Tiring for a brief moment of science fiction and fantasy’s endless calamities, averted and otherwise, I recently turned for solace to non-fiction. Specifically, the text I fished out of my teetering Mount Tsundoku1 was Riley Black’s 2022 The Last Days of the Dinosaurs.
I see some skeptical faces out there. How can a book about a global-scale apocalypse be in any sense heartening2? The answer is simple.
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs’ subtitle reads “An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World.” The cataclysmic end of the Mesozoic is only the beginning. Having documented the demise of the old order, Black leads the reader through the early stages of the recovery, from the very early days when opportunistic survivors dominated, to the era a million years after impact, when the ecologies that dominate our world began to take shape. The clear moral here is that a chapter ended, but the story itself continued.
Of course, I could just as well have turned to science fiction for that moral. Exploring the worlds that rise out of the ruins of the previous order is a popular pastime in science fiction. Consider these five works.
“By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benét (1937)
(Collected in Cities of Wonder) The lands to the north, the west, and the south are treasured hunting grounds to John’s people. To the east, the Great Burning left only the Dead Places, which are taboo to all save the priests who retrieve metal from the cursed lands. The demon-haunted Place of the Gods is forbidden to all, even priests.
The son of a priest and a future priest himself, John is well aware of the law. Nevertheless, something draws John towards the Place of the Gods. There he discovers the true nature of the Place of the Gods, and perhaps, just perhaps, takes the first step back towards civilization3.
This short tale may seem entirely conventional save for two details related to the date it was published. First, this story helped establish the conventions of the after-the-end narrative. Second, while many details might lead readers to the conclusion that the Great Burning was a nuclear war, the story pre-dates the first atom bomb by eight years.
Second Ending by James White (1961)
World War Three killed nine out of ten people, but enough infrastructure survived to support reliable hibernation. This is good news for terminally ill Ross. He can be placed into suspended animation until a cure is found for his disease. The results are a mixed success. Ross wakes, now healthy, to discover that humans have, during his long slumber, not only annihilated themselves but almost all life on Earth.
Fortune smiles on Ross. First, life may be (mostly) dead but there is an army of robots to carry out his orders. Second, thanks to the upturned cuffs of the clothes he wore on his way to cold sleep, a few seeds survived the apocalypse. Third, thanks to suspended animation, Ross has all the time he needs to oversee Earth’s terraforming… although he might be surprised to learn how long that will take.
For the most part, this short novel is a tribute to what one human can accomplish, given only determination, knowledge, and a vast army of relentlessly obedient, highly advanced robots. That said, Second Ending may feature the longest timescale needed for terraforming ever featured in a science fiction novel.
As the Curtain Falls by Rob Chilson (1974)
Humanity triumphed during the Dawn Age, conquering the stars themselves. That was a very long time ago, longer than any person living on Earth can imagine. A billion years is long enough for uncounted civilizations to rise and fall, for the oceans to vanish, for history to become myth and then forgotten.
Nevertheless, time has not erased everything. Humans survive, if in fewer numbers than in the past. Nor is the Dawn Age entirely erased. Trebor of Amballa hopes that among its relics is one that will let him bend a dying Earth to his will.
A cynic might speculate that the course Trebor takes towards his destiny is less driven by pragmatism and more by Chilson’s desire to show off his vivid worldbuilding. Earth in a billion years is a very alien world, where materials like plastic and fiberglass have been incorporated into everyday biochemistry.
The Breaking of Northwall by Paul O. Williams (1981)
A thousand years before, the Great Fire erased civilization. Only a few widely scattered survivors were spared. After ten centuries, a few communities, Pelbar being one, have clawed their way back to town-sized city-states. Between them, pugnacious nomads make travel ill-advised.
Jestak was the only survivor to return from an ill-fated exploratory mission. His silence about what befell his companions is suspicious. Jestak is silent because he believes conservative Pelbar does not want to hear what he learned. Once, a single great nation dominated continent. Perhaps it can be united again! And just perhaps, Jestak is the person to set that process in motion…
This novel and the series of which it is a part are a celebration of E Pluribus Unum. It’s also an exploration of the consequences of founders being drawn from tiny groups. Pelbar seems to have been founded by a particular sort of academic, while one of the nomad tribes is almost certainly descended from feral boy scouts.
