The World is Over; Now What?

Alas, Babylon
by Pat Frank
p. 1959

Without really intending to, June sort of became ‘Apocalypse Month’ for me, as all three novels I read that month dealt heavily with the end of the world, and all in vastly different ways. But whereas Good Omens and The Devil’s Cat were worlds on the brink of apocalypse, thwarted at the last moment, Alas, Babylon is one of those postwar apocalyptic novels that explores what happens after the world has suffered a nuclear holocaust. The last one I read like this was Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, and any comparisons between the two are apt.

It’s an interesting thing, the mentality that existed in Cold War era fiction. Whereas post-apocalyptic fiction was nothing new, the threat of nuclear holocaust added a new dimension to the genre with the implication that—at least in this instance—humanity is directly responsible for its own downfall and have no one to blame but themselves for the bleak world they left for the future, if indeed there is even a future left.

Alas, Babylon centers on the day to day trials of Randy Bragg and his town of Fort Repose, Florida, in the direct aftermath of a nuclear exchange that devastated the United States to the point where it became a third world nation in a matter of minutes.

Randy was a largely directionless but amiable young man who only thrived in his postwar world because he was warned by his older brother, a military man who saw the incident coming in time to send his family to Randy for protection. Suddenly saddled with numerous responsibilities, Randy does what he can to protect those closest to him—his sister in law and their two young children (who are remarkably well composed, given the circumstances; perhaps a bit more composed than what is natural), Randy’s girlfriend and her father, the town doctor, a couple of elderly female neighbors. Randy also warns the black neighbors who worked for him prior to the nuclear exchange (referred to in the novel as ‘The Day’) and a relationship of mutual assistance forms, which is crucial to the town’s survival. There are moments when the way the black characters are depicted feels a bit uncomfortable, but I have to say that—given the time frame in which it was written (1959)—Pat Frank is relatively politically correct, all things considered. Randy is a forward-thinking and fair-minded man, and it helps spur him on in his newfound ability to lead, a role previously alien to him.

Another thing I was mostly impressed by was Pat Frank’s depiction of women. I have been saying for years now—ever since I got into early science fiction—that it was my goal to find a male author who wrote positive roles for women prior to the seventies. Thus far, Alas, Babylon is the closest I’ve come to meeting this goal. There are still times when Frank slips into cringe-worthy clichés—such as Randy’s sister-in-law, Helen, momentarily becoming obsessed with Randy as a replacement for her husband, and Randy’s later appraisal that women cannot be relied upon to think for themselves some times,

“The more he learned about women the more there was to learn except that he had learned this: they needed a man around.”

but prior to this incident, Helen Bragg was a remarkably outstanding pillar of control and support. Randy’s girlfriend is portrayed as independent and free-thinking. The elderly female neighbors are hardy and independent as well, and even Randy’s eleven-year-old niece has a moment of determined brilliance when she takes the initiative to provide for her new community, comptently, I might add. But it was the most jarring revelation—that, as a result of The Day, the only remaining official left to hold the office of President is a woman, and Fort Repose accepts this with little argument—that made me question whether Pat Frank was a pseudonym for Patricia. (It’s not, remarkably.)

One of the aspects of fifties and sixties science fiction that I have come to realize, regrettably, is that there are few characters with standout personalities. The same can be said here, as Alas, Babylon, was a very perfunctory story, without much zest in the characterization department. That said, I did like Frank’s style of writing, particularly when he ramped it up for the end of chapters. This was not a book I read in one sitting, but I was okay with that, because the way every chapter ended was so poised that it left me with something to think about for hours afterwards, until I had the opportunity to resume reading.

It’s fitting that I concluded my ‘Apocalypse Month’ with a book that actually went to the brink, with finality and solemnity. It felt like a good way to cap off my month of living on the verge of destruction, and I already can’t wait to see what the next one will be like.

