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This is a very specific sub-genre with which I used to be near obsessed when I was about 12-13, for reasons which still aren't entirely clear..
You know, those stories that are almost inevitably set in England in the 1950s and the first few chapters centre around a group of people going about their jolly nice lives in an orderly manner - AND THEN! - some massive, earth shattering, science fiction related disaster takes place and the characters spend the rest of the story fighting to survive as the fabric of society crumbles and the world is overrun with mad/blind/dead people and monsters/aliens/killer microbes lurk around every corner and buildings collapse and stores are raided and cities are flooded/invaded/burned down and so on.
Often it develops into a variant of your traditional fantasy quest story as the characters have to trek across the newly dangerous landscape to find some semi-mythical 'safe place' which one of them knows about.. shotguns, abandoned farmsteads, roadblocks made of useless cars and deranged end-times cults often feature prominently.
The master of this genre is of course the great John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes and so forth..
And also John Christopher, who as well as writing the rip-roaring Tripods Trilogy (and it's prequel When the tripods Came, which is completely rooted in the genre of which I speak) wrote an absolutely fantastic grown-up book called The Death of Grass - about what happens when all forms of plant life suddenly die out. I must have read that book 3 or 4 times .. I loved the way that by about half way through, the 'heroes' had become completely amoral - it's a terrific examination of the fine line between civilisation and barbarity and all that business.
And then there's a horror book I read a few years ago, King Blood by .. Simon Clark I think, which was a terrific yarn in which non-specific ‘dark forces’ come to reclaim the world for themselves by triggering a wide variety of panics and disasters. Sadly it was full of nasty and gratuitous sex n’ violence in order to justify it’s position as a ‘horror’ book, but aside from that it was still really good fun, and it did things on a grand scale – if I remember correctly the finale had an army of refugees marching across the drained bed of the North Sea towards a grounded battleship on which our heroes battled to stop the ‘bad guys’ machine gunning the lot of them. Or something along those lines.
A mention should also go to old Nigel Kneale, partly for the brilliant mass hysteria / alien mind control moments at the end of Quatermass and the Pit (and c’mon, we all know that scheme they use to save the day would never have worked – they just needed a happy ending for the TV show) and partly for the Quatermass book he wrote in which strange powers were at work slowly driving everyone round the bend .. and stuff..
Perhaps my favourite though was Nightfall, a short story by Issac Assimov which was expanded into a novel by Robert Silverberg (two writers I usually can’t stand). I’ve been thinking about this again recently, and realising just what a fucking good story it is:
For those who don’t know, it’s set on a world almost exactly like earth, only there are six suns, meaning there’s no nighttime – there’s always at least one sun in the sky.
And the human civilisation can find no evidence of itself from before 2500 years ago .. how they developed before that is a mystery. Until, out in the desert somewhere, a team of archaeologists find the site of a lost city. As they dig deeper they find relics that go back through the 2500 years of known history, then a layer of ash. They dig through the ash and find remnants of a previous, completely unknown, civilisation which also lasted 2500 years .. then they find another layer of ash .. and another 2500 civilisation beneath it.
Meanwhile, a psychologist is hired to investigate a ride in a theme park which has been closed down because it drove some of the people who went on it mad. It’s main point of interest is that it puts people through a short stretch of total darkness..
And in another place again, a team of astronomers are getting excited because they’ve worked out that sometime in the next three months there’s going to be an extraordinary series of eclipses not seen for thousands of years..
..and you can probably guess what happens next.
And the point of all this is? Well, um, I don’t know really, I just felt like rambling about how much I like these kind of stories.
Anyone else keen on them?
Anyone want to offer any cod-psychological explanations of why I like them so much?
Anyone want to recommend any similar stuff? |
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