quite early and by a major writer); P.K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968; Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence, 1968; Richard Jeffries, After London, 1885 (another early work and more set in the post-apocalyptic zone).
Ice Water catastrophe: Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradl, 1964; Robert Silverberg, Time of the Great Freeze, 1964; Michael Moorcock, The Ice Schooner, 1969.
Insect extermination: Charles Pellegrino’s Dust, 1998. The ecosystem collapses after bugs disappear.
Infertility caused by nuke power plant meltdown: Mr. Adam, by Pat Frank, 1946. Also the infertility endgame in Greybeard, by Brian Aldiss (1964).
Meteor: James McPhee, Survival, (2000) and Titan (1997); Stephen Baxter The Day of the Triffids, 1951. (The Baxter novel is post-apocalypse, the Earth more-or-less battered to bits by a meteor shower, giving way to a species of plant that starts attacking people.)
Monsters: Skeletons, by Al Sarrantonio, 1992. The Earth is ravaged by a raised-from-the-dead society of super monsters comprising all animals that ever lived, ever, but in super-skeleton form. Yikes! Nice idea.
Nature’s Death: Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, Nature's End (1986). Technology is doing fine--people aren't. This one opens with the unusual proposal that in order to save humanity a third or so of the Earth's population needs to die/commit suicide.
Nuclear-bomb-induced-methane-fueled super-hurricanes is the set for Mother of all Storms, by John Barnes (1995). Interesting that some folks are talking about this for real, nowadays.
Nuclear weapons: too many to reckon with here. Ray Bradbury famously ends the world via an exchange in Fahrenheit 451; a few other very good examples are Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7 and Nevil Shute's On the Beach.
Overpopulation and mass famine: Anthony Burgess’ The Wanting Seed, 1962. Harry Ellison wrote an interesting book but saddled it with a burdensome title, Make Room! Make Room! that was turned into a movie with a better lede, Soylent Green). There's also Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a story of developing underpopulation caused by infertility brought on by some sort of Dick Gregoryian pollution.
Petroleum-eating microbes: Kevin J. Anderson and Douglas Beason, Ill Wind (1995).
Plagues: Frank Herbert, The White Plague, 1982; Jack London, The Scarlet Plague, 1912; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003; P.D. James, The Children of Men.
Pollution: H.M. Hoover, Children of the Morrow. (ecological devastation, cities in ruins, and kids scrambling through it all), 1973 (suddenly sounding like NYC in that same year).
Religious: Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God, 1953; and of course Book of Revelation, the Book of Daniel, and on and on. The Clarke work is a short story, and one of the best in the field. It is thought by some monks that the sole purpose of the universe was to provide a haven for humans to figure out all of the names of god--once done, the purpose of the universe complete, the universe would come to an end. Inhibited by their method of hand-recording all of the names, they grab modern tech and employ programmers and a computer to finish the job. The Geek Squad decides that before the job was complete that they'd hightail it out of their so they wouldn't be blamed when nothing happened at the end of the print run. Surprise! That's not what happens. The story ends with them on the run, but "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." Ouch.
Robot Revenge/Overlords (mostly antiquarian but the ideas can still be applicable and creepy): Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872; E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909; Michael Williams The Mind Machine, 1919; Karel Capek's robot-creator R.U.R., 1921; Edmond Hamilton, The Metal Giants, 1921; S. Fowler Wright's short story, Automata, 1926.
Snow: Adam Roberts The Snow, 2004, where everyone buried under lots and lots of building snows making me instantly claustrophobic.
Space-based whatever (excluding comets and aliens and the normal stuff): Charles Sheffield, Aftermath, in which a super nova does the bad deed here, creating cataclysmic climate change.
Space-based (civilization collapse): Against the Fall of Night, by Arthur C. Clarke; Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, the City and the Stars; Jack Vance, The Dragon Masters. And Arthur C. Clarke again, The City and the Stars.
Volcanic eruption: M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud, 1901.
Windstorms: The Wind from Nowhere, by J.G. Ballard, 1961.
Zombies: Max Brooks, World War Z, 2006. I don't know anything about the books that created the massive surge of interest in zombies, but this one had a "Z" in the title as a stand-alone letter, so it became my selection. No doubt there are hundreds (thousands?) of others to choose.
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