Eleven Reasons to Take a Valium

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
by Richard Yates
p. 1962 (Stories written between 1951 and 1961)

It was the title that snagged me; I had never heard of Richard Yates, though I realized later, I’d heard of at least one of his novels, if only because it had been made into a movie a few years back—Revolutionary Road (which famously reunited Titanic costars DiCaprio and Winslet in a much different setting). This collection of short stories, released one year after the aforementioned novel, is a simple yet introspective reflection on the mundane life of 1950s Americans, and in my subsequent research on Yates’ legacy, I’ve come to understand that it not only embodies the spirit of what is known as the “Age of Anxiety,” but that Yates is generally regarded as the type of author that authors love... and one who is criminally under-read.

I’ll talk about this Age of Anxiety thing first, as that is a concept that was unfamiliar to me, and it guides a lot of my views on Yates’ collection. The term comes from a W.H. Auden poem (and later the Leonard Bernstein symphony upon which it was based). From what I understand, it refers to an era from the 1940s on when American society was unsettled, tense, trying to find their footing but feeling displaced in an increasingly industrialized world.

Well, I suppose there were a lot of things to feel tense about in the 1950s. Fresh off of one war and finding ourselves in another, the implementation of nuclear technology and the subsequent Cold War atmosphere, McCarthyism and Red Scare, and the wave of technology designed to bring us closer but irrevocably driving us further apart.

Unlike my beloved pulp sci-fi novels, which capitalize on Cold War fear and technological advances to create tension and intrigue, Yates’ work focuses more on the domestic—the subtle ways in which these changes affect our every day lives. The recurring theme in these eleven stark tales is, of course, loneliness, but not so much of the literal kind as the alone-in-a-crowd kind. I found that often times the central figure to each story (and almost all of the stories were told from a perspective outside of the subject) was someone with ‘vision,’ someone who possesses unique if unpopular traits that Yates believed should be more widely appreciated. It is a retrospective on the American Dream—not on the bright, shining possibilities and Land of Opportunity dogma you always hear about—but on what comes after, when you realize that perhaps that American Dream was not all it was cracked up to be and you must now struggle to find your place in a changing world that doesn’t care about your dreams.

If that sounds depressing then I’m doing it right, because these were eleven ridiculously depressing tales with very little relief. Seriously, I couldn’t read more than one in a single sitting because I needed to take a break for something lighter.

What makes it so much worse is that reading about the Age of Anxiety—fear of constant war, of religious fundamentalism, of out of touch politicians running things, of degradation of society, of a crumbling environment, of technology isolating us even while it ‘unites’ us—you realize that all of these things are as alarmingly applicable to today’s society as they were then. Sure, some of the details have changed, but the loneliness prevails. I need only look at my friends and family struggling with unemployment and displacement after decades of hard work—or at myself even, 26 and working a job unsuited to my own ‘dreams’ and aspirations—and I realize that we’re still deeply embedded in our own version of the Age of Anxiety. Perhaps reading Yates’ eleven tales of lonely people in a lonely world is so very depressing because it hits all too close to home.

I can’t say that Richard Yates’ writing style resonated with me—the prose is spartan and not very poetic, and he relies a bit too heavily on the cliched Italian-American ‘New Yawkah’ dialect but in spite of this the characters are deeply drawn and for the first time since this project of mine began, I can say I’ve encountered the first example of a story written in the 1950s that presented women as complex characters, perhaps not quite equal to men, but nonetheless relatively positive in their representation. The pulp sci-fi authors who think they’re doing women a favor by including them in the action could have learned a lesson or two from Yates about giving them a soul and a voice, but sadly, as I’ve come to find out, Yates wasn’t appreciated in his own time. He never sold more than 12,000 copies of any of his first editions and wasn’t recognized until after his death. He’s still not widely recognized today, which is a shame, because while his writing is simplistic, his ideas are far from such.

Casual Racism and Cattle Rustling in Northern Australia

The Irishman
by Elizabeth O'Conner
p. 1960

Despite being set in northern Australia, Elizabeth O’Conner’s The Irishman is an inherently Irish novel, as it is tragic and naturalistic and chiefly concerned with the sins of the father. For awhile near the beginning, I kept forgetting it wasn’t set in Ireland; what kept bringing me back to reality is the overwhelming presence of racist undertones in response to the assortment of aboriginal characters.

