Ruined Earth

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Ruined Earth

Term used in this encyclopedia for the longer-range sf aftermath of Disaster and Holocaust scenarios. First comes the cataclysm, then the Post-Holocaust struggle with a general emphasis on survival and adaptation. If humanity avoids extinction, the details of past technology and the fall of civilization are apt to become increasingly blurred – and often mythologized – with each new generation of survivors. Beneath such cultural Amnesia lies the promise of rediscovery via a potentially moving Conceptual Breakthrough.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

The novel in which the ruined-earth story takes on its distinctive modern form is Richard Jefferies's After London; Or, Wild England (1885), in which the author's strategy is to set the narrative a century or more after the catastrophe has taken place; in this way an interesting, alienating perspective is gained. The hero takes his own society for granted (as in most later stories in this vein, it is quasimedieval); he endeavours to reconstruct the nature of the fallen civilization that preceded it, and also the intervening years of barbarism.

Ever since Jefferies's time the longer-term Post-Holocaust story has tended to follow this pattern; for every book whose hero lived through the Holocaust itself, there are several whose story begins long after the disaster is over but while its effects are still making themselves felt. Though such stories continue to fascinate, there has been surprisingly little variation in the basic plot: disaster is, in the average scenario, seen as being followed by savage barbarism and a bitter struggle for survival, with rape and murder commonplace; such an era is often succeeded by a rigidly hierarchical feudalism based very much on medieval models (see also Medieval Futurism).

When the emphasis falls on struggle and brutality, as it very often does, we have in effect an awful-warning story. But often the new world is seen as more peaceful and ordered, more in harmony with Nature, than the bustle and strife of civilization. Such stories are often quasi-Utopias in feeling and Pastoral in their values. There is no denying the attraction of such scenarios: they tempt us with a kind of life in which the individual controls his or her own destiny and in which moral issues are clear-cut.

I have never read this but I plan too! You can find it at After London; Or, Wild England by Richard Jefferies for free at the Gutenberg Project.

If you read it, I would love to hear your comments. Remember this was published in 1885.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Another famous example is Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Place of the Gods" (31 July 1937 Saturday Evening Post; vt "By the Waters of Babylon" in Thirteen O'Clock, coll 1937), which blends superstitious fear and plangent nostalgia in its telling of a barbarian boy's response to the technological wonders of a ruined City. Its sentimentality was to become a recurrent note in many such tales after World War Two established the real possibility of world Holocaust: it ends, "We must build again."

Perhaps paramount among sf ruined-earth scenarios is Walter M Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (April 1955-February 1957 F&SF; fixup 1959), an ironic black comedy about the ways in which a post-holocaust civilization's history recycles and recapitulates the errors of its predecessor. The story is set largely in an abbey, where fragments of half-understood technological knowledge have been kept alive by the Church. The book is vivid, morose and ebulliently inventive; it has been very influential. A further outstandingly fine achievement of the subgenre is Riddley Walker (1980) by Russell Hoban, in which the nature of the future civilization is vividly evoked through its devolved language (see Linguistics; Ruins and Futurity).

Read the rest of the encyclopedia post, many other great books are referenced.