Fallen by Melissa Scott (2023)
Artificial Intelligences were supposed to provide the Ancestors with boundless leisure and wealth. Instead, the AIs rebelled. The AI were ultimately defeated, the survivors exiled to another dimension known as the “possible.” This victory did not come soon enough to save civilization.
The Successors believe salvaged Ancestor relics can supercharge progress. The Newfounders believe the inherent risks outweigh any possible benefits. Starfarer Nic’s successful use of an ancient artifact to ply her trade makes her proof of the Successor creed. Her upcoming attempt to save a doomed city may be evidence that the Newfounders are right.
Generally speaking, in science fiction, yay progress people are correct while technophobes are wrong. In Fallen’s case, readers familiar with Finders, the other book in the Firstborn, Lastborn space opera series, may not be confident that this rule of thumb is correct this time. Although published first, Finders is set later, after someone crashes civilization again. Is Nic that someone? Read and find out.
SF authors love writing stories about people crawling from the ruins almost as much as they love writing stories about people creating those ruins in the first place. Such up-from-disaster works abound. No doubt I missed some of your favorites. Feel free to tell us about them in comments below.
- Yes, I do think about Ascendance of a Bookworm every time I look at a well-stocked and (I hope) solidly built bookcase.
- Leaving aside people who really hate dinosaurs for some reason, such as resenting the way archosaurs displaced therapsids following the End Permian.
- Whether that’s a good thing depends on how optimistic you are about humans not repeating the mistakes of the past.
I’m always impressed the sheer number of books you remember in detail. How do you keep track of them all??
I keep notes. And copies of the books in question. And my brain prioritizes details about books over minutia like names, faces, and why I’m standing in the kitchen.
You were getting a drink of water.
A couple I would have added are Lucifer’s Hammer (Pournelle and Niven) and Seveneves (Stephenson). But perhaps they focus too much on the cataclysm itself.
Lucifer’s Hammer certainly hasn’t aged well.
Although it could be the source of the feral boy scouts in The Breaking of Northwall.
re: AS THE CURTAIN FALLS
So _Robert_ wrote a book about a guy named _Trebor_, eh?
Lots of SF features rebuilding after Global Thermonuclear War. “A Canticle For Leibowitz” being among the best.
There’s a bit of a twist at the end of “The Return” by Piper and McGuire
I would add to the list Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. I read this book over a couple days at the beach, and then couldn’t get it out of my head enough to even attempt the other books in my TBR pile that traveled with me.
Good selection, thank you.
Other post-apocalypse books: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.
In the 80s, I remember reading 3 very similar apocalypse tales – The Stand (Stephen King), Swan Song (Robert R McKammon), and one that I cannot remember the name of (even tried using Gemini and it wasn’t any help). The third one had a thing (think a disease) that killed most people but made the survivors immortal (which they didn’t figure out for a while). I don’t know if they qualify for this list, since it’s more about surviving it than rebuilding after, but if anybody else can at least remember the 3rd book, I’ll stop wondering if it’s my own personal Mandela Effect!
I have found two books with that premise, but they’re both from within the last decade
If you can remember a specific, unique (-ish) sentence, phrase, maybe a character name, from the book, try Google Books search: https://books.google.com/
It helped me identify a book based on a single half-remembered sentence recently.
Man, all I got a bunch of D&D rulebooks so far but I’ll keep digging, I’ve tried ChatGPT but didn’t even realize google books existed, thank you!!
Good grief, never ask a so-called “AI” for information. They have no actual knowledge or intelligence; they’re just really big predictive-text gimmicks that throw thousands of plagiarized texts in a blender and churn out something that superficially looks like coherent text but has no actual meaning. Any “results” it gives are likely to be complete gibberish. You might as well ask an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters.
I have seen a lot of people referencing Octavia Butler’s “Parable” novels this past month.
But they are more about the cataclysmic events of The Pox versus the rebuilding afterwards, although “Parable of the Talents” does get to that.
Alas that Butler was never able to complete the next book in the series.
See also “Chicago Red” (1990) by R.M. Meluch. One of the earliest novels to address global warming, it is set a few hundred years in the future, at a time when about 1/4 of what was the USA is now underwater. Technology is at about 1910’s level, but society has reverted to an absolute monarchy with highly stratified class system. A prevailing narrative by the rulers is that the old order of democracy and egalitarianism led to the destruction, and only tyranny can bring well-being to the most people.
