While nostalgia has had a place in tabletop roleplaying games ever since the field was old enough to have second editions—remember when tabletop roleplaying game nostalgia was new?—the recent Twilight 2000 Kickstarter is remarkable for the speed at which the project hit its funding goals: just seven minutes, a bit longer than it would take missiles launched from the Soviet Union to reach Britain.
First published in 1984, Twilight 2000 took as its background a mid-1990s Soviet-Chinese conflict that spiraled into a global war when East and West Germany tried to use Soviet distraction to reunify. By 2000 all sides are too exhausted to continue. Most campaigns begin as the war stumbles to a chaotic, exhausted halt.
T:2000 might seem to be an odd game to be nostalgic about. Perhaps it is a reflection of the Jason Mendoza principle: “Anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem.”
Nuclear war might not be desirable but it certainly would be different from the issues facing us now.
As grim as it is, Twilight 2000 does offer this hopeful message: enough of human society survives World War Three that there are stories worth telling in that setting. To quote Maureen McGovern:
Here are five works about the world after the end of the world:
Karma by Arsen Darnay (1978)
Fission power can save the world! Provided a solution is found to manage nuclear waste for thousands of years. Visionary Theodore J. Aspic III has a solution: manipulate dead people’s souls so that when they are reborn, they will be compelled to sequester and guard radioactive waste. This self-sustaining nuclear priesthood will ensure nuclear power’s future. What an entirely reasonable solution!
Alas, Aspic isn’t just a visionary. He is a vindictive obsessive who uses his command of reincarnation to get payback for sins committed against him in a previous life. Centuries after the Holocaustic War renders American industrial strategy moot, it falls to Aspic’s bitter enemy Jack Clark, having escaped his enemy’s trap and now reborn, to decide whether to walk away from the dispute or, by responding, guarantee yet more cycles.
***
The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent (1986)
The world that arose after a world-destroying nuclear war is a segregated one. Women live inside well-guarded enclaves. Men live outside in the wilderness. Women have all the benefits of sophisticated technology. Men have all the benefits of an impoverished hunter-gatherer lifestyle. From time to time, men stray outside the lines of propriety by reinventing such things as villages and agriculture. Women provide gentle correction in the form of prompt, merciless extermination.
Exiled for her crimes, the woman Birana was supposed to provide a valuable moral example by dying a miserable death in the wilderness. Instead, she does the unthinkable: she forms an alliance with a man.
***
The Wall Around Eden by Joan Slonczewski (1990)
Gwynwood, Pennsylvania survived nuclear war thanks to the angelbees’ intervention. A ten-mile-wide dome of force separates Gwynwood from a post-holocaust hellscape. Outside the dome, nuclear winter, fallout, and searing UV have radically simplified ecosystems; only the exceptionally hardy survive. Within the dome, life goes on as before…within the material limits imposed by a small community only eighty square miles in extent, which is permitted some limited trade with other enclaves.
Why the alien angelbees saved a handful of communities is unknown. The Six Minute War began with spoofed ICBM radar signatures. Did the aliens deliberately murder most life on Earth to save a chosen few? Isobel and her husband Daniel set out to learn more about the entities who may be humanity’s saviors…or their persecutors.
***
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice (2018)
The Anishinaabe were relocated to the far north by Canadian governments who hoped that the pesky indigenes would just die off. But the isolated community has survived every catastrophe that has befallen them…including this last, the probable death of complex civilization. It’s not clear what has happened. All the community knows is that communications and electric power have failed. No more supplies may be coming. The south is eerily quiet.
The community has a generator, fuel, and a cache of stored food. They have traditional hunting skills. Will that be enough to survive the coming winter?
***
We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep by Andrew Kelly Stewart (2021)
The submarine Leviathan survived the nuclear war that scoured the surface world. In the years since then, the nuclear submarine has patrolled the seas, sheltering the faithful who labour within it. The devout who call Leviathan home know that one day the final Judgement will come, the day when they will finally use their last SLBM to redeem the sinful Topsiders.
When necessary, Leviathan recruits new choristers from Topside. Many recruits are willing. Leviathan’s most recent acquisition is not. Forcibly kidnapped for her technical skills, the latest crewmember brings unwelcome news to the faithful: They may have fundamentally misunderstood the post-war world, and their great mission may in fact be deepest folly.