At its heart, The Irishman is a classic bildungsroman, or coming of age story. Young Michael Doolan—twelve years old at novel’s start—is a shadow of his father, Paddy Doolan, the notorious, stoic and often drunk teamster in an early 20^th century remote Australian town. To Michael, Paddy can do no wrong and he stands tall in the boy’s eyes, in spite of his cowering mother and rebellious older brother Will, who hates his father’s uncivilized, selfish ways. Michael sees none of this though, enamored as he is with the hero his father represents. To the reader, the cracks are already beginning to show but to Michael, it understandably takes a bit more time and perspective, and it all starts when Paddy abandons his family about halfway through the book. Michael, determined to truly know his father, sets out to find him, but it takes him a long time and a lot of trouble to get there and when he finally does, he’s not the same boy that set out.

Michael is growing up in a rough, constantly changing world. He often straddles the line between the old ways of his father and the new method which his brother—exiled from his home until his father exiles himself—later adopts. The contrast between the old and the young is felt and there is no clear emphasis on which way is the best way, but it is clear that with the advent of the automobile and other technologies, the old ways, for better or worse, are dying. In both his chosen profession and his place in his boy’s heart, Paddy Doolan is slowly becoming obsolete. It is a tough theme to wrestle with and O’Conner handles it with grace and beauty. This would have been a novel worth reading again and exploring its complex themes... if not for the casual racism.

It starts somewhat innocuously. Will, having left home for a job wrangling cattle at a nearby station called Timbooran, finds himself in thrall with a black aboriginal servant girl who works for the station manager’s wife. The girl—for lack of a proper name, simply called Bo-Bo, a pile of gibberish she uttered when they found her as a baby—is educated and appears to be a favorite of the missus, and it is her unusual forwardness that both repulses and attracts Will to her. But he cannot start a proper relationship because people will talk so when he knocks the girl up then shuts her down refusing to acknowledge it, poor Bo-Bo throws herself off a cliff to her death. Will not only moves on, but his life gets infinitely better. I kept waiting for the novel to revisit the Bo-Bo story and Will’s own tale of growing up and accepting his sins but it never does and—unless you count getting his face punched in by Paddy, which anyone could see coming a mile away—Will never even receives his comeuppance.

The only reason I could summon for this awkward and unpleasant side story is to draw a parallel between Will and Mr. Dalgliesh, the station manager Michael comes to work for who alters the course of Michael’s life. Dalgliesh, a stern, taciturn, humorless man, is at first a bad match for wild, charismatic Michael, who is constantly planning to escape this work detail. Dalgliesh gives Michael grunt work, is moody and laconic, and at one point retaliates against a cattle-stealing neighbor by murdering 200 of his cattle in what can only be considered the act of a sociopath, and yet his ‘darkest’ secret is the implicated affair with his aboriginal servant Paula. I spent far too long trying to find the part where Paula was revealed to be a sympathetic character and Michael learned to get over his racism. Sure, she harbored a crush on a married man, but the only sin anyone was concerned with was that Paula dared to be familiar with white people. From the moment she appears, O’Conner’s language makes it very clear that there is something sinister about Paula and Dalgliesh. We are never given an opportunity to view her situation in a sympathetic light... not until Paula is brutally murdered by a frustrated and off her rocker Mrs. Dalgliesh near the end. Michael hears of these events later and shrugs it off, thinking Paula probably didn’t deserve it but it’s no matter because the black characters are treated as disposable and their loss is never felt. Michael even goes back to work for Dalgliesh in the end, having seen that his way was 'best.'

