This question was in play when Stewart's novel first came out in 1949 and it's one I'm putting in play for us here.
Think of all the other novels, films and tv shows, and more that are definitely post-apocalyptic but may or may not be science fiction: recently, Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Brian Vaughan's comic book series Y: The Last Man; not so long ago, Stephen King's The Stand or the tv show The Day After; roughly contemporaneously with Stewart, all the authors Connie Willis mentions in her 2005 introduction to the new edition. Which would you consider science fiction? Which not? And why?
Just to get us thinking about defining science fiction, why we do it, and what's at stake in it....
4 comments:
Are you referring to the made for TV movie aired in 1983 "The Day After" about nuclear holocaust? I thought of that movie immediately upon reading the first few pages. That movie scared me out of my mind. Maybe becasue I was seven, and probably shouldn't have been watching it, but my parents had odd views on what was family programming (more on that later). Just a random thought. Now I'll ruminate on it a little and post something of substance soon.
I have read Y the Last Man. One of the best comic series to date. However I am surprised that the Resident Evil series (the games not the movies) were not mentioned in relation to this post apocalyptic science fiction novel. It is a very good example of this scenario and relates fairly well.
On a side note: I really am enjoying Earth Abides! It is reminding me of H.G Well's War of The Worlds. Very similar actions and set of events seem to take place between both Ish in Earth Abides and Well's in Worlds. One example i can point out is how Ish compares our society to some insignificant neon horse. How we gallop "so hard and yet never [arrive] anywhere" revealing how small we are. This relates to Well's in Worlds when he famously quotes "What are we?", referring to how we, as humans, are not the unbeatable giants we think we are. instead we are but small insignificant beings...
But I stray from the topic... I do believe that all these works are science fiction and that there is much to learn from many of these works and much that is revealed about ourselves as well...
For example I was reading this quote on page 21:
"The horse, suddenly he thought, was like that civilization of which man had been so proud,galloping so hard and yet never arriving anywhere..."
I believe that this quote can tell us about ourselves and the world we live in today. We, as a society, do "gallop" very hard to advance ourselves to a healthier, happier society. We have prolonged life, eradicated small pox and many other deadly diseases in the Western World, and have overcome the Cold War and 2 World Wars, surviving oppression and hatred. However poverty is still ramped throughout many western cultures, corruption is entangled in almost every western government, and popular opinion throughout many countries is not heard, or ignored, by the people that can make a difference. It seems as though we “gallop” so hard to make advancements and yet all we find is a world that is even more deplorable to live in than the last.
Do you agree?
Thanks for listening to my rant!
~Ultraviolet~
UV, you're absolutely right about Resident Evil--I'm unfortunately close to a decade behind on gaming culture these days (although I hope to catch up as my daughters get older!), so I never thought to add it to the list.
I like the Wells connection--made me think that the solution in Wells to the alien invasion becomes the problem that kicks off Stewart's novel....
I also like the way you brought this 1949 novel to the present through the symbol you chose to analyze from the first chapter. My first impulse is to look back at how the novel reflects upon early Cold War anxieties in the U.S., even in the midst of the emergence of new opportunities to enter the working and middle classes in the post-W.W. II economic boom, not to mention America's global influence and leadership--and even farther back to the ways in which the global flu pandemic that followed on the heels of W.W. I was still "live" and a source of fear/trauma in the late 1940s. But there's definitely an almost transhistorical aspect to Stewart's reflections on civilization and nature in Book I.
BB, yeah, I was a kid when The Day After aired on tv, too--well, a teenager. Because I grew up near Griffiss Air Force Base, I had reconciled myself to being killed at the very beginning of a nuclear war should one break out, so I actually wasn't too freaked out by the show at the time. But the fact that I can remember very little of it suggests it may have been traumatic in a similar way to that Holocaust lit class I took in college was--memory blanks are sometimes more than signs of a bad memory, if you catch my drift. Anyway, by that time, I had been reading enough anti-nuclear political stuff and post-apocalyptic SF that it seems to me I had a more analytical response to the show at the time--although that, too, could be mistaken....
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