By which I mean my life at the moment. Somehow these 11-hour workdays are not agreeing with me. But I stole my title from Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book for a reason. I’ve just finished Michael Swanwick’s In the Drift, which I briefly thought meant I was now caught up on Swanwick, but a quick search shows I’m wrong. And it’s a book from 1985 about a post-apocalyptic United States.
There was a time in my life when I was obsessed with such stories, though it was admittedly after 1985, which was the time when I was obsessed with Narnia to the point where I could recite full pages from memory. In the Drift explores East Coast civilization after Three Mile Island, or rather after an accident at Three Mile Island in which, unlike in our history, catastrophe wasn’t averted. I can’t recall other books in which the nuclear apocalypse is not weapons-related, which added intrigue here.
Postapocalyptic fiction as I know it had its heyday in the late 80s, and I hope to revisit some of the titles I remember well. A lot were geared toward young adults, or at least the ones I read. Young adult books seem to be set in the time of the crisis featuring teenaged protagonists trapped in a world they didn’t create, trying to make sense of love and horror, which is to say just normal young adult books. This could be a small sample size problem, though, because the only exceptions I can think of at the moment are In the Drift and A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I reread last month and which seemed much more profound when I was 12. Both have standard future-story problems with pop culture references. It’s 70+ years after Three Mile Island and a journalist’s heroes are Hemingway and Ernie Pyle? Or perhaps I’m just frustrated because I had to reread the chapter of 3001 today in which a space captain in the titular year has a photograph of early 1900s explorers and explains a whole bunch of nonsensical multicentury history that makes no sense in the order in which it is given. Think, authors, think!
At any rate, I plan to come back to this when I’m awake, and I’ll focus on the two books just mentioned as well as the excellent Brother in the Land, which has another title too, and the After the Bomb series and the Tomorrow When the War Began series, which I haven’t finished because they’re really well after my time, as well as the entire phenomenon that was Stamp Out Sheep Press. And more, if I think of them.
I realize I was a grim little girl to be so taken with these stories of destruction and fleeting beauty, but maybe that’s why I didn’t get around to reading comics until adulthood. I don’t think I really understood the Cold War paranoia necessary to accept a lot of the stories as directly applicable to my life, but they were awfully meaningful to me nonetheless. I don’t know if there are books like this for my littlest brother and his classmates, born the first time our country was at war in Iraq. I don’t think they’d think their threats were the same, but I didn’t care about the bombs and not having a clear Red Menace didn’t make the stories less powerful to me, especially because the moral was always that you have to be at least as worried about “our” guys as “theirs,” and most worried of all about yourself and what you love.