All of this I might have overlooked, but then O’Conner had to throw in one last far-too-forward black servant who overstepped his boundaries. This one had the audacity to try to tell others how to do their job and for that he got his face punched in by a pissed off kid with missing daddy issues and no one felt bad for him at all. Look, I know this book was written in the fifties, so I ought not to be surprised, but the dogged racism really distracted me from the whole experience and pulled me out of the events. They weren’t even necessary to tell the story of boy and man and that rocky path called adolescence. It’s as if O’Conner just really had some racist things to say and invented a venue from which to spout them.

All of this criticism and I haven’t even gotten to the part where the white women (the only ones we’re supposed to like, apparently), are all timid, fearful messes accepting of verbally and physically abusive relationships. For a book written by a woman, it sure does a disservice to female writers, and yet it still won the Miles Franklin Award in 1960.

I suppose it’s fitting that I’m reading a novel with outdated, politically incorrect language and attitude, when the underlying theme is about accepting one’s obsoleteness in a changing world.

Another Fun Romp In Cold War Paranoia!

Year of Consent

by Kendell Foster Crossen

p. 1954

Don’t be confused by the cover, which features a massive machine literally enveloping a puny human in its sinister grip. Kendell Foster Crossen’s 1954 novel about a supercomputer that runs our lives isn’t so much a straight up science fiction novel as it is a dystopic future novel. There is no computer sucking our brains out through tubes—at least not literally. False advertising, people—this is your first cold hard lesson in media manipulation, and a rather appropriate one considering the themes the novel goes on to introduce.

As I’ve stated before, I like reading books like this for a variety of reasons—seeing how accurately (or not) past writers predicted the future, and seeing what ideas developed from the intense Cold War paranoia of the time are foremost on my list. There are a lot of reasons I find these short novels tedious as well; women rarely, if at all, represent positive and influential figures—a product of the conservative era in which they were written, undoubtedly. Also, they are not very well written most of the time, and Year of Consent is sadly not an exception to this rule, but I think it’s a very important book and worth bringing to the forefront for the historical context it provides.

Year of Consent is set in 1990—36 years on from the year it was written, but for us it’s 23 years in the past. It’s always amusing to see what past ‘science fiction’ writers predicted for the future and what they failed to comprehend. Crossen’s novel sees us with self-cooking ovens that supply the food from warehouses, but it failed to predict the rise of personal computers. As a contemporary science fiction author, it’s intimidating when I look at my own work and find my predictions for science and politics woefully inadequate. The truth is we will never really know what the future holds technologically-speaking, but ideas—more often than not—hold true. This isn’t because all these authors are prescient so much as it is because ideas, and societal norms, are cyclical and people, on the whole, are pretty predictable.

Crossen’s 1990 imagines a world of four social classes—the producers (pros), the consumers (cons), the non-producers (nulls), who as I understand it, are pretty much the artists and writers who produce whatever semblance of ‘culture’ exists, and a secret class of social engineers, the people who truly have all the answers. Our narrator, Jerry Leeds, is one of these social engineers, an ‘Expeditor’ working for the government sector of Security and Consent (SAC), whose job it is to essentially root out un-American citizens. Information on consumer activities is fed into a giant computer, unofficially nicknamed Herbie, and any dissenters are captured, labeled ‘sick’ and reprogrammed to ‘appropriate’ degrees, sometimes necessitating full frontal lobotomies. We meet Jerry on Depth Interview (DI) Day, the annual day when the cameras are turned, so to speak, on the social engineers and they are forced to wear devices that monitor their every move, right down to their heart rates. Jerry is nervous, but so is everyone, so great is their paranoia that ‘Herbie’ will find something amiss in their daily routine that would cause them to be considered ‘sick.’