***
No doubt you have your own favourites. Perhaps you are even now fuming that I overlooked them. The comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF(where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
The art in the new T2000 is very nice, although bleak.
The backstory in the new edition is fairly different from the original timeline, although it still ends up in the same place: Europe smashed, the rest of the world not much better. Unlike the original, France did not get to sit out WWIII.
Well, there is also one of the predecessors to Twilight 2000, The Morrow Project.
It’s premise is that one Bruce Morrow had a vision of things to come, made a lot of money through his talents and then started the Morrow Project. Teams were put into cryotubes to wait until 90 years after the war. Well, there was an oopsie, and some teams woke up hundreds of years after the war. (Somehow all their weapons and vehicles survived the long storage, including all their ammunition and explosives, neither of which are suitable for long term storage of a couple hundred years, let alone 90 or so.)
I play tested this game back in the late 1970s and it was fun, though I never had a character last for the full session…
Ah, Morrow Project. Nothing says “we’re here to help” like a deuce and a half packed with ammo and high explosives.
“Remember when tabletop roleplaying game nostalgia was new?”
Meta-nostalgia? You’re playing with dangerous forces…
I do seem to recall that an atomic priesthood was one of the solutions to long-term nuclear waste proposed by one of those fascinating government think-tanks (along with color changing cats, landscapes of thorns, and giant sculptures of diseased screaming faces), but I don’t think they got around to suggesting meddling with the laws of reincarnation. Probably because they weren’t convened long enough!
The obvious candidate here is A Canticle for Leibowitz, though I suspect that has come up in a different list and I know James hates to repeat himself. A surprising choice, but one that has a lot in common with T:2000, is Final Blackout by (of all people) L. Ron Hubbard. It’s easy to forget that, once upon a time, he was a halfway decent writer from the late pulp/immediate post-pulp era. Final Blackout is unquestionably the best thing he ever wrote and worth a read if you can find a way to do so without giving money to his organization. For something written in 1940, its depiction of a Europe ravaged by ABC warfare looks a lot like most post-atomic imaginings of the same thing.
Worthy of consideration:
– On the Beach by Neville Shute. Until The Road came along this was the most depressing novel I’d ever read.
– A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller.
– Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We All Got Along After the Bomb, by Philip K. Dick
– Rebirth, a/k/a The Chrysalids, by John Christopher.
– A whole bunch of Andre Norton stuff from the ’50s and ’60s
One of the more remarkable pieces I came across Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon”, which hits all the notes of a post-nuclear war foray into the ruins of the lost civilization despite publication predating both fission and fusion devices.
The same author also penned one of my favourite children’s bedtime poems.
There are a lot of old books about soon-after-the-end, even if you exclude the after-the-climate-change-disaster books covered in a previous column (and leaving out both the uncertain cases like Davy and Cowper’s Corlay books, and all of the stories set after a post-nuclear-war rebuild such as all of the Lensman books and Anderson’s future history.) Examples that come immediately to mind and haven’t already been mentioned:
Earth Abides (Stewart)
Twilight World (Anderson)
After Doomsday (Anderson)
Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky is the most Earth-set of several early works that take place at some time when nuclear war is well in Earth’s past but the planet is still a backwater (often despised) with many no-go- areas.
Notable even-older short works (from back when genre novels of any sort were very uncommon) include “The Place of the Gods” (Benét) and the Meg stories by Nelson S. Bond.
Ah! I have at least one of the Bonds in this book.
This is my astounded face that someone managed to assemble an anthology about matriarchies without including any works by women.
@6 The one Andre Norton novel I remember was “Daybreak: 2250 A.D.,” also known as “Star Man’s Son.”
Cordwainer Smith’s interconnected future-history stories are set in the centuries and millenia after the “Ancient Wars” (presumably nuclear) that led to the collapse of Earth’s nations and civilization as we know it.
Later on, Asimov retconned the history so that the crisis that created this situation wasn’t a nuclear war at all, but it was very silly and unsatisfying.
