Tag: Post-apocalyptic

Neanderthals, extinction, the apocalypse

After a lengthy hiatus, I’m about to kick my survey of post-apocalyptic science fiction into gear again. Before I do so, I’m reposting my original rationale for reading post-apocalyptic sci-fi:

What does the Neanderthal genome have to with post-apocalyptic science fiction? It may seem like odd inspiration, but Neanderthals have aroused my interest in one of the most venerable genres of science fiction. Last summer I was awaiting the release of The Road movie, reading a piece of classic post-nuclear sci-fi (John Wyndham’s 1955 The Chrysalids), and thinking about some recent news stories on the (then) forthcoming Neanderthal genome sequence. Continue reading “Neanderthals, extinction, the apocalypse”

First Post-apocalyptic sci-fi for 2012

I picked up Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife for Christmas, and can’t wait to start reading it. (Alas, I must first make a little room on my stack.)

Here’s what Paul de Filippo has to say about the book that io9 called this year’s weirdest post-apocalyptic novel:

With his new book, Blueprints of the Afterlife, Boudinot takes this finely wrought but perhaps thematically underpowered mimetic-absurdist vehicle and drops in a rocket-powered speculative engine. If Misconception took off from “So Little Time,” Blueprints launches hypersonically from “Written by Machines.”

The bulk of the novel unfolds about a century from now, in a postapocalyptic future barely emerging from an interregnum called the Age of Fucked Up Shit. We will witness at several removes, in the form of interview transcripts with one Luke Piper, the birth of FUS, an enigmatic era whose full meaning and dimensions Boudinot sternly and bravely refuses to fully resolve. With its leitmotif of “superposition,” the physics riff most familiar from the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, this novel pinwheels out multivalent explanations for almost everything, demanding that the reader navigate his or her own best-determined path of causality through the sly and shifting narrative.

But do not take that to mean that Blueprints of the Afterlife is an impenetrable nest of hypertext. Far from it. Its linear propulsion, studded with bravura set pieces, is compulsively readable in the manner of any consumer-friendly epic fantasy novel, overstuffed with unforgettable freakish characters (in the Age of FUS, freakish is the new normal); laugh-out-loud or cringe-worthy incidents; and rafts of genuinely innovative scientific, spiritual, and philosophical speculations delivered in sleek and colorful prose.

Michel Houellebecq does post-apocalyptic clones

I just read Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island. It was a mistake for me to do so. Given my literary tastes (Pynchon, Nabokov, Kafka, Borges, Cortázar, Calvino, DeLillo, etc.) I’ve long thought that Houellebecq would just my style but unfortunately, instead of reading what is likely a better Houellebecq novel, Elementary Particles, I picked up up The Possibility of an Island. On the surface, this book sounds great – a provocative, imaginative French writer does a sci-fi-ish, post-human, post-apocalyptic novel. What’s not to love?

Well, the tedious writing for one. While there are some good riffs in here, in general the flat prose is repetitive and tiring, executed with a light ponderosity that quickly becomes boring. I’ve got nothing against ‘novels of ideas’, but my experience is that a novel centered around ideas (as opposed to say, one focused on plot or character sketches) is generally a failure unless it also succeeds as art, because without art this kind of a novel typically is about as compelling as the classic dinner party bore who spends the whole evening droning on with poorly articulated banalities. Continue reading “Michel Houellebecq does post-apocalyptic clones”

Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

The much-revered writers of the Golden Age of science fiction can be quite rough around the edges, even downright embarrassing on occasion. The writing is hurried, the plots of plot-driven books are disturbingly inconsistent, and the characters are primarily stock types and authorial mouthpieces. To top it off, many of these novels are ambitious, earnestly offered as novels of big ideas. These ideas are usually sympathetic (tolerance, freedom, racial equality, escape from religious tyranny), but generally reduced to platitudes expressed in long, somnolent sermons by the your standard pointy-headed philosopher-scientist.

So why bother to read these books? Continue reading “Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic”

Apocalypse 1958: The Tide Went Out

A Nuclear Eco-Catastrophe

Fans of British apocalypse novels a la Wyndham and John Christopher ought to enjoy Chalres Eric Maine’s The Tide Went Out, another story focused the catastrophic disintegration of British society in the context of a world-wide disaster. Journalist Philip Wade writes a speculative story about the potential adverse geological effects of nuclear testing, and inadvertently almost reveals a tightly held state secret. The recent nuclear tests of ‘Operation Nutcracker’ have busted open the earth’s crust, and the oceans are draining away into the earth’s interior. Wade has his story pulled at the last minute by mysterious government officials. But oddities offer clues: frequent earthquakes trouble seismically mild Britain, and the tide steadily decreases. Soon shipping is impossible, and Britain (and the rest of the world) goes into crisis as the world dries out – no clouds, no rain, no crops, etc.. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1958: The Tide Went Out”