“In three or four generations the race would not be able to survive at all, would not be able to make the transition between the scavenging, uncreative life and some new level of life at which they could remain permanently.” — Earth Abides by George R. Stewart I just finished writing a short novel — my first foray into the post-apocalyptic genre (or perhaps mine isn’t a post-apocalyptic novel so much as a post-death travel fantasy in the vein of Flann O’Brien). Naturally, I was curious to read other books in this genre to see if I could identify some patterns.

Contemporary post-apocalyptic novels often seem to me reverse images of the utopianism prevalent at the inception of the Enlightenment. Robinson Crusoe is adrift on an island and must build his own civilisation from limited materials; the same challenge confronts the lucky survivors of today’s apocalypses.

Post-apocalyptic fiction always seems to be in two minds about civilisation. There is a desire to want to see it end because it is just so awful, but also a desire to see it resurrected in a better, simpler, more humane form.

Among those I read while writing my novel, Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) and George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) stood out for their high literary quality. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) — adapted multiple times for the screen, such as the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth — provided an interesting counterpart to the first two. And while I do not recommend Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) and Stephen King’s 1,000-page The Stand (1978) — both distinctly lowbrow efforts — they do shallowly reinforce some of the tendencies of the better novels.

A novel I read earlier, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), represents to me the modern peak of this genre, offering a more deterministic cyclical reading of history; its first section, ‘Fiat Homo’, is incomparable, deserving a separate treatment.

In A Canticle for Leibowitz the world has ended because of nuclear conflagration and the same is true of Alas, Babylon. It’s natural that this should have been a major preoccupation of American writers in the immediate post-war era.

Typically, the apocalyptic event is both foreseeable yet unpreventable. Pandemics are a favourite resort too, in a Malthusian iteration updated for globalised science.

In the nuclear conflict in Alas, Babylon between the United States and Russia, both countries lay waste to each other. Though the protagonist’s brother, a high official at Strategic Air Command in Nebraska, sees it coming, he can do no more than get his own family out of the way to Florida.

In Earth Abides a pandemic does mankind in. The novel is a poignant meditation on mortality as the “Last American” from before the apocalypse, geographer Isherwood Williams (or Ish) slowly ages and dies, having been unable to raise a tribe ambitious enough to regain the lost arts of civilisation.

In The Stand, an American bioweapon virus finishes off mankind, while in Lucifer’s Hammer a comet strikes Earth. I Am Legend also deals with a plague, but with the twist that vampires take over the land. There are survivors, but of the wrong kind!

How to resurrect some form of authority, some government or state, is a running theme through all these novels. Democracy or dictatorship? Charisma or participation? Should scientific knowledge be centralised or diffused? In any event, there is no choice but to try to rebuild civilisation after finding a suitable mate and expanding from that.

Alas, Babylon describes the almost quaint efforts of Randy Bragg to restore a recognisably American civilisation in small-town central Florida, while the surrounding big cities have been destroyed. This novel partakes in the Cold War fantasy that nuclear war is survivable. But the key narrative thrust always seems to be for survivor(s) to take stock of what was truly indispensable about civilisation and what they can live without.

The Stand and Lucifer’s Hammer, less literary ventures, unfortunately trivialise the dilemma of authority. In Lucifer’s Hammer a senator builds a California fortress against anarchic forces, while there is a supernatural battle between good and evil in The Stand. And I Am Legend consists entirely of the final stand of Robert Neville, barricaded in his house in Los Angeles, to defeat the thriving vampires with garlic, mirrors and crucifixes.

The post-apocalyptic novel is driven by the worry that we no longer know how to conceive of ourselves in isolation. This has become so true, with intricate connective webs and overdependence on technology, that we have ceased to marvel at it. This reflects a primary subterranean desire of novelists and it contains the familiar duality: to want it and to reject it.

As soon as the (lone) survivor identifies himself as such — Ish’s cross-country drive across an emptied US in Earth Abides is the strongest part of the novel — he must find another survivor, to salvage, rescue, reassemble. Ish finds the perfect woman in Em (Emma) and Bragg in Alas, Babylon is equally lucky. But the survivor — like the professional novelist — is tainted with the knowledge that he alone might be the last barricade against barbarianism; Ish and Bragg in the two novels are always identified as worrying too much, carrying the fate of civilisation on their shoulders.

The better novels here make us wonder how bad it really would be for the human project to end. After all, Earth will still abide and we are just one species, having its moment in the sun for now. And yet, how to let go of all that we have accumulated, good and bad?

Precisely the same thoughts occur to an individual when it is time to die, but transposed to the collective fate of humanity there always seems to be an escape valve in the form of survivors. The post-apocalyptic novel knowingly plays upon this fantasy.

The post-apocalyptic novel is how we imagine ourselves not being as we are, caught in our lies and deceits and instead having to start over from scratch. It postulates the end as yet another beginning, in the most potent fantasy for our times.

The columnist is a novelist, poet and critic, and author of Literary Writing in the 21st Century: Conversations

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 27th, 2018