The Morrow books by H. M. Hoover are a duology about post-ecological life. Children of Morrow are about telepathic children trying to get to the people they shared dreams with. Treasures of Morrow reverses the process; they go back to the primitive culture the kids came out of.
No relation to the RPG, as far as I know.
Not a work of fiction but maybe of interest.
100 suns book of photographs of atomic tests.
13: You may enjoy Isao Hashimoto’s A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945.
I will point out that there was a sequel to the original _Twilight 2000_, _Traveller 2300AD_ (aka just _2300AD_). The post-recovery world discovered an FTL drive (not the Jump drive of the various editions of the _Traveller_ RPG of which this is not one) and explored much of space within about 50 lightyears.
BTW, “By the Waters of Babylon” and “The Place of the Gods” are the same Benet story.
Somewhere out on the Internet is a story based on the logical conclusion of the color-changing cats + lots of Indiana Jones taken to 11 traps: whatever’s down there must be amazingly valuable, otherwise why guard it so carefully? Told from the POV of one of the locals who gets hired as a guide but wisely bails out when the cats turn green. I’m sure I’ve bookmarked it – I just lost the bookmarks. I thought it was on Ao3 but it might even be here.
I confess that the first thing that popped into my head when I read the synopsis of The Shore of Women was ‘You are not morg. You are not eyemorg.’
How about Glen Cook’s The Heirs of Babylon? I’ve not got around to finishing it yet – far too depressing at the moment, plus it’s not really my cup of tea, being more of a Cold War thriller in style.
@16- I’d be interested to read that story if you find it again. At least one of the reports did note that modern museums are full of objects that used to be behind doors labeled “If you open this something awful will happen to you.”
I would also suggest:
Wool by Hugh Howey
Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen
Both of those have sequels, but the blindside of the originals is pretty spectacular.
What about Paul O Williams’ seven volume Pelbar Cycle, which is all about reestablishing civilisation in North America at some point after the Time of Fire.
The best bit about it? It’s a fundamentally optimistic look at societies recovering from apocalypse, with cooperation and cultural accommodation the order of the day.
@14 Thank you.
@19, There’s is simply no way to discourage Monkey descendants from prying into things best left alone. The more you warn us away the more interested we become.
What about Against the Fall of Night/The City and the Stars, two takes on the same basic story by Arthur C. Clark? It’s not just our world, the whole Galaxy has been through a cataclysm that’s left two islands of survivors in the deserts of Earth; the City of Diaspar and arcadian Lys. The people of Diaspar are very post-human in City and the Stars.
I am a fan of the Yngling stories by John Dalmas, and Heiro’s Journey by Stirling Lanier. Nothing like an apocalypse to trigger psi powers in mighty warriors so they can wander the world to do great deeds.
What was Avon thinking with that cover?
The book which came to mind for me is Queen City Jazz, by Katherine Ann Goonan. I read it avidly about three-quarters of the way through and for some reason never picked it back up. I think it was me, not the book, so give it a try if it’s at hand.
James Davis Nicoll@7: Benet is due for a rediscovery. I say that a lot. I’m hoping to be right while I’m alive enough to enjoy it.
JDN@9: It makes perfect sense that Moskowitz excluded writers representative of the ruling class and let the story be told instead by own voices.
Pam Adams@26: Probably “Wow!” I mean, I don’t know what it means, either, but it really is something!
David Brin’s The Postman certainly fits Mr Nicoll’s topic.
So would, I’ll argue, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy.
There was also a fun novel which I read many years ago about a Canadian university which had a grant and a spaceship to go and check out the surviving space colonies that had been established before the great powers blew each other to Hell and gone.
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban! It’s literary fiction and it’s totally genre. Quoth Michael Helm: “It’s narrated in a language burnt to its rudiments by nuclear holocaust and revived into new forms by survivors in England who live as hunters, and who believe in a past that’s half history, half myth.” You look at the first page and think, I’ll never be able to read this for a whole book, and then a few pages in, with the help of some reading aloud to yourself, you’re reading along just fine, and mightily enjoying the constant clever wordplay that does not prevent the narrative from having real emotional weight. In my opinion it does a much better job of addressing the power of myth and storytelling A.D. (after the disaster) than does Station Eleven.