Would the Sharing Knife stories by Bujold qualify? They’re not about discovering the past & rebuilding Civilization, though. They simply know about a few aspects of the past, & living & spreading & discovering a few new things is handling the Civilization part on its own.
Oof, As the Curtain Falls is such a tough hang. Really had to push through to finish it. Kind of astounding how beautiful/haunting some of the world building stuff is, but, oof- not a good one for female characters (or characterization, or prose. or narrative…)
Nice to see new-to-me Melissa Scott. Should I read them in publication order or chronological order? (I usually default to the former.)
Publication order, I’d say.
I enjoyed “The gate to women’s country”, apart from one problematic sentence about homosexuality.
I have been haunted by Solitude by Ursula Le Guin since I discovered it relatively recently. From an outsider character’s perspective, the survivors of the anthropogenic mass extinction event that overtook Planet Eleven-Soro have surrendered themselves to a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. From their own perspective, they have achieved the best of all possible worlds and are free to devote themselves to meditative practices aimed at self-actualization that outlasts the death of the body.
Ironically, the explicit and fractal rejection of civilization that frames their cultural practices is possible only because the mass extinction event was very recent: they can easily scavenge from the wreckage of civilization needed items that their own principles do not allow them to make.
Norman Spinrad’s Songs from the Stars features a virtuous civilization drawn from the pages of CoEvolution Quarterly that utterly rejects the products of the bad old ways that destroyed most of the world. At the same time, they need a constant supply of goods that only the old civilization could make. Luckily, the Americans seem to have left an infinite amount of useful goods to salvage. At least, that is what the west coast people tell themselves because if the stuff they’re being was made recently, that raises questions they don’t want to ask.
I don’t know whether Le Guin worked on a sequel to Solitude, but at some point in the future of the persons of Eleven-Soro there must be cataclysmic cultural change comparable to what happens to Spinrad’s protagonists. Their culture depends on equable climate, an ecosystem that lacks swarming crop pests and large dangerous animals, and easy access to the ruins of civilization. All of these are subject to change. They will have to relax their strictures against “doing magic” eventually.
Tangent: I enjoyed how Le Guin doesn’t take the easy way out in translating from Sorovian. The obvious (to me) translation for tekell is “trespass,” with its mingled connotations of violating boundaries, going astray, doing harm, and deserving shame. But the Hainish observers don’t have that cultural reference, so they have to translate tekell as “magic,” which affects how they interpret everything they observe.
How about “The Peshawar Lancers“ by S.M. Stirling set in alternate history British India (Angrezi Raj) in the year 2025 when Earth’s climate is has recovered from a devastating meteor shower that caused a three year winter in 1878.
As a impassioned fan of Benjamin Disraeli, I enjoyed the mention of him as instrumental in making sure the Empire survived.
That one and the long Emberverse series, which begins with something like the Waveries returning in 1998. As the series goes on, things get cosmic, but the early books are very much about how people cope, or not, with having survived the end of the world as they know it. They are also about what it’s like to live within arm’s reach of people who are not emotionally walking wounded because they love being able to do whatever they want.
My little obsession, Bunch’s Moderan, has a cataclysmic event going on in the background of its early parts, and another in the foreground: humans have polluted the world so badly that they’ve decided that the best thing to do is coat the whole thing with white plastic (shooting the oceans into space to make this job easier) and become cyborgs with as little actual flesh as possible. The world they create for themselves is a hideous dystopia, but they think it’s a utopia.
Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon ends with a vague promise of rebuilding.
Smith’s Earth Abides is sort of about failing to rebuild after a cataclysmic event.
I’m amazed that no one has mentioned The Postman. So now someone has.
Does it count if some aliens help (a lot) with the rebuilding, without telling the human survivors the price? If so, then Octavia Butler’s “Lilith’s Brood/Xenogenesis” trilogy belongs here.
For that matter, does it have to be humans who do the rebuilding? If not, there’s Planet of the Apes.
Gene Wolfe’s “Seven American Nights” is set after an unspecified cataclysmic event local to (North?) America.
One set on a more or less rebuilt Earth, a llllllooooonnnnnnngggggg time after the nukewar: Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky.
And (of course) no such list would be complete without Andre Norton’s Star Man’s Son: 2250 AD.
Earth is only partly rebuilt in Pebble in the Sky; it’s a backwater, its people are despised, and most of the cities of our time are still unhabited if not uninhabitable.
Moderan is certainly the most literal rebuilding.