Jerry’s DI day routine gives us a brief overview of the world, which essentially boils down to only two major powers—the democratic Americans and the Communist Russians, with other lesser republics in between. While Crossen doesn’t hesitate to vilify Communism, he also doesn’t glorify the democracy he finds himself living in. In fact, one is almost drawn as critically as the other. Jerry identifies with a third group—the ragtag underdog known as the United Nations (Uns), a group existing primarily in Australia, the only refuge for the only sanity left in the world, apparently (In what is probably Crossen’s most glaring inaccurate view of the future, he has envisioned an Australia where everything ISN’T trying to kill you!).  On DI Day, Jerry receives orders from his totally indoctrinated boss, Roger Dillon, to capture a fugitive 'Uns' leader known as ‘Paul Revere.’ It is not a very subtle book, so you don’t even have to read past that sentence to know that Jerry has been tasked with capturing himself.

And so the adventure is set as Jerry must somehow evade his own oppressive, nosy government to protect his identity. I won’t go into the details but he is successful, though his simple-minded girlfriend Nancy finds herself lobotomized before the week is up, for merely wishing to herself that a Communist dissenter escape custody. Later on, poor Nancy a forgotten casualty, Jerry hooks up with a more spirited woman, Meg, who initially gave me some hope that she might represent her sex a little better. For a minute there, it seemed like she might break with the traditions of woman’s passive role in fiction and reveal herself to be a fellow undercover Uns, or at least an active convert who aids Jerry... but then I remembered this was 1954. I’m sure Crossen felt portraying Nancy and Meg as sympathetic victims seemed fair at the time, but in 2013 (and even in 1990), it’s a little disappointing to see women dragged around like props. It is my hope to find a science fiction novel written by a man before 1970 in which women were not merely passive participators, but I don’t suppose this was a popular viewpoint then. Hell, it’s not even acceptedthroughout science fiction today.

The social engineers don’t just capture the ‘sick’ dissenters. The SAC is also responsible for designing the culture that Herbie considers most acceptable, based on collected data. Herbie decides what the most acceptable foods are to eat, what clothes to wear, what music to listen to, and this all adds up to the quintessential American. Nobody is forbidden to go outside the norm, per se, but it is strongly discouraged, as it will all go into your profile and determine whether you qualify for a lobotomy. As a result, we end up with a culture of zombies and people afraid to be different for fear of getting noticed and labeled. Opinions may vary, but I don’t think this reflects the U.S. of today, because the 70s did a decent job of popularizing the minority opinion so that rejecting the norm is almost as popular as accepting it today, but in the fear-steeped 1950s United States where information was limited and Communism was a very palpable threat, I can see how this opinion would be one that would get into the hearts of readers.

I did find a prescient quality to the DI Day cameras and Herbie, the computer that devours all the minutiae and knows everything about you. It’s rare today when someone can exist without at least some kind of online presence. What Crossen failed to predict, though, was that while the U.S. of his making was under mandatory close surveillance of our thoughts and actions, the real population of today willingly offered up this information ourselves. For either outcome—real or fictional—however, we are the only ones to blame for allowing things to be what they’ve become. In Year of Consent, Jerry and Meg have an opportunity to escape and start a new life in Australia, but Jerry chooses to stay, knowing that his work is not done. The SAC is hellbent on introducing their latest social manipulation into mainstream—creating an unconscious correlation between their two greatest enemies through CommUNism, a word which inextricably causes people to associate the U.N. dissenters with the Communist threat. If it is allowed to come to fruition, Jerry’s sacrifices might be all for naught. It is kind of striking to realize that this ploy of the SAC’s—this stupid, baseless plan borne of ignorance and fear—is not very different from the fear mongering of networks like Fox news over the past decade. Media manipulation, it seems, is nothing new, and this is precisely why novels like this—in many ways outdated—are still relevant today.

When it’s all said and done, the greatest attack on bureaucracy is to be as individualistic as possible, social norms be damned. Jerry Leeds is at the heart of a movement encouraging people to reject what society tells you is ‘normal’ and be whomever you so desire. It’s a sentiment that serves to be both anti-Communist and anti-whatever-the-extreme-reaction-to-anti-Communism-turns-out-to-be. An important lesson in not letting your fear dictate your thoughts and actions, because extreme reactions in either direction are equally destructive. In other words, THIS IS HOW WE LET THE TERRORISTS COMMUNISTS WIN, people!