@16 Instead of making the radioactive waste site look dangerous and worth someone’s while to dig up and explore, make it look absolutely boring. Concrete pads with cinderblock buildings on them that you let decay naturally. Only one of the pads is an actual plug, but with a building on it and nothing but junk inside, no one will want to dig it up. Leave them a tidbit, like a safe that when cracked open has the records and deeds for a sawmill or something.
#8 – ” Anderson’s future history”?
I think you mean Piper’s – Anderson’s “Technic” civilization was pretty much an outgrowth of “Western” if I recall correctly, and not really a remnant successor like Piper’s, based on the southern hemisphere. Anderson pretty much skipped anything about his universe before the 21st or 22nd century, whereas Piper started his “before” WW III…
@9: I am utterly unsurprised that an old-line fan like Moskowitz had no stories by women in that anthology — especially since the Meg story (from 1939) was the newest in the batch.
@11: I knew there was a reason I hadn’t read any of the late Asimov…
@15: I should have noticed that — I think …Babylon is the title I first saw it under (IIRC in a mundane collection intended for 1960’s high-school English class — somebody must have thought Benét had enough cachet to override the stench of genre).
@24: IMO that’s a stretch; there was a catastrophe, but what the people in the book believe it to have been was a mix of wild exaggeration and outright falsehood (at least in tCatS — I don’t remember AtFoN well enough to say, but Clarke later declared it a draft that got published at least partly because he was about to do something dangerous and wanted the work in print). Most of the difference is just that Earth is Awfully Old.
@31: If I’d meant Piper I would have said Piper. I distinctly recall Anderson quoted as saying his FH went off the rails when WW3 didn’t happen as expected, so ISTM plausible that the Polesotechnic League comes centuries after Twilight World rather than “The Saturn Game” even if Wikipedia disagrees — I doubt the quality of that article given that the footnotes don’t show any credits for Miesel, who was the most serious scholar of Anderson’s work when I was reading it. (Someone may have superseded her — I haven’t been following criticism much in recent years.)
32: Anderson had a few future histories. I suspect the one he meant there was the Psychotechnic League.
Echoing Dan’l @6, On the Beach by Neville Shute is at the top of my list. The quiet resolve and respect of nearly every character is the antithesis of so many post-nuclear war tales where laws and society immediately break down.
As one small spoilery example, the 1957 novel’s Australian survivors will be dead from radiation poisoning in a matter of months, but several characters still go through the exercise of petitioning the State Fisheries and Gaming Department to move up the opening date for fishing season. It is easy to imagine civilization collapsing after nuclear war – I suspect it is much more difficult to write believably about the reasons to keep going on.
@@@@@ 4, cuttlefishbenjmin:
I do seem to recall that an atomic priesthood was one of the solutions to long-term nuclear waste proposed by one of those fascinating government think-tanks (along with color changing cats, landscapes of thorns, and giant sculptures of diseased screaming faces), but I don’t think they got around to suggesting meddling with the laws of reincarnation. Probably because they weren’t convened long enough!
Tibetan Buddhism has an order of teaching lamas who die, reincarnate, and continue serving as the same meta-lama. The Dali Lama is the best known of these tulku (reincarnating) teachers.
A few decades ago, China passed a law requiring all Tulku lamas to be reborn within Maoist China. Right under the government’s thumb, where they can make no political trouble.
The legislation was a little light on the enforcement end.
@@@@@ 7, James Davis Nicoll:
One of the more remarkable pieces I came across Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon”, which hits all the notes of a post-nuclear war foray into the ruins of the lost civilization despite publication predating both fission and fusion devices.
We read that story when I was in high school. It was the age of Duck and Cover. The tale must have had a different meaning to us, than it could have for our parents. It was published in 1937, on the brink of WWII.
@7, @35 et al: The idea of atomic weapons was already being considered before WWI; H G Wells write about them in 1914. According to Wikipedia, Churchill ‘speculated about the possible military implications: “Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?”’
So the idea that Benét had in mind some sort of atomic holocaust, even writing in 1937, is completely reasonable.