Footnote 3 covers it all really. If there’s an apocalypse and we don’t remember the past, we will repeat our mistakes. OTOH even when we do remember our past we still repeat our mistakes.
For me as some others here: ‘A Canticle For Leibowitz’ would have been my first exposure to this sort of tale. And my favourite such is ‘The Peshawar Lancers’ by S M Stirling; how can you not enjoy the pulpy goodness of a climate apocalypse, a mass migration, Victorian rationalism, a liberated femnale Indian scientist, a Russian death cult, an Afghan princeling, and a finale that includes a swordfight inside the envelope of an airship?
There’s always Poul Anderson’s Maurai stories, which focus on different ideas of how to rebuild, especially in the novel Orion Shall Rise, where the main conflict is between people who want to build an Orion-drive ship and people who want to not have any more nuclear detonations in the atmosphere
I am saving the Maurai for “five sympathetically presented groups at whose heads I want to throw tack hammers.” Apparently the title needs work.
To be fair, they do have reasons for being the way they are.
John Wyndham needs a good mention with 3 novels: The Chrysalids (after a nuclear war), The Day of the Triffids (biological enhancement of plants got out of control), and The Kraken Wakes (aliens try to take control of Earth from the season).
No Blade of Grass was also good, though I think the author took the easy way out by eliminating Pirrie as a possible rival leader to the hero.
Good to see a mention of Chilson’s AS THE CURTAIN FALLS. A bit uneven, but some of the worldbuilding really emphasizes just how extremely far-future the setting is. One I recall is that lobsters have evolved to become arboreal tree-dwellers. The former ocean beds being mostly empty may have pushed lobster development in that direction, and if I recall correctly, the reason for the ocean beds being mostly empty is that civilizations have risen and fallen and developed space travel so many times that the water they’ve carried into space emptied the seas.
“the reason for the ocean beds being mostly empty is that civilizations have risen and fallen and developed space travel so many times that the water they’ve carried into space emptied the seas.”
Which doesn’t make a lot of sense given modern understanding, since there’s far more water available as ice in the moons and comets of the outer system than there is on the entire surface of Earth, and you don’t have to fight Earth’s gravity to get it out to space settlements. Ceres alone is believed to have more fresh water than Earth.
As I recall, it was millions of years’ worth of filtering the world’s oceans for deuterium to fuel fusion reactors for Earth-based industry.
Could be wrong here, it’s been decades since I read the book.
Seems unlikely. Heavy water makes up only about 0.0156% of ocean water, so even if you filtered it all out, nearly all of the regular water would still be there.
And there was that horrifying glutinous monstrosity, The Snail.
Edgar Pangborn’s Davy, The Company of Glory, and the collection Still I Persist in Wondering are some of my favorites in this area.
There’s a heartbreaking moment in Glory where our protagonist, who survived the crash, thinks wistfully of the original uses for that white ceramic twin level planter.
And I remember Davy being completely baffled by a retractible ball point pen…
“Second, while many details might lead readers to the conclusion that the Great Burning was a nuclear war, the story pre-dates the first atom bomb by eight years.”
I made that point when we read the story in high school, sometime in the late Cretaceous, and still remember my frustration at my classmates insisting otherwise despite the clear evidence of the publication date.
(In retrospect, that certainty in the face of evidence, without any perceived need to show any countervailing evidence of their own, was helpful foreshadowing of arguments on 21st century social media.
)
Well, atomic energy was known to the curious public before 1945. If not how to use it, er, effectively.
Isaac Asimov wrote “History” in 1940, in which are mentioned “the tiny Drops of Death, the highly-publicized radioactive bombs that noiselessly and inexorably ate out a fifteen-foot crater wherever they fell. By the time I wrote the story, uranium fission had been discovered and announced. I had not yet heard of it, however, and I was unaware that reality was about to outstrip my prized science fictional imagination.”. (The Early Asimov)
Wikipedia describes H. G. Wells’s “The World Set Free” (1913) whose “atomic bombs have no more force than ordinary high explosive [dubious – discuss] and are rather primitive devices detonated by a bomb-thrower biting off a little celluloid stud. They consist of lumps of pure Carolinum that induce a blazing continual explosion whose half-life is seventeen days, so that it is never entirely exhausted, so that to this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.” It’s not clear to me what a “continual explosion” is, but without reading the book, it could be just the emission of radiation particles. Later in the book, “a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city” – yes, Wells foresaw a time when a man could carry a handbag.