The first line of Miesel’s “A Chronology of the Technic Civilization”, found at the back of the paperback edition of A Stone in Heaven:
The preceding essay, “The Price of Buying Time”, is unclear whether she considers Twilight World part of the chronology, or thinks Anderson intended only a general but less-catastrophic breakdown.
@33: Could be. Unfortunately, there’s room for confusion: various sources (above, cited Wikipedia article) use “Technic” for the time line that includes the Polesotechnic League, the subsequent disorganized period, the Terran Empire, an even longer period of disorganization (Flandry’s “Long Night”) despite the Empire’s reforms, and the weakly-defined following period. (I’m not even sure the last period belongs in that line; Miesel’s only instances are works originally written in 1963-68, so this may be a sort of retconning.)
Ya want a novel for after the world REALLY ends: After Worlds Collide by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer.
I concur with the mentions of On the Beach, above.
I well remember the book, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (1959) where a small Florida town survives an Atomic was, and is cut off from the rest of the country due to fallout zones. (Fun idea in the book, the new US President is the Secretary of Health, Education & Welfare, the only Cabinet member to survive)
@32, Against the Fall of Night has the same back story, deceptions and all, as City. It’s not post nuclear but Earth is a barren ruin, and so is most of the galaxy.
I read Alas Babylon for school, it wasn’t as depressing as I expected.
The Stand by Stephen King, obviously. (Unfortunately, the upcoming adaptation looks cheesy, by the way.)
“A Boy And His Dog.”
Found the ray cat story! The relevant phrase was “markers to deter”, not HITF or green cats. Definitely not cats by itself.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/8887861
@6 John Wyndham wrote *The Chrysalids* (US title: *Rebirth*) and not John Christopher. Although John Christopher more than his fair of catastrophe and post-catastrophe novels. Try *No Blade of Grass* for bracing cheerlessness.
The four 1940 Anderson stories that were retconned into Twilight World revolve around fertile human mutations caused by the aftermath of an atomic war, which is not reflected in any way by any of the stories in the Technic series (in the Polesotechnic League “era”, (Van Rijn/Falkayn) the “Imperial” era (Flandry), or anything else in that universe, so … no.
See:
https://www.apocalypsebooks.com/books/twilight-world/
“If the few supernormals are to become the new bearers of the human heritage they must find a way to leave the ruined earth.”
No mutants or anything else mentioned in the “Technic” stories; in fact, the Earth in the entire “Technic” sweep is not, in fact, ruined. It is the center of the universe for most of the stories, in fact.
There’s S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse series, which begins as an extended riff on “The Waveries” and develops as an extended riff on the concept of fictons at home and abroad, plus (ROT13 for spoilers) n pbfzvp jne bs zber be yrff oraribyrag ragvgvrf if., onfvpnyyl, Fnheba. The groups that survive the end of high-energy civilization in 1998 seize on anything that appears to offer social cohesion and increased chances of survival. Sometimes it’s poignant, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, sometimes infuriating. (In one scene set a generation afterward, the putative good guys, whose culture is founded on a Victorian/New Age Celtic Twilight/Neopagan mix that takes “half fun and full earnest” as a first principle, tell the changeling legend to some people who have been isolated for a long time and are having trouble keeping their children alive. At which point I looked up from that volume and said, “You shitheads.”)
The Stand, at least the uncut version, ends with the good guys who leave Boulder basically dooming themselves. Stu Redman knows the hazards of being in a small, isolated group: he watched somebody die of appendicitis. But off he goes in a group of, what, half a dozen people? All the way to Maine, of all places? With no doctor?
So I wouldn’t call it worldbuilding after the end of the world as such.
In Arthur C. Clark’s Rescue Party, a crew of Galactic surveyors find an already abandoned Earth. Hours before Sol would go nova. Then the find the sub-lightspeed fleet, carrying the escaping human population.
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0743498747/0743498747___1.htm
Emergence, by David R Palmer. Written as diary entries by a young survivor of a combined nuclear/bio apocalypse who at first believes herself to be completely alone in the world, then finds information that she may not be. She spends a good part of the book looking for a community of evolved humans with her “little brother” (who just happens to be a macaw) It takes a little while to get used to reading, since she makes quite a few grammatical changes to the English language for the sake of expediency, but I always find myself wanting to talk the way she writes after I reread it.