Philip Nowlan’s The Airlords of Han from 1929, the second of his two Anthony Rogers pulp novellas from Amazing Stories (basis of the Buck Rogers comic strip), describes the use of atomic weapons in the future, though Nowlan underestimates how much more powerful than conventional explosives they would be (he says it would take a hundred atomic shells to destroy a city) and assumes that disintegrator rays would be the primary weapon of mass destruction. (Airlords is a horrifically racist “Yellow Peril” story that climaxes with the protagonists heroically exterminating the entire Han Chinese race with atomic, chemical, and biological weapons — which was apparently beyond the pale even by the standards of the time, since there’s a half-assed handwave at the end saying “Oh, it turned out the Han were half-alien all along so it was okay to genocide them even though we didn’t know that at the time, and all the human races live in harmony now.”)
So the idea of atomic weapons would certainly have been well-established in science fiction by the late 1930s, even if the accurate scientific details hadn’t been worked out yet. And post-apocalyptic fiction was certainly already a thing by then.
Radioactivity was discovered, accidentally, in 1896. X-Rays and other various high energy events were also discovered around this time. The Nobel was awarded in 1903.
The last paragraph of this article could make for an interesting alt-history story.
The first sentence of the article is quite whimsical. One does find surprising things that way.
These are all rather better counterpoints than my classmates offered, since they include countervailing facts.
I’m still not sure from my limited knowledge of Benet’s background that he’s up on his pulps, physics, or Wells, vs. extrapolating from Great War horrors. But in principle it’s the sort of thing that more biographical info might make seem more or less likely.
To be fair to your classmates, they might have realised that people must have foreseen the possibility of nuclear bombs before the first one was built, but not a sufficiently clear realization that they could explain the point easily.
To be able to understand or suspect something is not the same as being able to explain it.
Many 1960s Marvel Comics characters received strange abilities caused by radioactivity. They used it for everything… Spider-Man notably was bitten by a radioactive spider, and he did well. After a not very altruistic start. It was just a word for a strange scientific process. Alternatively, characters encountered meteorites, but maybe radioactive meteorites, so it’s the same thing. Iron Man was another exception. He got his powers from transistors. Which the writer may have understood as well as they understood radioactivity.
David Palmer’s Emergence would fit here, I think. He apparently wrote a sequel, but I’ve never read that.
I had to look up Nelson Bond’s work; I’d forgotten that the first in his “Meg and Dave” post-crash series didn’t come out until 1939, so he might have been influenced by Benét. Or he might not; the Benét is a mood piece in which the big realization is that the city was inhabited by people like the narrator, where in Bond they rediscover soap.
Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay and its sequels are an early version of rising seas (before warming was recognized — see also George Turner’s Drowning Towers, aka The Sea and Summer).
Has someone mentioned Asimov’s short “Nightfall”. Definitely alludes to how civilization has recovered, but only up to a point, over and over.
Some of Keith Roberts’ works would fall into this category — The Chalk Giants, Kiteworld, and, possibly Pavane, depending on whether you read it as only alternate history or hook onto those few lines near the end that suggest it was a sort of guided do-over after a complete cataclysm.
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart, 1949. (I probably read this when I was about 13 and still remember the last scene where the protagonist decides it is more important to teach children growing up in the post-apocalyptic world to make bows and arrows, rather than read and write.)
Jack McDevitt’s Eternity Road (1998).
Kerry Greenwood’s Stormbringer YA series (Whaleroad, The Cave Rats, Feral, and The Broken Wheel). Yes, the same Kerry Greenwood who wrote the Phryne Fisher 1920s mystery novels.
The earth was on a road to sustainable power: orbital solar collectors gathered power, which beamed it down to collector stations on the ground which then distributed it to local cities.
Unfortunately, the Three Days were the direct result of the beam alignment system getting screwed up, and the transmission beams wandering hither and yon across the cities of the world until they could be shut off.
These books are all set in the aftermath, where various groups of people are limping along and either surviving or wondering about building something new in the ashes; including the descendants of a medievalist society (OK, she was thinking of the local SCA barony at the time), who were having a camping event down the coast, and decided to just sort of keep going that way.
So not someone with a strong knowledge of science, then.
I’m just here to promote Hiero’s Journey (again) which has as its main plot point a trip to rediscover computers to triumph over the post apocalyptic enemies.